Re: 2 cents on the context menu

On Friday 12 September 2003 07:28, alan hill wrote:
> Hi all.  I've been lurking for a while.  Just thought I'd point out that
> Flash MX 2004 enables you to easily create context menus (the "about
> Macromedia Flash Player..." is mandatory), so I imagine that they'll be a
> lot more common in a year or two.

Perhaps. Flash, OTOH, doesn't really look or feel like a "regular" web app, 
and users tend to be discerning enough to tell the difference. All I really 
care about here is that we're meeting the user's expectations (not our 
expectations of what the user should want).

> Speaking of Flash, is there any particular reason people have for not
> wanting to use it?  

Plenty:

	1.) there are no authoring tools for Linux, and I will NOT use windows.
	2.) it is entirely timeline based (still!)
	3.) accessability still requires too much effort (this is getting much 
	    better)
	4.) still can't interact richly with most brower host environments

That's enough to kill the deal for me, but that said, there are some things 
that flash has that I WANT that I can't get right now through a standard 
browser:

	1.) the ability to optionally use a timeline-style animation (tweening,
	    etc...)
	2.) vector graphics. SVG is waaaaay too far away from being useful. Once it
	    works and can "play nice" with regular HTML content (i.e., doesn't
	    require a plugin), I'll be a much happier camper. NW is written in such a
	    way as to allow porting to SVG when it's commonly available. Hrm, now 
	    that I think about it, all I _really_ want is the ability to draw non-90 
	    lines. I think I'd settle for that in lieu of SVG.
	3.) something like XMLSocket()
	4.) streaming audio. What I'd give for streaming MP3 in HTML/SVG.

> I used to be quite anti-flash and am still flash-sceptic, but I think MX
> 2004 kind of represents a tipping point for me where the ease of development
> it provides begins to seriously outweigh any concerns I have about it.
>
> I suppose what I am asking is: what is the fundamental motivation behind
> the development of netWindows?

Portability, degradeability (flash fails this one *hard*), ease of development 
(you shouldn't have to rip out an existing front end to start using NW), and 
most of all a better UI for the web apps we all know and use. HTML is 
hamstrung in some pretty lame ways. We're not trying to re-invent the wheel 
here, just to give the browser a bit of help where its built-in UI constructs 
leave something to be desired. I've personally retrofitted a couple of apps 
with combo-boxes and menus in order to make some otherwise broken UIs much 
more usable. Note that this is incremental change, and not invasive at all 
unless you decide to write a pure netWindows app (like Christian's).

Does that answer your question?

-- 
Alex Russell
[email protected]    BD10 7AFC 87F6 63F9 1691 83FA 9884 3A15 AFC9 61B7
[email protected]  F687 1964 1EF6 453E 9BD0 5148 A15D 1D43 AB92 9A46


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