That is the most inspirational thing I've heard all week, perhaps so far this month!
Thanks for that!
2,046 karma · joined August 14, 2007
Thanks for that!
From a developer's standpoint, though, I'm hoping there's a way to swap in the appropriate debug player. What would be even cooler would be if the new plugin API makes it easy to write an extension to allow swapping of plugin versions (a la Flash Switcher for FireFox).
If nothing else, it looks like they're making it easy to disable, so one could install the debug player manually, and switch between them by toggling the inbuilt-plugin enable in Chrome.
That being said, a more relevant question is what the societal effects would be. My first question is how this would affect crime rates. A quick search seems to indicate that crime rate may go up with population density, though other factors are, of course, more highly correlated (such as poverty).
Some of those other factors also correlate highly with high density areas. No clue what the causative links are ... could be that density has no effect, or even reduces crime rate, I suppose - I'm way to lazy to research it for ta quick hn comment!
I do know that being too close to too many other people makes me think about perpetrating violent crime, though! ;)
I'm thinking I need to reevaluate with CS5. If nothing else, perhaps the total diff from CS3 -> CS5 will now be worth the upgrade.
First, SpiderMonkey is the next-gen JS engine for FireFox. V8 is the Google JS engine.
Second, Flash Player 10 is as good or better than any JS engine (with the possible exception of V8), and many Flash games bog on my netbook.
Just one example, but, as more capable web apps come online, the bar will rise, and more cycles will be called for.
You're right that this is similar to the Java vs. C (or C++) debate. And, as with that debate, the answer is that, for many application domains, native code has a significant performance advantage.
Take games, for example. The Tower Defense game is nice enough, but no where near the quality of the Flash based versions. And this is a very, very simple game compared to, say, Fancy Pants Adventures or the like. Can processing.js. I mean, the missiles don't even point at their target, for crying out loud.
This is on the level of C64/PET character based graphics, more or less.
Again, I know nothing about processing.js at this point, so, perhaps it's possible to do much more.
Two other questions come to mind, though:
1. Flash already has its issues vis a vie cross-browser and cross-platform performance. It's not at all bad, and, because of the developer base, pretty well defined, but certainly not perfect. How does this technology compare, especially given the widely disparate support for native canvas and decent JavaScript engines?
2. What about packaging and distribution? .swfs can be self contained, making distribution to, say, portals nice and easy. A whole infrastructure for add supported apps has grown up in the Flash world, as well.
2) Your opinion. Assuming it was done well, a Flash/Flex based mail client could rock. As an added bonus, done right, it could also be a client side mail client (using AIR).
Also, if you're using Flex controls, reskinning isn't that hard.
3) Again, your opinion. Without knowing what you mean, I can only assume you mean the whole Flash Authoring Tool (damn Adobe for overloading Flash to mean the IDE, the VM, the framework, and the technology)/time line thing, you don't need to use it. There are loads of options. See #1, above.