Geoffrey Swenson wrote: > Why should I pay almost $1000 for Flash and its tedious, > user-hostile graphic editor, the non-intuitive and overly animation-focused > timeline editor, when the same $1000 buys me the MSDN library including XAML > that was designed from the ground up to be a programmable graphical > environment?
For what it's worth, you can create high-performance SWF for free, within an XML development environment, with Adobe Flex 2: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2006/03/flex_is_free.html (The optional Eclipse-based IDE with visualization, Flex Builder, is available for half the price you cite... currently Windows-only, but Adobe is contributing to the Eclipse project to make the Mac version more stable, and these Eclipse changes may make other development platforms possible as well. There is also an optional Flex Data Services* for persistent connection and data synchronization, whether across sessions or across computers, which is free for small-scale use, but per-CPU for larger-scale work. The framework, documentation and compiler, however, all offer a zero-cost way to make data-fed interactive graphics for the web today.) * http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/productinfo/faq/#item-25 For deployment, I have absolutely no idea when Vista-style XAML or its XP/other subsets will be widely adopted on consumer machines, but I do know that Flash Player 8 has reached 90+% consumer viewability within its first twelve months, and that Flash Player 9 (the minimum runtime for Flex 2 work) is being successfully installed at an even greater rate. (ie, it's easy to choose your own authoring environment; harder to have your work perform predictability on the world's varied machines... for practical deployment it's no-contest.) For the news about Adobe SVG Viewer, I first learned of it here on the mailing list myself, and am summarizing and highlighting posts here and on the web for other staffers. Your words will be heard. jd -- John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA Weblog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd Aggregator: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/ Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Groups gets a make over. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/WktRrD/lOaOAA/yQLSAA/1U_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
