As of yesterday, for the first time EVER, nearly everyone in the world has access to a FREE, ubiquitous application runtime, and a FREE application development toolkit for that runtime! Of course I’m referring to Flash Player 9 and the free Flex 2 SDK. To show people the power of these two technologies I’ve recorded a screen cam of me building a YouTube video player on Linux. Check it out!
One of the benefits of working for Adobe is that I get to test new products while they are still in the pre-release state. One night a few weeks ago I was able to install a pre-alpha build of Flash Player 9 on Linux. I couldn’t contain my excitement when I pulled up my first Flex 2 app on my Gentoo laptop. Smiling from ear to ear I ran over to Emmy Huang (who, as usual, was still working at 7pm), and I thanked her. And the next day I also had the chance to thank Mike Melanson, Tinic Uro who are also investing a lot of time making Flash Player 9 on Linux a reality. Many others at Adobe are also working hard to get the public beta out the door. Most Flex 2 apps I have tested are working, but there are still frequent browser crashes and other bugs that the team needs to fit before we can send a beta out the door. But we are close and I can’t wait to watch the very eager Linux community get their hands on Flash Player 9.
Ever since I got into Macromedia Flex I have not been able to view .mxml applications in any Mozilla based browser on Linux. Mozilla for some reason cuts off the Flash at around 240 pixels in width. I have searched the web and Mozilla’s Bugzilla trying to find others who have also experienced this problem. I haven’t found much. A few Mozilla bugs seem to indicate others had this same problem. But not enough for anyone at Mozilla or even Macromedia to care. There has only been 1 post about this issue on the flexcoders Yahoo list. So not really a big deal, except to those of us on Linux!
Yesterday Mozilla released Firefox 0.9 rc1 and I just couldn’t wait any longer for the ebuild, so I figured out how to get it built from the cvs source. The instructions are posted on the Gentoo Forums. Not a big deal, but I thought this was blog worthy since it was fun and exciting. I guess that makes me a nerd. :)