Re: [Gnash-dev] Carlos Nazareno: Gnash 0.8.3 bugs - 767 + Flash developer perspective

[strk]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 11:54:03PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 04:30:54 +0800
> From: "Carlos Nazareno" <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Gnash 0.8.3 bugs - 767 + Flash developer perspective

[...]

> Anyway, those are bugs I've encountered so far with Gnash 0.8.3. 0.8.3
> is an improvement over 0.8.2, but with the impending release of the
> Flash 10 plugin, Gnash will now be 2 generations behind instead of 1
> generation behind.

It is only content authors having the power to leave players behind.
If you care about partecipation, you should develop your applications
to be as much portable as possible, which in this case means NOT using
latest-and-greatest-features-only-available-in-a-few-players.

[...]

> Because of this, the bugs mentioned above, and the fact that Gnash
> cannot play Actionscript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) content
> (Actionscript 3-compiled SWFs in Flash 9 & 10), I recommend that users
> and developers use the Adobe Flash Player 10 RC instead, which runs
> without problems (barring cpu & memory issues) in both the Browse
> activity and the latest version of Opera on the XO.


This is dangerous reccomandation to make.
Especially for developers.
Developers of applications for OLPC should try to target free
platforms, or did I miss something about the mission ?
Adobe Flash Player 10 is NOT a free platform.

There are a lot of ways to optimize an SWF application to use
less resources. I've seen movies out there doing really silly things
with SWF8 tags, making the result worst than a fairly written SWF1 ...

Free software also gives you the option to *profile* application
execution so you can tweak the code to perform better.

If developers stick with SWF7 at most, they'd make the proprietary/free
choice easier to take. If they don't they'll make things worst.
I'd expect a conscius choice from OLPC developers ...

> - for developers, Flash 9/10 Actionscript 3.0 AVM2 SWFs are more ideal
> for the XO than older Flash 8 & below Actionscript 1.0/2.0 AVM1
> content because the Flash AVM2 performs roughly 10x faster than the
> AVM1, and given the XO's low horsepower, developers would be able to
> author richer apps and users will get better experiences with AVM2
> content because of its better efficiency.

Efficiency is important.
"The extent to which time is well used for the intended task."
What's the intended task here ? Having a free educational system
or a proprietary one ?

> - I was hoping that Gnash, which only plays up to Flash 7/8 AVM1
> content could attract Flash Lite developers who primarily work with
> Actionscript 1 & 2.0 content (all current Flash Lite player versions
> only play AVM1 content), but because of Gnash's bugs, this may turn
> out more difficult than initially thought.

Flash developers are the most useful resources for fixing gnash bugs.
Many times we get bug reports from users that know *nothing* about the
internals of an SWF applicatoin. When it's the author of the SWF reporting
the bug, it is usually fixed *very* quickly.
By suggesting OLPC flash developers to not use Gnash at all, Gnash will
have less help in fixing the bugs.

--strk;