I just read on Colin's blog that apparently Adobe has plans to integrate the Flash Player and the Adobe Acrobat Reader (also known affectionately as the bloated beast from hell.) I'm sorry, I didn't know there were plans to draw up Flash's death certificate!
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
are you planning to port it to AS3 Greg?
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,
David
Adobe (wow, odd to write that after 13.5 years at Macromedia).
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! :)
Peter – i’ve already started working with an AS3 port. should be MUCH better (smaller, leaner, etc). of course Apollo has my interest piqued… ;-)
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
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).
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.
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 :)
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@macromedia.com
Thanks, Mike! Good to know :)
http://www.flashant.org/index.php? [...]
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does anyone know where i can download it
hello
hello
hello!
dern it
this was 2 years ago.
answer me anyway
god!
and is it for mobile also and palm os
thanks. super site