I’m creating an Apollo app that loads a SWF (Player version 8) that has a ComboBox in it. When I run the Apollo app and select the ComboBox it opens as you would expect but when you select one of the labels it reports the wrong selection - most of the time. The selection is always something below the selection that you clicked on, or occasionally it gets it right.

Here’s the Apollo code:

And you can download the dropDown files here.

Flashmagazine is reporting about the huge price differences for the CS3 Web Premium edition in countries outside of North America. In today’s world how is this going to fly? What’s to prevent someone from buying in the US and selling them on eBay to people in Europe? (I’ve never used eBay so I don’t have a clue how stuff like that works.)

Flashmagazine suggests that Europeans fly over here and buy there own copies. They get a vacation and save a few dollars. With that in mind I’d love a free trip to Italy. If it’s not illegal I’ll bring you a few copies. You pay for airfare and the US cost for the suite and we’ll call it even.  :-) I think I’m joking here but then again, what the hell?

Note: nothing of actual use follows. Just a few thoughts about the plugin formerly known as WTF/e. (What The Frak/everywhere)

The first thing I thought of when I saw that Microsoft had renamed WPF/e was, “Amazing, they picked one of the few English words that have no rhyme.” Not that it matters but I know how anal those marketing folks can be about naming things. They’ll probably call a staff meeting to discuss the global socio-economic ramifications for using non rhyming words in a product name and how that will impact product penetration along the Asian rim.

The name that they ended up with - no, I’m not going to use it - just slides off the memory cells somehow. Kieth Peters noticed the same thing.

On a less technical note, I gotta say, I HATE the name. I can’t ever get it right. I’m stumbling over Sparklelight, Sprinklelight, Silverfish, etc. before I spit it out. John Grden suggested “Steely Dan”, but we won’t go there…

Then I did a search for Silverfish + ‘the other name’ and found that a few others are having just as much trouble remembering the name as myself. And I swear as the god Apollo my witness that I independently used the name Silverfish in some comment on someone’s blog in the past few days.

Without having any experience developing with Silverfish I’ll wager that no one can create a custom video interface with it as fast as I can with Flash/video.Maru. (Shameless plug but hey, it’s my fraking blog.)

I don’t have anything to add when it comes to actually testing Silverfish’s capabilities or development environment because I don’t plan on installing the player much less developing for it. I’m backed up with Flash jobs as it is and I don’t think anyone’s going to pay me my freelance rate to learn Silverfish for them.

If you, dear reader, happen to be a Microsofty and want to accuse me of being an Adobe fan-boy who doesn’t know half of what I think I do then let me save you the trouble. You’re right. Point made. Now move along.

I just read Ryan Stewart’s article where he endorses the idea of open sourcing the Flash player.  Maybe that would explain that odd looking bolt of lightning that I saw arching up from over the horizon from the South and hitting somewhere in the Seattle area. Ryan, I hope you’re okay. Ryan? You still there? :-)

My obvious concern is with the forking issue if the Flash player is open sourced. Ryan pointed out that forking may not necessarily be an issue mainly due to the On2 and MP3 codecs that can’t be released. That got me to thinking about a possible solution that might satisfy everyone. If it’s technically feasible.

1 - Most of the player source code is open.
2 - Along with the MP3 and On2 bits the code that is responsible for the player automatically updating itself is kept locked up.
3 - Anyone who wants to can fork the code all they want. But, they can’t use the SWF extension. They would have to use something else.
4 - If they did fork the code and kept the SWF extension that player would eventually update itself to the Adobe governed version.

In this way there would be a very slight number of people using any forked version of the player to run SWF files. We could publish knowing that only a vanishingly small percentage would ever run our SWF files on a non Adobe player. But, developers would still be able to customize the player to suit specific needs as long as they targeted their player at an extension other than SWF.

I’d love to hear your comments if you think this, or something similar, is technically feasible.

On the other hand maybe ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous open source zealots than to take up arms against a sea of forked Flash players.

I tried to resist. Really, I tried but I couldn’t stop myself from opening Photoshop and having a go at it. Here’s my 360 Flex Seattle badge.

Please forgive the crudeness of the editing. My wife is yelling at me to get off the computer so I did this in a hurry. Besides, it’s the thought that counts! :-)

NOTE: check the date of this post. It’s an April Fools joke. I had no idea this article was so popular until I checked my site stats. My apologizes to anyone I might have misled. Anyhow, I still think it’s pretty funny.

An anonymous source from Adobe has confirmed that they have a final release name for the Apollo project. It’s going to be called Adobe Desktop Presentation Foundation, or Adobe DPF for short.

He said that they wanted to go with a name that was more evocative but since this product competes with Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation they decided to go with a product name that was long and bland.

He also confirmed that a lite version of Apollo will be released for cell phones early next year. It will be called Adobe DPF/e. He said that the ‘e’ doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s just there to confuse people.