Doh. I’ve been trying to get this working all day, to no avail. My installation of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (with Flash MX 2004 Pro), has suddenly decided it doesn’t want to launch.

I needed both Dreamweaver and Flash today, and neither one wanted to show up to the party. Fell back on BBEdit to edit the HTML (actually, that was probably more efficient anyway, so no biggie), but I have to go through some Flash files to evaluate some requirements for a project. And that’s hard to do when Flash doesn’t want to run.

I click on the app, and get the bouncy dock icon. It bounces for up to 3 minutes (thought I was stuck in VM thrash hell, but apparently not), and then I get a dialog box saying the application has crashed, and asks if I’d like to tell Apple about it. No, Actually, I’d like to tell Macromedia, but I’m not given that option

I’ve tried deleting the whole shebang (the apps, the /Library/Application/ SupportMacromedia folder, the /Library/Application Support/Macrovision folder (that’s supposed to be managing the registration, so I was hoping that would trick it into working), and then reinstalling from scratch. No joy.

I’ve sent word to Macromedia, but haven’t heard back from a non-automated respoder. Doh.

UPDATE: I deleted all of the Macromedia and Macrovision stuff again. Rebooted my machine. And reinstalled. Again. It worked this time. Why on earth would I have to reboot to get Dreamweaver working is beyond me, but it’s running now. More importantly, Flash is running too, so I can get to the Pachyderm template analysis…

UPDATE 2: Wow. A tech support guy from Macromedia just called me. An actual person, on an actual phone. I’d already resolved the issue, but that’s a nice touch – especially when most tech support is just a search form on a database somewhere. Great! Thanks, Macromedia!

Just came across this link from John Dowdell. I’m adding it here so I remember to check it out. Looks like someone has experimented with rendering MXML into a UI on the client side, emulating Flex, without the server. Sounds like something that could be useful for Pachyderm…

We’ve been taking a look at Macromedia Flex, and it seems like a pretty cool technology. It manages data modelling, UI generation, and presentation of an interactive application (as a .swf) to the user. Some cool potential there.

The data modelling stuff feels a lot like WebObjects EOF. The UI description stuff (MXML) is much like Mozilla XUL. The end product looks like a plain old Flash .swf, that can be presented anywhere.

Lots of marketing fluff on the Flex website (considering the product isn’t even released yet, that’s understandable). Some of the fluff is a little misleading, suggesting that rich interactive stuff hasn’t been possible until now. I’ve done this before in Shockwave, talking to a server via XML over HTTP. Worked great. 4 years ago…

One of the more reassuring things is a collaboration with IBM to build an Eclipse plugin for authoring MXML files for creating Flex applications. That, tied to the claim that it can run on any J2EE server, should be quite comforting, especially after the whole Generator thing…

One thing we’re looking into is the potential to use Flex as part of the architecture of Pachyderm 2.0. If it can handle programatic generation of rich, interactive, data-driven Flash movies, that takes care of a considerable bit of work for us… The only real question now is whether Flex applications can be configured to run (or at least output to) offline mode, or if they require a live connection to a server. Kiosks and CD-ROM standalone delivery of Pachyderm 2.0 content will be crucial for us.

We may also try out writing an APOLLO app, using Flex to generate some kind of funky interactive interface, rather than static HTML pages.

I’ve been playing around with Macromedia Contribute 2, which is now available for MacOSX. It seems like an extremely useful utility for editing existing websites, but falls short for creating them. That’s a reflection of the market they’re looking at – newbies editing content (change a phone number on an intranet, update an image…).

For that, it rocks quite nicely. I’m curious to see how/if it mangles a modern web page, since it seems to have some heavy table editing tools, but nothing for divs or css…

I’ve been pointing it at a dummy page to see what it can do. It handled the image upload and display attributes extremely well.

I just wrote my first Lingo in over 2 years. DirectorMX looks pretty sweet. It’s amazing how it all comes back. I REALLY miss the instant round-tripping, being able to modify code on the fly and have it kick in without recompiling and restarting an application to see the results…

It took a few minutes for the “sprite(me.spritenum).loc = the mouseloc” stuff to trickle back out of my head, but it was still in there…