Posts Tagged Adobe
My take on decompiling SWF
I didn’t read (or listen, I don’t remember if it was a video) Lee Brimelow article on decompilation but I know he his not against it. In the same way, I also believe decompiling other’s work is a positive thing. I remember doing my first webpage (html) and to add cool stuff to it (nice javascript and strange html tags) all you had to do was to right click, choose view source and apply it in your context. Back then you were on your own, but what you would learn there you wouldn’t forget because you worked to extract the knowledge from the cryptic code. What you learned was then added to your toolbox; you could build better webpages. The entire internet grew from the view source feature.
I believe it should be the same with Flash. Every day you can see an awesome piece of creativity if you go to theFWA.com; sometimes you know how it is done, sometimes you don’t. This is the time where you should reverse engineer the work. Learn how they did it, how they solved certain problems. You should do so, not to replicate the piece, but to make it your own. Mix it with what you already know or give it a new twist; do something even better. That is how you should pay back.
The community, platform (Flash) would grow from this. People would start decompiling your work and even better pieces would be created. In the end, we would all win from this. Better creations means more confidence in the platform, more money invested into it (Adobe, web agencies) and more jobs.
If you think individually, you’ll only see the bad sides of decompiling, but if you open your mind and have a broader view, you’ll understand the benefits.
Converting this contest into a SEO experiment
From previous posts you know that I am participating in the Flex SEO contest. I got my page pretty high on Google, but it still doesn’t seem to be finding my content. There are still a lot of unknown about this new SEO technology that Adobe, Google and Yahoo worked on and I think that to make a Flex application that load the content dynamically is to go a bit too fast.
So with that in mind I made simpler swf files. I even made some using Flash to see what would get indexed and how. In each of my experiments I have included a unique search expression basically formed from Fleximagically Searchable plus another word. If you search Google with that expression and one of my experiment shows up, it means Google indexed the content. Here are my experiments:
Flash:
We don’t even know what type of swf is or is not indexed by Google so I sat down down and I made the simplest ones. Since Flex is pretty complex, I made some files using Flash.
The first one is only a static textfield right on the timeline. we know Google used to index those files, let’s see how it does it.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v1/
The second one is still in Flash using a prefilled dynamic textfield.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v2/
The third one is using a dynamic textfield again filled using ActionScript.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v3/
The fourth one is using a static textfield added to the stage using ActionScript.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v4/
Flex:
Since we don’t know if Flex files get indexed at all, I made three simple experiments using basic components: TextArea, Label, Text. In those experiments the content is filled using the text attribute in the MXML file.
Flex file using TextArea.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v5/
Flex file using Label.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v6/
Flex file using Text.
http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/fleximagically-searchable-v7/
Now let’s wait for Google to crawl these pages and then we will be able to better understand how this all works.
Impacts of Silverlight for a Flash Programmer
Posted by zedia.net in Silverlight on December 6th, 2007
I have been thinking lately about what impacts will Silverlight have on me as a Flash Programmer. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really threatening. It could have been threatening in the sense that it could have made Flash obsolete and make me loose future jobs at the same time. But the thing is, Flash is such a good technology, it’s been around for a long time, the community supporting it is amazing and Adobe has big plan for it, Silverlight would have to be packed with a lot of feature in order to shake Flash’s position in the market. I don’t think it has just that.
It’s true that videos in Silverlight look good, but now with the moviestar release of the Flash Player, I don’t think one is better than the other on that characteristic. It’s nice for programmers who know .net, they can just jump right in and start programming Silverlight applications (maybe with a small learning curve). Good for them, .net programmers are already in demand, now they are going to be even more in demand, their salary is going to increase, so does the cost of building a Silverlight application.
One of the thing that Flash as always suffered was the penetration rate of the Flash Player, as a proof, website using flash 9 are now starting to emerge even if its been more than 6 month since it’s been release. Silverlight will suffer even more as people are not willing to download anything anymore. Flash as the chance to be adopted by huge website like Youtube and Facebook and has been around for way longer, people trust the Flash brand.
A big advantage Flash has over Silverlight is all the documentation lying around the web. If you want to know how to do something in Flash, just Google it, it’s that easy. Also open source projects like papervision3d and Tweener are just amazing.
For all these reasons, I don’t think Flash programmers have to be afraid for their jobs because of Silverlight and that for at least five years. I actually think Silverlight is a good thing; a little competition never hurt anyone, Adobe will have to keep improving Flash which is very good for us.
