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February 27, 2006
Torrone on clones
Torrone on clones: Phillip Torrone writes at Make, in part: "A forum member named 71M seems to have created a Macromedia Flash player for the PSP and won the PSP SWF player coding contest on PSPHacks." I've got a slight quibble on the phrasing: an actual "Macromedia Flash Player" is made and distributed by Macromedia (or Adobe ;-) and offers predictable capability on Other Peoples Machines. Unless this hack is hijacking the Macromedia codebase somehow, it's actually just a generic SWF renderer with some undescribed level of support for some level of the SWF file format. Accepting SWF files is a popular decision for software makers because there are so many talented people out there who can produce interesting SWF files -- but a different engine may support a different set of features, and more importantly, may act slightly differently from the reference renderer in the features it does support. No big thing, but it's something to watch out for: if someone tells you that a non-desktop environment "has Flash support", then it's important to qualify exactly what that label means...!
Posted by John Dowdell at February 27, 2006 4:06 PM