Flash Player + Adobe Acrobat = disaster
WTF would you want to merge these two players?
I'm really racking my brain to come up with some feature that Acrobat could add to the toolset of the Flash developer and, for the life of me, I can't! Could someone from Macromedia please give the Adobe folk a clue?
Flash got to where it is today in no small part due to the tiny size of the player. You add Adobe Acrobat in there and you'll have a disaster of Adobe Dimensions Atmosphere proportions.
Please reconsider.
The Flash Player + Adobe Acrobat = disaster article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.

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Peter
I had exactly the same reaction, the ‘multiyear effort’ they’re talking about probably refers to actually making Acrobat Reader somewhat stable and usable.
Can you imagine if they bundle Acrobat into the Flash player, that would be an absolute nightmare for filesize. On the other hand it would be rather cool to have a PDF encoder class in AS3
December 5th, 2005 at 6:08 pmg.wygonik
Peter wrote: On the other hand it would be rather cool to have a PDF encoder class in AS3
*cough*blazePDF.com*cough*
wondering what this will/could do to my efforts…
g.
December 5th, 2005 at 6:24 pmPeter Elst
are you planning to port it to AS3 Greg?
December 5th, 2005 at 6:28 pmDavid Mendels
Hi,
The FAQ is poorly written and will be fixed.
We plan to keep the Flash Player small and focused.
We *also* plan on a new client code named Apollo that will work out of the browser and bring together the best of HTML, Flash, and PDF. Apollo will be very cool. (note: we learned a lot from the experience with Central.)
Regards,
December 5th, 2005 at 6:29 pmDavid
Adobe (wow, odd to write that after 13.5 years at Macromedia).
Aral Balkan
Hi David,
Thanks for clarifying. I think that the spectre of a combined Flash + Acrobat runtime was a shared nightmare among quite a few of us.
Looking forward to Apollo and hope the new company is treating you well!
December 5th, 2005 at 6:33 pmg.wygonik
Peter - i’ve already started working with an AS3 port. should be MUCH better (smaller, leaner, etc). of course Apollo has my interest piqued…
December 5th, 2005 at 6:37 pmmattmuller
hang on a second, havent you got it the wrong way around, I would put money on being able to use flash content inside acrobat, which would be pretty cool, actually acrobat 7’s 3d features are pretty neat, I’m pretty sure there are some really smart people at Adobe and their main roadmap in the interim is integration making life easier for us end users.
MaTT
December 5th, 2005 at 7:04 pmg.wygonik
actually, you’ve been able to include Flash content inside PDFs for some time - i just know of any application that supports doing it! (i actually looked at this as a solution to using SWFs in PDFs in my component).
December 5th, 2005 at 8:09 pmJohn Nack
Generally speaking, if something seems like a surreally poor idea (like, stuffing all of Acrobat inside of the Flash Player, rather than the other way around), you can be fairly confident we won’t be doing it.
By the way, you’re right that Atmosphere never did take off as a product on its own, but you might be interested in knowing that the technology now lives a much more successful life as Acrobat 3D (key for engineering folks wanting to embed interactive models in their documents).
J.
December 5th, 2005 at 10:01 pmaral
Hi John, as long as you leave us our tiny Flash player, I’ll be happy.
It definitely makes more sense to put Flash in Acrobat (but, again, why — they have such cleanly demarcated use cases — PDF = Print, Flash = online.) I mean, even for online documents, FlashPaper is so much better than PDF. Just waiting for that darn plugin to load makes me want to tear my hair out
December 5th, 2005 at 11:31 pmmikechambers2
fyi, we are not combining the Flash Player and Acrobat reader plugins.
More info here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/12/flash_player_an.cfm
mike chambers
mesh {at} macromedia(.)com
December 9th, 2005 at 6:07 pmAral Balkan
Thanks, Mike! Good to know
December 14th, 2005 at 2:03 pmPeter Elst » Adob's Macromedia acquisition - week 1
http://www.flashant.org/index.php? [...] December 29th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Peter Elst » Adob's Macromedia acquisition - week 1
http://www.flashant.org/index.php? [...] December 29th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Yet Another Blog from Luar » 屿2006å¹´ï¼Flashæªä¾æªæä¾ï¼
teresa
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