[OLPC-Philippines] GNASH evaluation

[Carlos Nazareno]

Just tried out Gnash on the latest XO liveCD build.

It was a very frustrating user experience. It was slow and stuff was
just broken.

The need for Gnash before was very understandable given that there was
no decent flash runtime for Linux, but now that Flash runs perfectly
fine on quite a number of distros (and Linux zealotry aside), I don't
see any solid reason on insisting on using Gnash aside from "it
doesn't come preinstalled on default XO images".

IMHO, using Gnash will be shortchanging OLPC users and giving them a
second-rate user experience.

Much of the web already uses Flash, and having Gnash installed will
cut off XO users from a significant portion of the web. I think we owe
it to OLPC recepients to give them an experience at par with those
using "real PCs" (note the quotation marks). XO users shouldn't have
to feel experience envy with internet cafe users that can access stuff
they can't.

Furthermore, Flash is the defacto standard for building multimedia
educational software. The "real world" uses it. It simply works. If
the real world thinks Flash is good enough for building educational
stuff, well :-/

Finally, we can now use completely open-source free tools to build
Flash apps (Flashdevelop editor + Flex SDK + JDK). However, we need
Flash 9 and above to use the Actionscript Virtual Machine 2 bytecode,
and Gnash doesn't run this kind of content. Also, the AVM2 is faster
and more efficient than the old Flash 7/8 AVM1 and thus should be
better for building content for XO's limited CPU.

Regards,

-Naz

On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 11:59 AM, Carlos Nazareno <object404 at gmail.com> wrote:
> yeah. will be playing around with Gnash! :)
>



-- 
Carlos Nazareno
http://www.object404.com

interactive media specialist
zen graffiti studios
naz at zengraffiti.com