NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

Caligari TrueSpace - When good software gets dumped

Just went to the Caligari site and read the letter from founder Roman Ormandy saying that due to the economy, Microsoft was going to phase out TS. Not surprising. I was kind of scared this would happen. Here is a post from the forum from a user named Steinie:

Approximately between September and October Caligari, this Web Site, trueSpace, tutorials, this Forum and all related downloads and ALL history will probably disappear!
As my last wish to all of you new to 3D software please do the following NOW before the plug is pulled.
FIRST:
Download trueSpace because after October you probably will not be able to get trueSpace ever again! (I’m not kidding)
http://www.caligari.com/downloads.html
SECOND:
Download “WorkSpace Organics Modeling 1 Course”
http://www.caligari.com/products/tru…te=Fundamental
THIRD:
Download any tutorial you might want to watch. All of them if possible.
FOURTH:
Join the New FREE trueSpace Forum “TSCommunity” where all the regulars will be moving to.
http://www.tscommunity.co.cc
FIFTH:
Support the Plug in Developers and any future enhancements.
http://www.yafaray4ts.org/download.html
http://truesourceshop.com/agoracart55/agora.cgi
http://www.truespaceplugins.com/store.html?vmcchk=1

Wow! That is kind of sobering. TS was my first 3D package. I came on board with it in version 2.0. I knew the company had struggled for years to keep up with the industry, but I thought the Microsoft acquisition would keep them around and infuse them with life. That of course, was before we had economic issues. If you want a good 3D and animation package, you might want to go get a copy of this while its available. Even has a Flash exporter. May not be as good as Maya or Lightwave, but it certainly can produce some decent stuff and definitely has its uses. Hope the community can get access to the code and keep it rolling.

-DCF

Where to from Here?

Great article on Jesse Warden’s blog , ‘Flash Player 11: Gaming Platform?’ There are lots of great (and needed) comments and discussion regarding this issue. I too have noticed industry Flash rock stars shifting focus to other platforms like the iPhone, or Unity. Makes me wonder if Adobe understands what is happening here.

I tried Unity. I loved it, but my money for the moment is made with the Flash platform. I pull the player penetration card, and stand on ‘when the Unity player has greater penetration, I’m in’. As for the iPhone, love the phenomenon, love what can be done with it, but loving the Flash platform more. That, and I don’t have an iPhone. Wife does though, she loves it, and is saying to me ‘hey, why don’t you make apps for the iPhone?’ Never has she cared about what platform I was coding for. Very telling indeed.

Flex was/is a wonderful paradigm shift for the Flash platform. I get it. RIAs are a huge deal, particularly for business apps, and the potential money that can be made is staggering. If everything really does move towards cloud computing, and RIAs become the way to go for apps, then it makes perfect sense for Adobe to concentrate on the business side of development rather than gaming. Or does it?

Back in the day, when Microsoft made most of its money off of corporate licenses, it made perfect sense for them to concentrate on business apps. Eventually, they saw the potential of gaming, and entered that arena first with DirectX, then later with Xbox. It took years for them to become a major player in those areas, but time was on their side. With the exponential growth of technology today, I don’t think that Adobe has the luxury of time that Microsoft had. There is a lot of potential here, and I hope Adobe is the one to address it. I hope they have been keeping a screaming demon of a player under raps and have been waiting for the right time to release it. Now would be a good time.

Making Flash The Console For The Web

-DCF

Flash in the Cloud

Great series of articles on cloud computing on the Technology Review by MIT site. In the companies to watch section, Adobe is listed for Flex and Air. The Aviary website, with its image editing RIA is cited in a case study. Whoda thunk it? Well, all us die hard Flash developers who could see the potential of Flash back in the day.

I remember back when I started using Flash in 2001 with Flash 5.0 and Actionscript 2.0. Those were the days. I remember moving from C/C++ to work in Flash and other developers saying that it was a crazy move. I remember the promise of Java, write once and run anywhere, and now quite a few years later, the Flash platform is the closest to making good on that promise. Kind of ironic when you think about it.

It makes perfect sense that Flash would be listed as a technology to watch in the move to cloud computing. I’m waiting for the day when my colleagues of old have to eat humble pie and learn to develop for the Flash platform because it became the tool of choice for RIA development. Of course, no one will remember that we told them so.

Cloud Computing

-DCF

Flash Builder and Catalyst Betas

Been playing around with the betas of Flash Builder and Catalyst. I must say that I am quite impressed. There are still some things to be worked out I guess for the final release, but for the most part both builds seem pretty solid and are quite workable.

Admittedly, Catalyst is going to take some getting used to just in terms of work flow. Once folks are over the hump, I’m sure it will become a power tool in most shops. Just for mock ups and demos alone, it is worth it. I do remember when Dreamweaver first had behaviors and wrote code for you. Used to produce some scary stuff that the developer never wanted to touch. Such is the case now with Catalyst. As I play with it more, I’ll post.

Flash Builder is really good. The profiling and debugging tools are a needed addition. The new components and help are great as well. Definitely starting to feel like the “Borland Builder” environment of years past. I love Flash Develop and the work flow I have developed between it and Flash Professional, but now using Flash Builder, I could be enticed to make a switch to Flash Builder. Now that I get how to build SWC files in Flash Pro, it is beginning to make more sense to work in Flash Builder.

My designer colleague made an observation. He wondered why Adobe just did not go the route of a Dreamweaver, and make Catalyst and Flash Builder one product with a design view and a code view? Or why don’t they just improve the Flash Pro code editor to be more robust so those of us that have to work in Flash Pro don’t have to resort to a Flash Develop. This present move means I will have to buy a whole lot more stuff to get a happy medium. He does have a point.

Check out the betas at Adobe Labs

-DCF

Moving Day, part 3

After much planning and configuration, I was finally able to get my multiple site environment moved from our local machines to a hosting company. In part 1 and 2, I talked about how my company could save money by using an external hosting company and dropping the T1 line cost. We chose 1and1 for the initial move. For $20 a month, we could have pretty much what we had been maintaining in house.
Seemed like a great idea, until we ran into the 1and1 database limitation. It seems that on their most robust package which is their Developer Package, 1and1 limits the size of a database structure files to be 100MB! That is just stupid! At the time of the move, my structure weighed in at 107MB. There was no way to up the database quota, so we had to get another host. This was after moving gigs of data up to 1and1. Painful indeed.
We then went to HostGator out of Texas. I have nothing but good to say about them. For a mere $15 per month, we have unlimited everything! The move had some minor bumps, but all were easily addressed in the forums and tech support. The whole process was just a really good experience all the way around. While not as polished as 1and1 in the way of online admin tools (took some getting used to, but what doesn’t?), I highly recommend them. I will be keeping my personal 1and1 account, as it is great for what I am doing development wise. A small business could do well with such a package, but if you have some serious data going on, you better go with a host that allows for such throughput. HostGator is just such a host.

-DCF