I wish a happy new year to you all. To be happy, most probably you’ll need health and wealth. I plan to quit smoking in 2008. This will surely bring some health and wealth. I’m sorry for non-smokers, as they won’t be able to copy my great plan

Anyway, I didn’t blog at all in December, apart from this post. There were quite a lot of news from Adobe, Flash Player release, AMF3 specs release, lots of betas from Adobe labs… While spreading the news is nice too, and most probably it’s good for my business, I’ve not been entirely happy blogging ‘news’. What original content can I blog? ‘News about our software’. That would be the last thing I’d want to do, besides, our software each has their news blogs… ‘Interesting bits about SWF format, Flash Player, etc. we encounter’. That would be nice, but probably that would not be too good for our business. We need to keep our edge, where we have it. On top of this, blogging is not easy, you need to care, it takes time, too much time (not that I’ve been properly blogging). I can’t keep this blog as ‘Flash news’ and have other blogs too…

So, as I intended to do exactly one year ago, in 2008, I’ll be blogging freely. I hope this way, this blog will be better content-wise, even if it won’t be as focused as before… Thank you.

Not at adobe.reader-download.org as Microsoft Mouse & Keyboard Products Documentation links you to.

On that page, as of this writing, Microsoft offers documentation in XPS and PDF formats. PDF versions of the documents are smaller, but getting the reader is made extremely hard for the novice user.

On Adobe Reader Distribution page it says: ‘Third-party websites must link directly to Adobe.com for the download of Adobe Reader software’. But the logo can be downloaded without an agreement.

Is this an honest mistake? Frankly, I don’t think it’s Microsoft’s official policy but their culture makes it so easy to make these kinds of ‘evil mistakes’, I think it’s very likely that this was done intentionally.

Note: If you want to download Adobe Reader go to Adobe.com and click on the link.

Are you an Apple fan? Think again. Thank god I didn’t ‘switch’ or purchased any Apple products.

For me, with the iPhone announcement, Apple made it clear they don’t have any ethics. Because there is already an iPhone phone on the market by Cisco! (Because Cisco is big enough, they are now sueing Apple).

How dare any company, knowingly, announce a product in the same category when there’s already one with the same name? Totally unacceptable for me.

Can anyone defend this move? It’s not a simple trademark dispute, this is like knowingly killing a man without any respect for the laws, and shouting ‘bring on the trial’ assuming you’ll get away with it because you are powerful…

It seems Apple tried to negotiate with Cisco over the name before the announcement, it didn’t work out (at least it was not finalized), but Apple did this anyway. Here’s what Apple says:

"Apple’s the first company to use the iPhone name for a cell phone. And
if Cisco wants to challenge us on it, we’re very confident we will
prevail."

I’m inclined to believe this is not true, because it’s so stupid. They are both Phones! Does this mean someone can use ‘iPhone’ name for ‘red cell phones’ or ‘dumb cell phones’ category? Come on…

Anything that begins with ‘i’ apparently belongs to Apple, Apple thinks. Does your name, your company name, domain name or product name begin with an ‘i’? You are not safe. The big bully may come and get it anytime – especially if it sounds cool. They’ll try to negotiate at first but if it fails, they’ll take it by force. I wonder how many of us can sue back…

iPhone issue may be settled between Apple and Cisco, but it won’t change what Apple has done… My code of ethics dictate that I shouldn’t help anyone without ethics earn money and power, so Apple is dead for me. I will never use an Apple product, even if somebody pays me for it, unless Apple publicly apologizes, accepts their wrong doings and promises not to bully anymore.

I’m quite surprised not seeing similar posts to this one. Do you think what Apple doing is acceptable? Can you still love Apple? Still think Apple is less evil than MS? If so, I feel sorry for you…

Just realized updateStage inc. closed its doors on December 31, 2006. This is certainly a big loss for the Director community…

Another year is gone…

I was looking forward to Jan 1, 2007 because I thought Adobe SVG Viewer would be RIP but I realized the expiry date was extended to Jan 1, 2008 back in October. My reason? Our flagship software Action Script Viewer shares the same TLA with it. Before the Macromedia acquisition it didn’t matter much but I’d really love to have one Adobe/Flash related ASV around…

Speaking of names, people also confuse the names of our Captionate with Adobe Captivate. I think both are great names and gladly there’s no real confusion but occasional use of one name instead of the other (in my experience).

In the first week of January, we will be releasing updates to ASV, UAE and ASR. The updates mainly fix decompiler bugs and enhance the decompile engine, no new features. We will also release an update to FLVMDI and FLVMDIGUI on January 1st.

We haven’t done any Vista testing. We will not be supporting any Vista only features (we will fix compatibility issues probably in a few months after Vista’s public availability), and we still support Windows 9x. 2006 was the year we have decided the future is not Vista. Not at all. I sincerely don’t think our customers will be using Vista soon, as they are, generally speaking, highly technical individuals and won’t upgrade for some eye candy (They will get their Vista if it comes preinstalled with their next computer purchase), and they’ll choose to wait until problems with the new OS is fixed (that is if they decide to use Vista at all).

Speaking of eye candy, I was trying out Ubuntu and unfortunately I can’t stand the UI! Either I’m missing some setting somewhere or even the buttons don’t move (for a button press). The UI is not for my taste, but with Firefox and OpenOffice.org (both of which I use on my XPsp1 system), I found Ubuntu fine and totally usable.

The sad development about OS support I see is that XP sp1 support is diminishing. That’s the OS I choose to use! (XP sp2 is a different OS – a free downgrade cleverly named as a service pack). Anything that requires sp2 (and I can’t understand why sp1 is not supported with those apps) runs in a virtual machine for me and it’s quite not the best experience…

I’m looking forward to Apollo but if it doesn’t support XP sp1 or even plain XP (released in 2001), I’m not sure I’d be able to consider it as really cross-platform. Anyway, Linux (or may be Mac OS) is the future, so I guess Linux support is more crucial.

Other than Firefox and OpenOffice.org, the third ‘excellent and free’ application I started using this year is Foxit Reader. Lets embrace the truth, Adobe Acrobat Reader is bloated. The last one I actually used was version 5, but even that version doesn’t compare to the Foxit Reader. No installation is necessary and it virtually works for all the PDF files I have (except one which uses features that IMHO shouldn’t be in a ‘document’ anyway). OK, some of you do need the features the bloat brings – but for the rest of us PDF Reader is the Foxit Reader.

I wasn’t able to post to this blog as much as I’d have liked. I was aware of a more fundamental problem than ‘free time’ for some time now, which is the fact that my job does not allow me post the real interesting bits of information that will be of interest to my readers. So I’ve been posting mostly news and my points of view but nothing interesting about the SWF format. It’s a pity because I do have lots of info I just can’t post… I’ve decided to post more frequently (like everyday) starting with 2007. I still won’t be able to post the ‘real interesting bits about SWF format, decompiling and obfuscation’, so I’m officially declaring this now and moving on….

Thank you for visiting. Happy new year!