Hi There! I'm a big fan of TiddlyWiki, and have enjoyed using it for a couple of years now, even being motivated enough to develop the odd patch and plugin! All well and good, but I have noticed a few fundamental weaknesses with TiddlyWiki which I think I've managed to address in a new product which I've been quietly working on in the background. It's something I'm really quite proud of, and which I'd like to share with you all today!
So I hereby announce TiddlyFlash - a clean-room implementation of TiddlyWiki written in Adobe ActionScript and targeted at Flash Player 10. TiddlyFlash has a number of advantages over the current HTML/CSS/ JavaScript version of TiddlyWiki, notably: * Flash is universal where as capable browsers are becoming harder to find. Using Flash gives developers a write once, run anywhere experience, freeing them from worrying about cross-browser issues. Everybody loves Flash and has it installed and enabled on their desktops, laptops and phones. * TiddlyFlash users benefit from a number of advanced features such as animations, sound, videos, control of web cameras and 3D bump-mapped texture and shading. These are essential for most wiki use-cases and heralding a new era of animation, slick-shading and other "Because I Can" developments not possible with current browsers. This particularly important for those of us who use the current browser of choice, Internet Explorer. * SEO is a solved problem for Flash now Google indexes the text inside many Flash files. * Accessibility is a solved problem for Flash: it's simple to add key- shortcuts and you can always keep a separate copy of the text for use in screen readers. * it is possible, indeed trivial, to hide the TiddlyFlash content inside a binary Flash file, allowing TiddlyFlash to hide text from Web and desktop searching technologies. This is particularly useful when running a guerilla TiddlyFlash on a machine with Google search or Apple Spotlight installed and you don't want people to find your content. * furthermore, it seems feasible to implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) for TiddlyFlash text, essential for building business critical documents. * offline mode, something which we know has been tricky for some browsers, is now a simple matter of downloading the Adobe AIR platform and running a version compiled, packaged and made available for this ubiquitous environment. * browser cookies are easily cleared and are often blocked by some people overly cautious about privacy. Such people aren't as aware of Shared Local Objects (LSO)* and it's unusual for them to be cleared, greatly assisting the more sticky storage of TiddlyFlash options. * whilst it's true that there are few viable ways of building Flash applications with free software, the excellent Adobe Flash CS4 is a very reasonable $699, so it's actually better than free to write and distribute Flash programs. It is true that there are some minor licensing things to worry about, but in many cases it doesn't cost anything to distribute Flash programs. * view-source of TiddlyWiki has introduced a number of security issues and has been an obstacle to anyone wanting to develop commercial TiddlyWiki plugins. TiddlyFlash brings the advantage of a closed- source ecosystem, protecting my and plugin developers revenue streams. * the unconventional Open Source nature of TiddlyWiki can be an issue for certain users, notably those within enterprises, therefore TiddlyFlash will be delivered as a trusted-source binary. Of course there will be a conventional EULA to OK to protect your supplier from errors, inadvertent or otherwise. I may consider providing paid-for support contracts given that shouldn't be too onerous to meet the expected standards for a typical commercial software product, and can probably be outsourced. * trusted-source code means we can have a TiddlyFlashStore, where you will be able to buy quality controlled TiddlyFlash software and where developers may upload their plugins and verticals on a reasonably and non-discriminatory fair revenue share. Registration will of course be subject to my approval and at a nominal fee of, say $99 USD per application. * ActionScript is a much nicer version of JavaScript, and coming from a single vendor, means it is more coherently designed, stable, better documented and with an understandable roadmap than the supposedly standard ECMA JavaScript. Anyone who decides to join the TiddlyFlash Developers' Programme will find writing plugins and extensions far easier and more satisfying. (Note, I may keep some of the more advanced developer features hidden, depending if I decide to write my own plugins. I may also run premium developer courses for those wanting to upskill from JavaScript to TiddlyFlash ActionScript.) * the future of the Web is Rich Internet technologies such as Flash, not in the current mish-mash of competing ad-hoc and Open Source browsers and the current limiting constraints which put greater value in documents and hyperlinks over cool interactions and effects. I think most everybody here must agree that browsers are an antiquated technology, subject to diminishing interest from developers and Web designers. I for one am happy to abandon TiddlyWiki and leave it with the browser to wither on the vine! Going forward, I'm pretty certain it's feasible for TiddlyFlash to be ported to Microsoft Silverlight for similar advantages but for those who prefer Microsoft, possibly for those who worry Adobe may not be around forever or trust them not to exploit their status as a single suppler. So if anyone is interested in porting TiddlyFlash to TiddlySilverlight, I'm more than happy to discuss terms. Feel free to shoot me an email and I'll get my lawyer pass on an NDA, which you can sign and fax back to me before we proceed further with negotiation for a source code license terms, i.e. business as usual! I think you must agree this is very promising avenue. I'm almost ready to launch subject to resolving a number of small issues, for example cutting and pasting text, high CPU use and permalinks to Flash- tiddlers has turned out to be much harder than you'd imagine, but these somehow feel less important as time goes on. As you can imagine, I'm very excited by this project, as indeed I was by the idea of a mainstream TiddlyWiki for the Enterprise** last year. Aren't you? Paul (psd) -- http://blog.whatfettle.com * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Shared_Object ** http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWikiDev/msg/78a55a4cc9c66630 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
