There’s been various comments on various lists to the effect of “Macromedia must be worried about MTASC cutting into Flash IDE sales” particularly with the immenent release of Flash 8, as signalled by the open public beta of the Flash 8 player, and the fact that many have been able to hack into the player code and figure out a good chunk of the APIs of new features. In fact, there are tons of examples out there of Flash 8 new feature content produced without the new Flash IDE. If we can do all this now, why would anyone go buy the new IDE, some people think.
I haven’t seen this as a huge problem, because I remember doing the exact same thing back in the Flash 6 Player public beta, hacking into the drawing API code with Flash 5 flas and ASNative! Certainly, that did not spell the demise of Flash! Anything but.
So, it was great to see a comment Mike Chambers made on the OSFlash mailing list today, in response to some of these comments. These mimic my thoughts about the whole subject, but it’s really great to hear it coming from a MM source.
fyi
We don’t see MTASC or any other open source Flash projects as a bad thing. In fact, we are very excited about them as they all strengthen teh attractiveness of developing for the Flash Platform. This is why we have been discussing them in our recent keynote, and why we released the Flash / JavaScript kit under an open source license.
As far as maelstrom info and demos being online, this does not surprise us. This happens every release of the public beta. If anything, there are fewer examples right not because of the bug with AsSetPropFlags not working in the beta.
We don’t have a problem with developers playing around with the player, and discovering thing (heck, I even posted some info on cacheAsBitmap to the wiki). We do have issues with people decompiling the player, and distributing our content without our permission, but that hasnt really been an issue with the beta.
As far as MTASC, having a solid non-Macromedia compiler available is a good thing for the Flash platform. Now, what might not be good is if that compiler branches from other compilers, but that is a discussion for another day / thread.
mike chambers
This makes me really appreciate how much MM rocks as a company. Can you imagine such a statement coming from Microsoft or … ahem … Adobe?