Re: flash v thingmaker

[Stephen Britton]

On Tue, 12 May 1998, Jason L. Fritts wrote:


> Just curious to know what everyone's opinions are regarding ThingMaker

> (http://www.thingworld.com). WebReview did a story on it (Meet ThingMaker

> http://webreview.com/wr/pub/) and I've just glanced at it and it looks very

> similar to Flash.  Anyone want to comment.  I know that it is lacking the

> mac platform right now but are in talks with apple so that's one problem (I

> think both the plug-in viewer & the software is lacking for macs).


I downloaded the ThingMaker demo the other night and was very 

impressed. It's programming features (which include neat things like

collision dectection) are more robust than Flash. In fact, I would say

that ThingMaker is a closer cousin to Director than Flash. And for $99 it

is a steal, especially when you compare it to products like mBED's $249

Interactor and Emblaze's Creator ($495 at shows). ThingMaker is much

easier to use than the mBED and Emblaze products and because it is so

cheap I will probably purchase a copy to add another toy to my hard drive.


But at this point, ThingMaker isn't competition for Flash. The

Thing plug-in viewer is five times the size of the Flash plug-in,

and the lack of support for Macintosh is unacceptible for professional

web development. Industry people like to point out that Mac's only

represent 4%-5% percent of all new computer sales, but I like to look at

browser statistics. In the 50+ sites that I have been involved with, 

Mac browsers have accounted for at least 12% of the traffic and in some

cases as much as 35%. I cannot find a client that would be willing to pay

me to put up a site that cannot be seen by 10 percent of the possible

visitors. 


What also bothered me about ThingMaker is they said on their

website that they hoped to serve Macintosh users by using some sort of

Java export. As many people on this list know, Java is a disaster on the 

Macintosh. If ThingMaker was developing a Mac plug-in, I might consider

using it. Also, how many times have you heard a company say they plan on 

coming out with a Mac version (or Windows version) and it never comes.   


As a multimedia tool, I think ThingMaker shows a lot of promise. If I

were Parable, I would immediately start working on a version based on

MM's Flash vector format. Now that MM has opened up the Flash graphic

standard, it will be interesting to see if other companies adopt it.

 

Time to get off my soapbox.


Stephen Britton

sbrittonwestnet [dot] com

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