It is like you say Adobe has to step up “while they still can”.

Forget it when Microsoft starts integrating Silverlight into every product horizontal and vertical. You are already seeing that with: Windows Azure, Virtual Map SDK, SharePoint, IIS Smooth Streaming etc. Adobe simply doesn’t have anything like that…their dominance right now is: market share and UI…once Silverlight becomes respectable in those areas…game over.

- You could convert the wav to mp3 in the background by putting it in an interval timer (and letting it execute only once, of course).
- Possibly you could also let this happen server-side with AJAX, if the data needed to create the mp3 (e.g. a wav file) is already stored servver-side.

Or is there anything I’m missing here which makes this impossible?

This post is a simular, a good point but only for 10-15% of the applications. It’s a big enough percentage to care, but doesn’t really affect the needs of most applications.

Flex has been getting a lot of exposure and I think it is time for adobe to step up now while they still can, to do all the necessary “base” work like threading because this could impact many of the applications and then go to the nice but really not needed stuff like directly exporting UI designs from photoshop, skins, etc.

But besides that I find the fact that flash doesnt thread pretty sad. especially when I can write an app for the iphone that will thread perfectly fine.

Perhaps the push to replace flash isnt about flash, but about the fact that we have moved on to a point where noone cares what its called.

Still, when prompted to download silverlight on Vista I steadfastly refuse out of a misplaced sense of pride.

Then multi-threading will be super easy from Flex. And cross platform. And you will have access to the entire Java library.

Artemis showed us the way.

As for Silverlight… I live in Redmond.

I see more open positions for Flash developers at Microsoft then I see for Silverlight developers every time I look.

At Noteflight, I’d like to think we’re not particularly ideological. Silverlight and Flash/Flex are both great platforms, but one of them presently has a 95+% installed base on consumer machines. Guess which one? Our decision to use Flash was (as it should be for anyone wishing for mass adoption of their app) primarily driven by the fact that it is already installed on our user’s machines, not by its development merits. Even if Flex sucked (which it patently does not) we would still have just gritted our teeth and coded up Noteflight in AS3. And if Silverlight takes over (which I’m not betting on, but have no say in) well, we’ll just have to port our app to Silverlight, won’t we? We are building an app for the real world out there, not for ourselves.

As for WAV files: the lack of threading played absolutely no role. What turned out to be more important in the end was that MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm, and we need a lossless approach in order to download and accurately loop sample fragments whose decompressed signal must be absolutely identical to the original. I note that Flash 10 does in fact include a native MP3 decoding API.

All this aside, as a programmer I would of course prefer to have access to a thread construct in AS3 and would find threads immensely convenient for many aspects of Noteflight. I’m simply saying that as a platform issue it is really, really far down the list of things that matter.

One last point about Noteflight - the author’s post says that our site will deliver “mass, systematic theft of music, which has, somehow, to be properly monetized”. I would encourage everyone to look and see what is actually going on on our site, and what is not. Noteflight’s aim is to foster a global musical community, particularly in service of education. Our business plan is built around people teaching and learning music, not around a site that attracts millions of people who don’t want to pay for copyrighted songs.

Today there are more Linux users than Mac users, and do you think Silverlight is ever going to work there? I know there is Mono’s Moonlight, but that isn’t supported by Microsoft at all. I just tested it with the examples mentioned above and some basic examples elsewhere (like a tic tac toe game) and none of them worked at all.

The java platform is coming around, adopting more of the end-user niceties of flash, like quicker loading, easier in-browser installing, etc. Not to mention it is open source and completely cross-platform.