Adobe Annouce 'full-Fat' Flash Support For Arm!

[WizardStan]

Adobe did open the specs for the flash file formats.

Nobody seemed to do anything with them.

Because it's actually fairly worthless, from what I've been told. It's like Adobe has a complete house, including plumbing, wiring, and furniture, and then released the blueprints. Anyone could use those blueprints to build something similar to Adobe's house, but there's a lot of things they don't include that are necessary to get the same effect. (ie, the plumbing, wiring, and furniture in this analogy)

 

[dflemstr]

Adobe did open the specs for the flash file formats.

Nobody seemed to do anything with them.

Because it's actually fairly worthless, from what I've been told. It's like Adobe has a complete house, including plumbing, wiring, and furniture, and then released the blueprints. Anyone could use those blueprints to build something similar to Adobe's house, but there's a lot of things they don't include that are necessary to get the same effect. (ie, the plumbing, wiring, and furniture in this analogy)

The ActionScript spec is kinda open, however, but it's copyrighted, and not really worth anything without Flash; any ECMAScript beats ActionScript when comparing features alone.

 

[aho]

Adobe did open the specs for the flash file formats.

Nobody seemed to do anything with them.

I actually did something with them (I wrote a basic recompressor). However, I did encounter a few undocumented tags where I absolutely do not know what they are good for. In my specific case something like that doesn't really matter, but if you try to write a player this might turn out to be a rather big issue.

I did ask Adobe to add a few undocumented tags I found in some of the SWFs, but the SWF v10 specs still lack them. (The reverse tag list from the v10 specs is identical to the one from the v9 specs.)

Also, writing a full-featured player should be pretty difficult. There is a lot of cruft, and you gotta take care of all of that. For instance: you need to implement two different VMs. You also need various audio and video decoders and fast vector rendering. And another cubic s-load of other stuff.

 

[-Tj-]

Flash needs to die a horrible death asap. But I still welcome this, it's about time. Now they need to get 64 bit Flash from pre-release to fully-fledged release. Then I'll have slightly more respect for it.

Thank you. My life has been a living hell ever since I've started having to use flash for work. Two years of utter hell. I don't mind Flash apps, and it has its uses, but the software to make it is TERRIBLE. >_<

 

[Game_over]

Flash is allot better than what it used to be. Silverlight has more impressive specs. They just need to regroup and really hammer out the performance issues and overhead in many cases. Making it open would help but won't necessarily expedite a fix IMHO.

 

[sehs33]

Adobe did open the specs for the flash file formats.

Nobody seemed to do anything with them.

Because it's actually fairly worthless, from what I've been told. It's like Adobe has a complete house, including plumbing, wiring, and furniture, and then released the blueprints. Anyone could use those blueprints to build something similar to Adobe's house, but there's a lot of things they don't include that are necessary to get the same effect. (ie, the plumbing, wiring, and furniture in this analogy)

As far as I know, Adobe only forbids those who read/acquire the SWF format from creating a Flash player, but everything else is a fair game. I co-founded a company few years ago that specializes in ActionScript obfuscation (and Flash files protection from reverse engineering), I remember very well how the printed format copy we used was covered with notes of corrections and additions to the formats, we used to call that copy the "Book of Shadows" simply because of the ambiguity the format had without our notes. There were many undocumented tags at that time, but the documentation was enough that we even managed to add features to make old version of Flash Lite use functions and other stuff through Flash assembly, but it was sure as hell a very messy work...

 

[Bagera]

As far as I know, Adobe only forbids those who read/acquire the SWF format from creating a Flash player, but everything else is a fair game.

Effective May 1, 2008, Adobe removed the entire licensing agreement from the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. These licensing restrictions had meant that no one could build software that would "play" SWF content.


Adobe is working quite much to make more and more of the flash platform open source (or at least more open) and will soon publish an API for porting flash on any device without having to have approval or direct support from Adobe and Mozilla is working on getting the AVM on x64 and ARM

 

[slygamer]

Flash is used by an increasing number of high profile console and PC games for their in-game menus and user interfaces through a library called Scaleform GFx. Scaleform has its roots in gameswf.

 

[Pleng]

Effective May 1, 2008, Adobe removed the entire licensing agreement from the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. These licensing restrictions had meant that no one could build software that would "play" SWF content.

Adobe is working quite much to make more and more of the flash platform open source (or at least more open) and will soon publish an API for porting flash on any device without having to have approval or direct support from Adobe and Mozilla is working on getting the AVM on x64 and ARM

Yea I think SilverLight sh!ted Adobe up in a big way. They need to get their format on as many platforms as possible to keep the high-ground. Opening standards and removing restrictions to let other people do the work for them is a good way to do that with as little effort as possible.