RE: FLASH: Flash Player 5 Beta

[Chris Tifer]

Thanks for the e-mail clarifying this.  Maybe my inbox won't be

quite so flooded with Flash 5 Player posts over the next couple of days.


May I say though:  You mention that the worst-case scenario would

be of people getting a buggy product, but out of those 50,000, if what

I read on these posts is correct, aren't they all getting buggy downloads?


>From what I've seen, I'm sure you will get good responses towards

whether or not the beta release is ruining some user's online experience,

just

from the developer's feedback.


Respectfully,


Chris Tifer


P.S. I hope to develop one of these sites that will cease working in

future versions.  Hell, I can't develop a site that works in the current

version :-)





-----Original Message-----

From:

ownerchinwag [dot] com

 [

ownerchinwag [dot] com]On">mailto:ownerchinwag [dot] com]On

 Behalf Of Peter

Santangeli

Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2000 6:55 PM

To:

flasherchinwag [dot] com

Subject: FLASH: Flash Player 5 Beta




A number of people have asked why we have gone ahead and made

a beta of the Flash 5 player available to the general public.


I understand your concerns about prerelease players being

available, but thought I would shed a little light on why we do

public beta's with Flash player.


I would actually love to simply rely on developers testing their

sites, but time and time again we have seen that this is not

sufficient.


Conscientious Flash developers do check their content, but many don't

- particularly for projects that they are no longer associated with.

In some cases the developers have simply gone out of business or on

to other things. Were we to simply rely on developers, the end result

for the public would be untested content that breaks in the released

player - the worst of all situations.


Our only alternative (apart from conducting an extensive private

developer-only beta program, which we have been doing for over 6

months) is to open it up to the public, who provide a pretty good

random sampling of site checks.


The situation is not as dire as some have suggested. The last time

I checked we had had about 50,000 people download the public beta.

This works out to about 2/10000's of the general public using the

Flash player, and less than 1% of people downloading the player

on a daily basis. To date, we have had less than 10 reports of broken

sites, highlighting one core issue with the player (described below).


The specifics of this one issue is as follows: The beta player has

problems with multiline text fields that have negative leading

specified. The player was not "sign extending" this, so the

leading was being interpreted as an extremely large positive number,

instead of a small negative number.


There have been a small number of other bugs (2 or 3) that are

similarly (or more) obscure. All are the result of Actionscript

coding errors that the Flash 4 player was interpreting in a manner

different than the Flash 5 player. We intend to correct all of these

issues in the final player. Were it not for the public beta I have no

doubt that they would have been missed, and shipped with the

released player.


Thanks for your ongoing support,


Peter Santangeli

Vice President of Engineering, Flash

Macromedia



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