Re: FLASH: Flash Player 5 Beta

[Gregg Caines]

I don't think anyone is arguing the fact that the beta should

be freely available to the public: you need a few thousand

people checking it to make sure it is bullet-proof.  The

problem is the way that it has been made available.  The

download page instructs EVERYONE to download the

buggy player 'NOW'.  It doesn't just ask people who want to

beta-test, it is speaking to everyone, even our

non-internet-savvy users.  This will get the wrong people

downloading the beta by mistake (and by the wrong people,

I mean people who don't know or care enough to provide

feedback if they do find a bug).  Even your numbers show

50,000.  I know this is a small percentage of the install base,

but how many of that 50,000 were really necessary to find the

three bugs?  I wonder how many even knew they they were

beta testing.  More importantly, how many know how to

uninstall that player and reinstall the correct one?


I'm not sure why it was approached that way, and I don't think

I'll ever understand it (unless it was to hype up the new authoring

environment, or there was some other motive).  What I wonder

now is why does the link to the buggy player still exist?  Do you want

people to

continue to download the same buggy player, and send the

same feedback on the same bug?


I'm not trying to criticize your methods... I've never distributed

a plug-in of any kind, and probably don't understand what it

takes to do an extensive beta test for one.  However, I do see

that the few hundred people on this list that downloaded it

found the main bug on the first day.


---------------------------------------------------

Gregg Caines

n e o m e t r i x  systems inc.

http://www.neometrixsystems.com

gcainesneometrixsystems [dot] com

>

> 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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