Re: flash v thingmaker

[Michael Gregor]

Not to be a jerk, but, can you please send me to a link of something good that

was done with THINGS.  It started out kinda cool, but then became quickly

redundant.


TIA,

Michael Gregor


Stephen Britton wrote:


> 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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