You can get visual studio by itself (without MSDN) for about $500. But it sure is nice having access to all of that other stuff on MSDN.
I will check out the Flex2 stuff and see what I think about it, though. However, it is going to take some getting over the bad taste of Flash. <amy people have done really neat things with it, but I have never been able to get past the utterly irritating graphics editor/timeline interfaces Macromedia saddled it with to spend anywhere near as much time on Flash as I have with SVG. I liked the way SVG was programmable and interactive with the HTML container Javascript. I don't want to have my code locked up inside Flash where it it is so much harder to deal with page elements. > 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. > Geoff Swenson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- 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/
