Aral Balkan

I just read on Colin's blog that apparently Adobe has plans to integrate the Flash Player and the Adobe Acrobat Reader (also known affectionately as the bloated beast from hell.) I'm sorry, I didn't know there were plans to draw up Flash's death certificate!

WTF would you want to merge these two players?

I'm really racking my brain to come up with some feature that Acrobat could add to the toolset of the Flash developer and, for the life of me, I can't! Could someone from Macromedia please give the Adobe folk a clue?

Flash got to where it is today in no small part due to the tiny size of the player. You add Adobe Acrobat in there and you'll have a disaster of Adobe Dimensions Atmosphere proportions.

Comments

• I had exactly the same reaction, the 'multiyear effort' they're talking about probably refers to actually making Acrobat Reader somewhat stable and usable.
  
  Can you imagine if they bundle Acrobat into the Flash player, that would be an absolute nightmare for filesize. On the other hand it would be rather cool to have a PDF encoder class in AS3 ;)

  by Peter on 2005-12-05 18:08:10

• Peter wrote: On the other hand it would be rather cool to have a PDF encoder class in AS3
  
  *cough*blazePDF.com*cough* ;-)
  
  wondering what this will/could do to my efforts...
  
  g.

  by g.wygonik on 2005-12-05 18:24:21

• are you planning to port it to AS3 Greg?

  by Peter Elst on 2005-12-05 18:28:37

• Hi,
  
  The FAQ is poorly written and will be fixed.
  
  We plan to keep the Flash Player small and focused.
  
  We *also* plan on a new client code named Apollo that will work out of the browser and bring together the best of HTML, Flash, and PDF. Apollo will be very cool. (note: we learned a lot from the experience with Central.)
  
  Regards,
  David
  Adobe (wow, odd to write that after 13.5 years at Macromedia).
  

  by David Mendels on 2005-12-05 18:29:26

• Hi David,
  
  Thanks for clarifying. I think that the spectre of a combined Flash + Acrobat runtime was a shared nightmare among quite a few of us.
  
  Looking forward to Apollo and hope the new company is treating you well! :)

  by Aral Balkan on 2005-12-05 18:33:43

• Peter - i've already started working with an AS3 port. should be MUCH better (smaller, leaner, etc). of course Apollo has my interest piqued... ;-)

  by g.wygonik on 2005-12-05 18:37:35

• hang on a second, havent you got it the wrong way around, I would put money on being able to use flash content inside acrobat, which would be pretty cool, actually acrobat 7's 3d features are pretty neat, I'm pretty sure there are some really smart people at Adobe and their main roadmap in the interim is integration making life easier for us end users.
  
  MaTT

  by mattmuller on 2005-12-05 19:04:09

• actually, you've been able to include Flash content inside PDFs for some time - i just know of any application that supports doing it! (i actually looked at this as a solution to using SWFs in PDFs in my component).

  by g.wygonik on 2005-12-05 20:09:05

• Generally speaking, if something seems like a surreally poor idea (like, stuffing all of Acrobat inside of the Flash Player, rather than the other way around), you can be fairly confident we won't be doing it.
  
  By the way, you're right that Atmosphere never did take off as a product on its own, but you might be interested in knowing that the technology now lives a much more successful life as Acrobat 3D (key for engineering folks wanting to embed interactive models in their documents).
  
  J.

  by John Nack on 2005-12-05 22:01:57

• Hi John, as long as you leave us our tiny Flash player, I'll be happy.
  
  It definitely makes more sense to put Flash in Acrobat (but, again, why -- they have such cleanly demarcated use cases -- PDF = Print, Flash = online.) I mean, even for online documents, FlashPaper is so much better than PDF. Just waiting for that darn plugin to load makes me want to tear my hair out :)

  by aral on 2005-12-05 23:31:06

• fyi, we are not combining the Flash Player and Acrobat reader plugins.
  
  More info here:
  
  http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/12/flash_player_an.cfm
  
  mike chambers
  
  mesh@macromedia.com

  by mikechambers2 on 2005-12-09 18:07:47

• Thanks, Mike! Good to know :)

  by Aral Balkan on 2005-12-14 14:03:50

• [...] ttp://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000179.html
  http://www.flashant.org/index.php? [...]

  by Peter Elst » Adob's Macromedia acquisition - week 1 on 2005-12-29 12:48:12

• [...] ttp://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000179.html
  http://www.flashant.org/index.php? [...]

  by Peter Elst » Adob's Macromedia acquisition - week 1 on 2005-12-29 12:48:19

• [...] tml">FAQ提到要將Flash Playerå'ŒPDF合併，Flash社群震æ'¼æ˜¯å¦‚ä½•å¤ [...]

  by Yet Another Blog from Luar » 展望2006年，Flash未來未有來！ on 2006-02-15 22:42:36

• does anyone know where i can download it hello hello hello! dern it this was 2 years ago. answer me anyway god!

  by teresa on 2008-06-08 07:37:49

• and is it for mobile also and palm os

  by teresa on 2008-06-08 07:38:20

• thanks. super site

  by hazım on 2008-06-18 01:57:31