I remember about 13 years ago I’ve told a friend of mine, who is an airbrush artist and a photographer, that untill 2005 all photos will be digital. He didn’t belive it. Today, even Canon stoped manufacturing film cameras. And how I told everybody that the y2k bug will be, much ado about nothing, they didn’t belive me, and spent billions on fixing this ghosty bug 🙂 (ok, ok, you knew it too..). Now, why can’t my superiors understand when I tell ’em that it’ll take some time, few years IMHO, untill we can develop in WPF/E and get reasonable compatibility ?. They, my superiors, don’t even want to upgrade to Flash 8 cuz they think they gonna jump straight to Microsoft Expression. That’s just aint gonna heppen that instantly if at all it will. Even if you’ll decide on totally switching to Microsoft WPF/E over Adobe Flash it’ll be a gradational process. Some of our clients will still demand that we’ll use the Flash platform. Either because of compatibility or due to a design issue. Designers will be the last to make the switch. No matter what I say, they can’t understand it, with their zombie hollow eyes they persist to recite “Mmmiiiicccroossoofftt….”
Don’t get me wrong – being a geek I’m excited by any new technology, all the more so about something as cool as the Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (that’s a long name :)). However we’ve got to be patient and not jump to any fanatical conclusions.
It’s slightly beyond my grasp to predict the far future of what I call the “RIA Wars”. But, I’m pretty sure about the near future or round-one as we might call it. After round-one Macromedia, hmm.., Adobe will retain it’s web dominance with it’s Flash platform. But, Microsoft will make wonders for Windows Desktop Application with it’s WPF where Adobe Apollo will hardly touch it.
And don’t give me that Microsoft number 3 bs (pro-Microsoftians says it always strike gold on the third version). Thats just your human nature, the need to format everything into a similar patterns. Lots of things can happen until MS ver 3, Flash-12 for instance. You know Adobe always strike gold with version 12 :D.
That’s mostly my opinion, you should have your own opinion, Just don’t numbly recite one or the other.
Haha…
Just before I went to change this post status from Draft to Published, Lately, another one of my Flash related prediction to my direct superior/boss came out true. :D. Which gave me that annoying, I told you so.., smile:
We use an Active-x on most of our websites. One purpose of this Active-x is to save photos on the user’s local machine and then integrate it into the Flash gui. When the new Flash 8 security model showed up, the option of loading local files (image, text, xml, etc) into a Flash file running from a server, was removed completely. That caused portions of our websites to not function properly. The idea we came up with was to load these local images into html divs, and to integrate it seamlessly into the whole website. While it was tiresome work, the result is good, the user won’t notice the fancy Flash gui he’s using is partially html. The new Flash 8 security caused some serious debate between me and my boss. He said that this Flash technology is not stable and we can’t trust macromedia for not making such future changes and break our code again. I, for my part, said that: While this update might be annoying, it was a necessary update, Macromedia have reached a satisfactory level of security and that kind of updates won’t be repeated. The whole idea of integrating with user local photos that way is problematic. And also, it’s reasonable to belive that Microsoft will implement some similar securities into their next Internet Explorer 7.
Indeed, in the latest IE7 release the same security of, no access to local files from a server page, new sandboxes and cross-domain, and much more, has arrived to IE7. So we gonna have to put all of the user’s photos on the server from now. But we’re aint the only ones who gonna suffer, tones of websites will resist to function properly. Now, who can you trust ?!
Just another “I told you so…” to the fanatic pro-microsoftians.