freecooperation mailinglist archive

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Re: the tools we use

garrett*at*eudoramail.com

Sep 24, 2003 04:36 PDT

 Millie Niss

More generally, the open source issue is important to >me but I am a sell-out. Much of my work uses Flash, >and I just don't see SVG as a viable alternative >there are no decent authoring tools). I'm also not >aware of any technology that allows you to do cross->platform cross-browser programming as well as Flash >and with as much penetration. I don't even know an >open source alternative to Dreamweaver, although I am >sure there are some-- HTML editing is not that hard a >task. I'd like to use open source, but how, given >that I want to do web art? (DHTML is not the answer >and it isn't open source anyway...)

Hi Millie, I think your confusing a few points here, flash (the application) is'nt open source however the swf format it outputs is, so you are not limited to creating swf's in flash, there are some other applications out there that do this - i think i remember seeing a review of them on webmonkey.com at some stage.

anyway flash is an object / a plugin which will play anywhere the plugin engine works, so this leapfrogs that whole cross-platform cross-browser thing for you! its not that your necessarily programming cross-platform more the donkey work has been done for you to ease development. on client side things like this there are other options, Director or Java for example, true steeper learning curve for these but more control as well. Java is open source and can be created (at least i think thats the official status, somebody might correct me on that?) with many different environments and is cross-platform. by dreamweaver i suppose you mean html which again is opensource - all you need to create html is notepad on pc or simpletext on the mac! they are both free - i use bbedit, i think theres a free version of that.


 warren

i have seen years of work attempting to find and/or >build the "perfect" environment. instead it is >probably easier -- and perhaps a more direct route -- >to simply choose an environment and then, over the
course of the discussion, keep tab of what we like >and don't like about the environment. such a list of
dis)likes might be an interesting and useful outcome >of our discussion.

absolutely this 'perfect environment / tool' is a very subjective issue! as i said this is more a space to come up with ideas for cooperations and the tools that might be needed for this but good simple tools to start with, open-source, open-ended and accessible would help overall.

this idea of lists of dislikes would be very usefull so that overall we could see trends in disscussions and formulate objectives for the group. rather than have vague wandering disscussions as there tend to be in many lists we can identify problematic areas and work towards solutions for these much as a scientific study would.

a+
gar


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