Thursday, January 18, 2007
Flashtastic! Adobe finally has Flash 9 for Linux. Also: Flash is good at some stuff.
We now have a decent Flash version on Linux.
quick notes:
Less than two years ago, being a couple of versions back with your Flash player wouldn't have been the end of the world. This is as much about Flash's totally reinvented usage, as it is about Linux. Previously, not having Flash didn't make you feel totally left out. Maybe you'd miss some animated banner ads (but they'd probably still work). With the increasing importance of search engine optimization (Flash isn't so easy to index for Google), and social bookmarking (Flash isn't so great with the unique URL's), and people's patience (Flash can get people kinda mad when they have to renavigate 6 steps after hitting the "back" button), web sites managed by Flash were getting less popular.
But then the YouTube/Vimeo/Google Video/Blip.tv/Revver embeddable video storm happened.
(original photos via Chris Pirillo's video experiment)
And Flash was actually really great for video inside of an otherwise non-Flash page. And then people started using it even as an embeddable mp3 player.
(a screengrab of a del.icio.us page set to browse mp3's and podcasts)
You didn't have to download podcasts and other mp3's. You could cleanly play audio and video in a browser page. (Yes, other specialized players/ plugins could previously do it, but way more clumsily than Flash).
With the newly realized ease of embedding video and audio (aided not just by Flash, but by the excellent players being made by the likes of YouTube and del.icio.us), audio and video was being used a lot more not just for entertainment stuff, but for delivering technical, business, and basic communications stuff. (For example, here I have an embedded demo of VMware Fusion Beta. In Flash!)
In any case, the huge wave of new Flash content really stung when you were on Linux, because all over the web, almost any embedded video was a reminder that you were a second-class citizen.
Ideally in the future the web won't be dominated by closed players, and users won't be held hostage by any single company. But given how much better Flash performs these basic multimedia functions at the moment, it's a good day for Linux.
related:
quick notes:
- You can get Flash 9 for Linux here
- Red Hat will include this in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, released February 28
- Novell will put Flash 9 in Service Pack 1 for SLED 10 (date undetermined)
- step by step Flash 9 installation how-to for Ubuntu Linux (thanks osnews.com!)
- still no 64bit version
Less than two years ago, being a couple of versions back with your Flash player wouldn't have been the end of the world. This is as much about Flash's totally reinvented usage, as it is about Linux. Previously, not having Flash didn't make you feel totally left out. Maybe you'd miss some animated banner ads (but they'd probably still work). With the increasing importance of search engine optimization (Flash isn't so easy to index for Google), and social bookmarking (Flash isn't so great with the unique URL's), and people's patience (Flash can get people kinda mad when they have to renavigate 6 steps after hitting the "back" button), web sites managed by Flash were getting less popular.
But then the YouTube/Vimeo/Google Video/Blip.tv/Revver embeddable video storm happened.
(original photos via Chris Pirillo's video experiment)
And Flash was actually really great for video inside of an otherwise non-Flash page. And then people started using it even as an embeddable mp3 player.
(a screengrab of a del.icio.us page set to browse mp3's and podcasts)
You didn't have to download podcasts and other mp3's. You could cleanly play audio and video in a browser page. (Yes, other specialized players/ plugins could previously do it, but way more clumsily than Flash).
With the newly realized ease of embedding video and audio (aided not just by Flash, but by the excellent players being made by the likes of YouTube and del.icio.us), audio and video was being used a lot more not just for entertainment stuff, but for delivering technical, business, and basic communications stuff. (For example, here I have an embedded demo of VMware Fusion Beta. In Flash!)
In any case, the huge wave of new Flash content really stung when you were on Linux, because all over the web, almost any embedded video was a reminder that you were a second-class citizen.
Ideally in the future the web won't be dominated by closed players, and users won't be held hostage by any single company. But given how much better Flash performs these basic multimedia functions at the moment, it's a good day for Linux.
related:
- the Gnash project, an source Flash player currently playing stuff up to Flash 7
Labels: audio, browser, flash, gnash, linux, macromedia, multimedia, oss, player, plugins, standards, ubuntu, video
