Dynamic Flash

It seems that Yahoo! have decided to emply some ethically questionable techniques to wrestle back some of their market share from the mighty G. The carrot here is “advanced Internet phone calling”. The stick is a whole heap of unrelated tools that get installed if you’re not not paying enough attention.

This event has caused me to revisit the Flash Player + Yahoo! Toolbar “offer” debacle. In light of recent events, I am now more concerned than ever that Macromedia have chosen to ally themselves with such a company. In fact, it concerns me that Macromedia are employing similar tactics to get people to download the Yahoo! Toolbar when all they really want is the Flash Player. The following is a quote from Terrell Karlsten, spokeswoman for Yahoo!:

By setting it that way we’re giving people choices. For people who want to download software in one fell swoop, they have that option. If they don’t want it we give them the ability to customise it.

This sounds unnervingly similar to David Mendels’ response to an earlier post of mine on this offer:

What we are doing is leveraging our website, and making an optional offer to the trivially small percent of folks who choose to install the Flash Player that way.

I’m not naive enough to think that my opinion is going to cause a major US company to back out of a lucrative deal. The Developer Relations guys certainly made it clear in their responses that this is a done deal. However, it would appear that Yahoo’s reputation is in serious decline, and this will inevitable rub off on their business partners, Macromedia included.

I just hope that the Adobe merger goes ahead. Maybe then Macromedia can forget about short term financial concerns and kiss good-bye to the ridiculous Yahoo! deal.

It looks as though the hosting for phpforflash.com has finally run out. This was the official site for my Foundation PHP for Flash and Advanced PHP for Flash books. It even had an active community, almost 4 years after the original book was published. Thanks to Alan McCann, Content Architect for both books, for picking up the hosting tab for as long as he has.

Incidentally, in an effort to get rid of a lot of clutter from our dinky little house I’ve put two of my author copies of Foundation PHP for Flash on Amazon UK. The book is out of print now (and, if I’m honest, a little out of date in places) so this is pretty much the only way to get hold of a copy now. I’ll even sign them too if that would help to shift them, though I’m not egotistical enough to think that anyone would want my autograph for any purpose other than forging cheques in my name

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve created a separate page tracking the latest MTASC version. In order to get a sensible URL for this page I had to move the MTASC OS X and Linux download files to http://dynamicflash.com/downloads/mtasc so this may have broken a few external links.

This also means that some of the URLs in older MTASC-related posts will be broken until I get around to fixing them. If you hit a 404 then go directly to the MTASC download page and find the version you were looking for.

If you have absolutely no idea what MTASC is, where have you been for the past six months!? Head over to the MTASC site to get the low-down.