John Dowdell

Member since: Jul 15th, 2005

John Dowdell's Latest Comments

Blog Activity

Blog	# of Comments
Flash Insider	11 Comments
Download Squad	1 Comment
DV Guru	1 Comment

Recent Comments:

Accessible Flash (Flash Insider)

Nov 19th 2005 9:31AM "I'd really like to see a site that deals with more of the specifics." Which specifics, specifically? Have you checked the site yet? http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/ And are you still of the mind that "accessibility means turning everything into a single linear stream of English words", or are you aware of the wider sense yet? (Seems the former, since you raise that HTML comparison.... yes, dynamic stuff is hard to make linear, so expect to see the debate change terms in six months or so as this realization sinks in among the text-supremacists.)

Suggestion for Macromedia: Donate Breeze to UNO (Flash Insider)

Sep 6th 2005 1:54AM I know that there are many philanthropic concerns being studied right now, and I don't have the best picture among all of them. What you say sounds reasonable, but I haven't checked whether other universites in Mississippi and Alabama were damaged by the natural disaster, nor whether the need may end up being greater in places like Houston or other popular areas to resettle. It's beyond my ability to judge. I do know the way to bring a software-donation request to the group's attention, though: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/community_affairs/software_donation.html tx, jd/mm

Kottke.org ponders WebOS but forgets FlashOS (Flash Insider)

Aug 24th 2005 7:44PM I read Jason's piece, twice... that's sixteen page-scrolls total. ;-) I'm still not sure why he settled on the past "operating system" model for the way the future will unfold, however. (I'm not sure I could get to the core of his argument... with the length, and absence of summary, I kept on veering off into sidetracks based on individual lines.... :( "Should we just ignore this partial argument or what?" Marketing folks have taught me stuff... sometimes they break ideas out into "the tag line" (the phrase which best describes an idea, to print on the box), "the elevator pitch" (the paragraph which tells the story within the time of an elevator ride), and then the whole enchilada where you get into all the rest. I'd need to get confirmation that I'm seeing Jason's core points as he sees them before I could judge my response to it.... (Bill McCoy of Adobe (see bio: http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2005/08/lifting_the_vei.html ) had a followup to Jason's essay which may be of interest: http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2005/08/webos_-_yes.html ) jd/mm

The supposed Flash backdoor (Flash Insider)

Aug 5th 2005 5:50PM "I think we need a quick and dirty improvement here..." Understood. I know that this privacy/security area has received work in the new generation, but I'm not sure when we'll see the results -- the beta Player itself has code changes, but the UI is presented through the website, and I don't think this has gone live yet. Mike, after Studio 8 gets fully out-the-door, could you drop a note if you see areas in the new UI that still seem problematic? Thanks! 8) jd/mm

Investors Daily tracks down Macromedia CEO for interview on merger (Flash Insider)

Jul 28th 2005 3:09PM Thanks for the bump on this interview... looks like that IBD address was a day-by-day... here's something in Yahoo News which may have a longer lifespan: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibd/20050726/bs_ibd_ibd/2005726tech01

Yahoo buys Konfabulator to give it away (Flash Insider)

Jul 25th 2005 10:35PM We actually need a good way to modulate processor requests across the board... every one wants their piece to run as fast as possible, naturally enough, but when everybody grabs the clock as much as possible things get messy. Walt Disney couldn't just say "Crank it to 100fps, we want it to look THE BEST!", and his was the only show in the whole theatre at the time.... ;-) For Central-like environments I can't help feeling that we'll end up needing some type of control panel, where you can inspect and choke the requests of various applets you have running, one by one. Responsibility is too diffuse otherwise; each enduser has to be able to modulate the demand that visitors put on his computer. (The Dashboard "yes we have plugins but no not really" stance seems to be just a subset of this -- multiple plugins run fine in the Safari browser, so it's not memory, but from what I've been able to tell they're also concerned about the consumer effect of varied authoring choices.) I'm sanguine about SWF's place in all this... it's an easy way to bridge platforms and environments... each widget environment gets big leverage when creators can easily embed any SWF. The Central initiative was partly about this desktop persistence, but also featured background agents, notifications, data-sharing, and we still need to find ways to handle occasional connectivity, context, and then the big problem of localization of web services. These will be especially important for pocket computing, because you want your local agents to work for you without you having to look at the screen. There's a flip side to this, and that's the folks who would prefer to do everything network-ish inside a document browser. It's good to see Yahoo join Apple in this beyond-the-browser investment, but there's still a whole lot of work we have to do to bring it about in a satisfying way.... jd/mm

Get rid of Greasemonkey for now (Flash Insider)

Jul 19th 2005 3:32PM For what it's worth, read-buffer overflows have the theoretical potential to get code to execute, but creating an actual exploit is something that is only very rarely seen in "buffer overflow" cases. The "exact domain matching" cases were in a similar situation... the theoretical risk was closed down before it became an actual exploit. Me, I'm surprised that with all the talky talk about GreaseMonkey last spring, that the ability it gave rogue sites to read files on your hard drive was only discovered this past week...? jd/mm

MacrAdobe: Whither SVG? (Flash Insider)

Jul 12th 2005 3:27PM Flash and SVG have been compared for years, because they can both describe vector graphics in a web browser, but they're really not that similar, whether in implementation or specification. In my opinion, SVG's progress may have been damaged by too many advocates' attempts to equate it with the Macromedia Flash Player, which can render curves in either SWF or SVG format. (Those pixel filters pushed into the SVG 1.0 spec may be possible in the next-gen Macromedia Flash Player, which renders pixel-filters by the SVG definition.) In all of this, the hard part isn't defining how things "should" be, so much as getting such a capability deployed in the world, where you can rely upon it on your audience's desktops or phones. (SVG-Tiny on mobiles is required by law in Europe, but has little adoption by manufacturers in Asia -- the Macromedia FlashLite 1.x engine for mobile can optionally render SVG-Tiny, but manufacturers haven't found reason to include that rendering code in the limited space on their phones.) (MXML is a way to describe data-bound interfaces in XML syntax... it's like how French and English both use the Latin alphabet in different ways.) David, is there any particular way that you'd like to use SVG-full or SVG-Tiny drawing instructions in the future...? jd/mm

Adobe bundles toolbar like Macromedia (Flash Insider)

Jun 14th 2005 2:46PM The Adobe Reader for Microsoft Internet Explorer has actually had a Yahoo Toolbar for awhile, predating the offer on the Macromedia Flash Player download page... the announcement was in Oct04, and implementation in Jan05: http://www.rankforsales.com/news-bd/845-seo-oct-25-04.html http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050105-173219 When the Macromedia webpage added that offer I remember discussions where we wanted to make it a better experience than the Adobe handling, but I don't remember the details that were different... Adobe has had that offer for longer than Macromedia, though. (It's hard for me to see either company "forcing" it for IE, much less all browsers, because of the impact that would have on completed player downloads.) jd/mm