Surfers set to splash out on Macromedia Flash kit
The latest version of Macromedia's Flash developer kit for creators of animated Web pages will incorporate players for video and music files, though the company insists that it is not meant to compete with players created by Microsoft and Real Media.
Flash MX was launched this week, while the latest Flash player for Web browsers will be available for download by Web surfers tomorrow.
According to Jeremy Clark, Flash product manager in San Francisco, the main reason for incorporating the multimedia features was that developers asked for them. Until Flash MX was introduced, developers had to import such files into Flash and users were required to launch a separate player.
'Right now, they [developers] have to encode their video in three different formats because they don't know what people are using,' Mr Clark said.
According to Macromedia, about 414 million computers, or about 98 per cent of the total, have downloaded previous versions of the Flash player, while about 70 per cent have Windows Media Player and fewer than that have Real Player.
