Geoff Canyon wrote:
> I can see it now--little badges everywhere on the web saying "This site
> best viewed in MetaCard!" This morning, www.warnerbros.com said I had to
> have Netscape or Internet Explorer, _and_ Flash, in order to use their
> site at _all_ What a thrill it would be to have some major site do a
> slight twist on that, and tell me that I needed the free MetaCard viewer
> to access their site...sorry, I was daydreaming for a moment there...
As much as I like the idea, and agree that mankind would be a more empowered
species if they all had the MetaCard Starter Kit on their desktops, the
reason that sites can get away with _requiring_ Flash on specific
content-driven sites is its market penetration: 88% last time I checked, at
least to be able to view Flash 3 content; a reported 60-70% to view Flash 4.
Flash is bundled with both major browsers on the two most popular consumer
platforms for the last three years. The subset of folks who cannot view
Flash media have either gone out of their way to remove it from their
system, or are working with an older computer.
Now, if only we could get that sort of penetration.... :)
Even if MC had Macromedia's marketing machine behind it, as a Helper app
only it faces another adoption challenge: for reasons not entirely based on
logic, folks prefer Web-distributed media to be displayed directly in the
browser window as opposed to being handled in a separate Helper app. You
can take the same UI for browser-based app and put it on the desktop and
folks will claim they can't figure out how to use it.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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