How to compile Flash

June 23rd, 2008

Today, I was astonished.

All these years, I’ve heard people talking about how great Flash is, and how fun to develop in it. Since I’m not a proponent of Flash myself (it really prevents some things to being accomplished. E.g. you can’t pass urls around to share with your friends), I didn’t have a look at it.

Only today, I found out that it is impossible to compile a Flash file without paying Adobe $ 699. Always living in open-source technologies, I’m astonished that people can be that enthusiastic about software that they have to pay that kind of money for. Marketing really is a discipline in its own.

Posted by tomklaasen Filed in

4 Responses to “How to compile Flash”

  1. Philip Paeps Says:
    June 23rd, 2008 at 11:36 AM Mmm - I know what you mean and what you're trying to say, but you accidentally implied that "open source = free (zero cost)", which is not necessarily true, of course. Having said that, there is some proprietary (and incidentally expensive) software I cheerfully pay for and which I would recommend to everyone despite it's price. FlexeLint ($999 per user) comes to mind here. But "Flash". Ugh. No. :-)
  2. TimothyP Says:
    June 23rd, 2008 at 12:03 PM Yet another reason why Silverlight 2 (not to be confused with Silverlight 1 which is a totally different product) will kick Flash ass... The tools are freely available, work on Linux support/tools is coming, developers can use whatever language they want, etc... etc... Now we just need to get people over their "oh no it's Microsoft" issues :p (Which of course are build on valid arguments... which now, for most part, belong to the past)
  3. Mystery Shopper Says:
    June 24th, 2008 at 05:31 PM There is a completely free SDK available, compiler included. If you are looking for a free IDE you can check out FlashDevelop ( win only ) or use Eclipse with some plugin. http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK I agree, you will need to write AS3 code. Compiling a FLA you created in Flash 8 in the tradional way is not possible ( allthough you can also compile FLA's through the compiler, once you followed the guidelines and created the fla in the Flash IDE ).
  4. Steffest Says:
    June 29th, 2008 at 09:46 PM Huh? Wherever did you get that idea? there are heaps of open source Flash possibilities. http://osflash.org/ I have some open source Flash projects myself, built completely with open source tools. http://www.steffest.com/boulderflash/ for example: assets build with swfmill, scripted in flashdevelop and compiled with Mtasc

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