You know, I wish Macromedia would have gotten back to me. I should have a copy of Flash 8, which I understand actually fixed some problems. But no, I've got my Flash MX 2004 instead. Sapph claims my current site design on Deviant Paradigm causes him physical pain, so he worked me up a new layout and I agreed to try to put it together. I'd wanted to do the damn thing in Flash, but that was before I rembered...The geniuses at Macromedia declared that it wouldn't dynamically load anything but JPEG's. How useful! Of course, what can I expect from a place with a website that is so close to purified unusability? Even MySQL's horrible mistake of a search engine is more likely to accidentally stumble on what you wanted to find than Macromedia's, which is supposed to be powered by Google, the evil masters of searching themselves. And don't get me started on how long it takes to do anything on their site. At least I've got Sephiroth. There's a place that's got it's act together. Look Macromedia! It's your documentation in a usable format! I was hoping that Adobe would improve things at Macromedia, but obviously, the website's only overhaul is replacing the logo.

So we'll see if I can at least do a freaking menu in Flash. That would at least be something.

4 Comments:

• At 10:41 PM, January 01, 2006,  Anonymous said…

  Are you asking which versions of the Macromedia Flash Player (not the authoring tool) can display which file formats? If so, then the past few versions could do clientside import of most JPG implementations, as well as MP3 and Flash native formats. The Macromedia Flash Player 8, released to the general public in Aug05, adds import filters for PNG, GIF, and progressive JPG:
  http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/8/releasenotes.html
  
  (The tradeoff with more clientside import filters has been the increase in download size for the Player... it's a tricky thing to balance.)
  
  jd/adobe

   

• At 11:53 PM, January 01, 2006,  Avvy said…

  I completely understand the balance issue. Not everyone has a high speed connection, even in these times, and the small size of both the Flash plugin and its files, along with their great versatility are some of the great attractants of the technology. Please excuse the vehemence of the post, I never expected anyone with any sort of connection or relavance to read this. What set me off was my disappointment at my inability to use Loader, Scrollpane, or Window objects to load image formats other than just JPG. Since my webcomic is based on a database backend and I've done development at my place of work with Flash interacting with a database to provide dynamic content, I knew that much could be done. However, I prefer to use PNG files (most specifically 8-bit PNG's) for my comics, since they provide what I feel to be the best balance between user-agent support, file size, and quality. After running into the issue of only being able to dynamically load a JPG or SWF, I considered changing my file formats to JPG, but they produce what I consider unacceptable file sizes. Without the ability to embed HTML in Flash (I looked for that but couldn't find any useful information concerning it, possibly I just missed it) or convert PNGs to SWF (as my webserver is a Linux-based system), I was pretty much stuck. That was the source of my rant, which expanded into frustration at the difficulty I tend to have trying to find information on Macromedia's website. As I said, lease excuse the venom.

   

• At 1:24 AM, January 02, 2006,  Avvy said…

  *please excuse

   

• At 11:57 AM, January 03, 2006,  Anonymous said…

  Thanks, but no worries... years ago in tech support I learned that's a marker of someone caring deeply about something... isn't taken at face value. (I regularly survey & collect feedback from weblogs, and arrived here through a Technorati search on "macromedia".)
  
  One more note on Flash Player 8, with its increased number of runtime bitmap import filters -- from all the preliminary data I've seen, it is being adopted quite a bit more rapidly than even the previous versions, which tracked at 80% consumer viewability within 12 months of release. I'm expecting new stats to be published on the website this month, but it's *fast*. If the current Player can display the types of external graphics you'd like, and if your material will be on the web for longer than just a few months, then Flash Player 8 can be a practical choice to make now.

   

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