Flash8 ships next month

July 28th, 2005

Macromedia plans to unveil its Flash 8 software early next month with an emphasis on video capabilities some think could up-end the Web video market. Macromedia is expected to announce the latest version of its signature Flash software Aug. 8, or 8/8, and release the software a few weeks later, said a source familiar with the company's plans.

I'm raring to go!

Filed under: announce

7 Responses to “Flash8 ships next month”

  1. Jon B Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 8:59 pm

    damn damn damn damn damn – we just bought MX 2004 at work!

  2. Florian Krüsch Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 10:49 pm

    MS and MM both claim they’re not competing, but it makes me wonder why Windows XP still bundles with Video-less Flash Player 5. It’s one of the reasons why clients still insist on Flash5 productions, which can really be a pain.
    I wonder if Windows Vista will come bundled with the Flash player at all.

    Florian

  3. zeh Says:
    July 28th, 2005 at 10:53 pm

    Jon B: well… they’ll probably have upgrade discounts.

    I’m also interested in know how much it’ll cost though.

  4. nuno mira Says:
    July 29th, 2005 at 12:15 am

    Jon B, I’d say that it won’t just be a discount, macromedia will probably upgrade it for free.

    I bought Contribute 2 and got a free upgrade to 3.

    Read some of the links at:
    http://www.macromedia.com/support/service/freeupgrades.html

  5. John Dowdell Says:
    July 30th, 2005 at 12:38 am

    Florian, if your clients think SWF5 is more widely supported, then does this March05 test of what consumers can actually view help at all?
    http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

    (There was only a 1% difference audited between SWF5 and SWF6 support… the latter was the version that added Sorenson video capabilities.)

    Regards,
    John Dowdell
    Macromedia Support

  6. Florian Krüsch Says:
    July 30th, 2005 at 11:21 pm

    John – there was exactly this discussion going on. The client (a fortune 500 international company) finally decided for Flash5, because they wanted there own people to be able to see it too.
    And upgrading their centrally administered Windows infrastructure was not an option, which is a situation you’re probably well aware of ;)

  7. tomsamson Says:
    July 31st, 2005 at 2:50 am

    yeah,i know how that is, had the same situation several times,clients were more scared they couldn´t access it in their local network.
    On the other side i recently had a funny experience when a client moaned,too,that they had f5 installed on all machines and their admin wouldn´t install newer things easily.
    When i then talked personally with the admin (to convince him it was a good idea to install newer flash players on all machines) he told me that they had installed f7 almost a year ago and i should next time directly talk to him as their marketing people handling the projects had no clue about technical things..
    generally speaking i think the more killer features a new flash version has,the quicker it will spread.
    (with killer features i mean top notch things which weren´t possible with older flash versions)

    for example i had a hard time convincing many clients of using flash 6 when it was relatively new (it had great features for developers of course, but not many new things which were wanted by our clients and were absolutely impossible to do with f5 (with painful extra work)) but for clients needing streaming video implementation (ideally with seeking to any position of videos and quickly swappping several ones),it was quite easy to convince em to use flash7 with its better video handling (i even convinced half of em to get flashcom licenses for streaming services).
    which featureset would make it a must have of course depends on client and project but yup,the more great new features for as many as possible usage scenarios,the faster it should spread. That´s why i´m very positive on f8 player spreading as fast as none before :D

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