This posting was inspired by seeing Mike Chambers' posting on the flash plug-in for Mac petition thread.
Come on! - we’re not born yesterday! Macromedia must know that the flash player for Mac has always been appallingly slow! They can’t suddenly start pretending that they don’t know about it!!!!
It seems that Mac users have been so deprived - that Macromedia need only give us a bit of official attention and we become all grateful! Are we so buttered up by a few choice words and flimsy promises of supportiveness?
Well, not me!
I suppose the root of the problem is that the Flash-player has no competition. So there is no commercial incentive for Macromedia to pull their socks up.
So, now begins my flight of fancy....
There is only one other company with even a ghost of a chance of giving Macromedia a run for their money. The strength of Flash lies in the number of people who have downloaded the plug-in. However, Apple’s Quicktime plug-in also has a formidable following.
Suppose Apple decided to take Macromedia on? Macromedia have muscled in on Video compression afterall - I think they are owed some payback. Ok, forget the weak capabilities that Electrifier Pro utilised - I’m talking about a well thought out Flash killer. It would be easy create smaller file sizes than Flash does. It would use interpolation at run time for tweened frames rather than the inefficient partial rendering, and bloated file sizes that Macromedia favours. Apple would integrate it closely with everything else that Quicktime has to offer, Quicktime VR, Reliable streaming etc. It would be truly cross platform and cross browser. The (ECMA-262) scripting language would execute faster. The authoring program (iMotion?) would be beautiful, a joy to use, and allow the import of .fla files. (It wouldn’t generate .swf files - but a new Quicktime format). Discontented MX users would flock to it.
The time is right Apple!
