Re: FLASH: Flash Player 5 Beta

[Peter Santangeli]

Clearly there will be bugs with the beta - as I pointed out, there are

a couple we know of. One of the advantages of both the object and

embed tags is that you can specify a minimum version of the plugin

required. Those whose sites are not working will be able to specify

that their site requires the released player by specifying the minumum

version as that the released player ships with. Yes, there is some

exposure in the interim, but the release of the player will be

"real soon now".


This is obviously a balancing act for us. We have tried very hard

to make sure that the beta player was as stable as possible (there

were no *known* bugs with it when it shipped). The beta has

turned up a few, and we are in the process of fixing them.


I shudder to imagine the kind of feedback we would have received

from these same people complaining had we shipped the final version

of the player with these bugs (to over 2 million new downloaders a

day!).


Pete Santangeli



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

From: Chris Tifer <

ctifer1tampabay [dot] rr [dot] com

>

To: <

flasherchinwag [dot] com

>

Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2000 11:16 PM

Subject: RE: FLASH: Flash Player 5 Beta



> 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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