11 Comments

1. Stephan Lachance says:

   April 1, 2007 at 1:19 pm

   Bizarre…. Actimagine almost-Flash player, was tiny because it didn’t supported many of the features Flash like: only medium quality rendering, no support for pens but only fills and bitmaps could not be transformed (rotated, scaled etc) but only put in front of any other graphics. I guess they are saying it because they have to justify an acquisision that didn’t made sense, iI actully spoke with developer inside Adobe and they said that Adobe did it in order to remove a potential competitor from the market (like they did with other companies)
2. Stephan Lachance says:

   April 1, 2007 at 2:04 pm

   As usual Bill you get away by not answering the real matter, was Mobiclip a full player or not? It could be easy as you say to not mention my infomation sources, but is it true or not? Wasn’t it an acquisiton in the same style of Animoi which turned into nothing again? Isn’t bizarre that Macromedia acquired a lesser player from somebody else? It is easy as well to just “question” my comment without answering to any of these, you only try to cast doubts on what I say without providing an alternative and real evidence.
3. Stephan Lachance says:

   April 1, 2007 at 3:17 pm

   I can’t cite my information source either for obvious reasons, the only thing I was referred was that the Mobiclip player is full of bugs and “we just don’t get why they bought it”. Actimagine only really active business was the video codec which eventually was embedded in several devices and mostly games like the ones for Nintendo DS. When they were invicted by Nintendo to join them as tools chain providers, they rejected the vector stuff as it was very buggy. The fact that a minor game company or two actually produced content means littel or nothing, Mobiclip was indeed used to piaret full movies and reduce them to mobile size, but again this was using the video codec part not the vector-flash thing.
   I know exactly what acquisition means, I wasn’t defining bizarre the term itself, but the fact that Adobe/Macromedia felt the need of buying out a company that was producing a buggy and incomplete alternative to Flash. It would have made sense if the company was something lilke Bluestreak, whose clean room implemented player is even superior in terms of features to Flash itself, but certainly not Mobiclip/Actimagine.
4. hip2b2 says:

   April 1, 2007 at 5:50 pm

   Ow. Actimagine Mobiclip? Aren’t they the codec maker that allows people watch movies and other multimedia nicely on mobile phones? I didn’t know they had a flash player?

   On another vein, what about the folks at bluestreak.com? They have a flash engine too right?
5. Jensa says:

   April 2, 2007 at 2:26 am

   hip2b2: I trust you meant this firm? http://www.bluestreaktech.com
   They got a really sweet product!
6. Zorro says:

   April 2, 2007 at 9:18 am

   What a pity ! This discussion was getting interesting until the http://www.bluestreaktech.com guys arrived ! I have heard their technology is awfully buggy too ! (no rotations either !).
   Did Adobe buy Actimagine or licensed its stuff ? I wonder what was the price of such a deal ! How much can a buggy or so it seems software be worth ?
   Is there any example of that Actimagine Flash player somewhere for us to see/test ?
7. Ramsey Isler says:

   April 2, 2007 at 4:00 pm

   Having seen the ActImagine “flash” player run, I have to say that their vector technology did have a significant performance advantage over the players that Adobe provided (although a lot of stuff like Alpha blending was missing). I wasn’t surprised at all that Adobe purchased their vector tech. Since the SWF format is open there have been a lot of implementations with it that Adobe themselves are probably surprised by.
8. Stephan Lachance says:

   April 2, 2007 at 4:18 pm

   There are several reasons why Mobiclip was faster compared to Flash:

   1) No handling of pens: pens have to be computed by the player and then rendered as filled polygons, an extra and expensive step to compute; with mobiclip you have to turn all pens to fills before exporting
   2) Sound support was juvenile compared to Flash
   3) Bitmap support simply wasn’t there
   4) Flash uses 4X supersampling to render antialias, Mobiclip only 2X, that means halved computation time and halved memory bandwiith required in order to transfer data (even Flash support 2X antilias but you have to set it explicitly)
   5) No Alpha support: alpha channels on both solid colors and bitmap requires HUGE computation time, if you don’t use use Alpha as Mobiclip requires, Flash is again fast as mobilcip
   6) Incomplete and buggy support of ActionScript, if you skip the same precision that Flash is using in mathematical routines, you certainly compute faster, but then applications relying in such precision (many games for example) simply fails.

   I don’t know much about the Bluestreak implementation as it is not available to third party to evaluate (they claim to have a J2ME player, which I would be very curious to see)

   If you apply the same requirements of Mobliclip to a Flash content, magically the player will be as fast as Mobilcip.

   What touches my nerves about Flash is not the concept per se, but the stupid way it has been integrated in the mobile ecosystem, or better not integrated at all. They rushed to get into the phones with a half baked solution that makes it irreceivable by customers beside some very well defined and unfortunately not money making niches (except for Adobe of course)
9. Zorro says:

   April 3, 2007 at 4:28 am

   Why some comments have been removed here ? Bil Perry’s and some other folk @ Adobe ? That’s strange to remove comments without explanation…

   Stephan you say “Flash support 2X antilias but you have to set it explicitly”. Could you be more specific ? This has something to see with the medium/low quality renderings offered by the Flash Player ?
10. Stephan Lachance says:

    April 3, 2007 at 4:45 am

    Don’t know why comments have been removed, maybe Alex can answer your question.

    To render using 2x antialias you have to select Medium as quality; in the desktop version of Flash you have to set it explicitly, in the mobile version it is the default.
11. biskero says:

    April 3, 2007 at 6:16 am

    Ciao

    some comments have been removed since the people asked to do so.

    Alessandro