Voting - should krpano be Flashplayer 10 only? (removing the Flashplayer 9 compatibility)

Hmm I'm not sure. Adobe is probally right with their 97%. But on the otherhand, Ofcourse Adobe would say their software is globally penetrated. It stimulates development (and thus cs4,cs5 package selling), and the more flash 10 content there is, the faster people will switch over.

if I look at my environment and my customers on the otherhand. Think most run on flash 9.

About this:

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# the internal preloader will be still Flashplayer 9 compatible and show an Flashplayer 10 needed message when a too old Flashplayer wil be used, that means there will be no changes in the HTML about the minimal Flashplayer version necessary,
# using the Flashplayer 9 renderer (display.flash10=off) will be still possible,

If it's possible to show a Flashplayer 10 is needed message, how bout skipping that and put the display.flash10=off automatically or show a warning like "some features will be unavailable, click here to proceed anyways". If we developers use features thats only possible with the flash10 renderer, you could always send a message in the trace log WARNING: Plugin someName not loaded. min Flash = 10. And perhaps a message to the user too. I think with the latest SWFOBject we could always "force" a expressinstall with flash version 10. No need to put that in the SWF.

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* a smaller krpano.swf (~10kb)

Doesn't really matter. If people can download a spherical image, they sure can download the plugin :) If the size becomes to big, you always enable some kind of preloader for the swf alone or include it in the current loader of the images.

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* a bit faster startup
* a bit faster krpano code execution

A "bit" is a bit vague to state my opinion about this. But Most of the users aren't programmers, so their code isn't that optimized. Whatever speed profit you gain from flash 10, will be put in vain by bad user code.

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* a quicker development of the rendering part

This could be interesting, what kind of developments do you have in mind?

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* easier and 'better' adding of new Flashplayer 10 and 10.1 features (like Touch Gestures)

Touch Gestures are mostly on mobile phones. And flash + 3d + mobile phones is still in development. Some phones act good (the more expensive smartphones with lots of processing power) but the majority is still behind.

Alsoo, this is something I noticed. Flash 10 uses hardware accelaration. Which means it uses the GPU instead of the CPU. The only persons that have a good GPU are graphical designers and gamers. If you buy a pc or a laptop for an average budget, the first thing that gets budgeted away is the graphical card. Which would mean, most pc's have a good CPU but a poor GPU. Which makes rendering in flash 9 faster. My work pc has a q6600 quad cpu, with 8gb of ram, but the GPU is elo budget-o-rama. I have about 10fps los when enabling flash10. But I cant speak for the majority.

You could always finish till 1.09 Final and start 1.10 with only flash 10 support. Or if you have time, work on both versions and release them side by side.

As a developer I would say yes! Flash 9 is getting old, 10 is the future, aim for the future, and milk the flash 10 cow dry with all your features. But as a user I would say, keep flash 9 (Have you thought of ofline tours? they cant upgrade to flash 10 easily unless you put the setup files in a folder, but then it depends on which browser they use...).

I reserve my vote, can't decide...

What does your googleanalytics from your website say about the flash version?

I just checked my customers, and apperently adobe/you is right :P only 0.38% uses flash 9 over the last 1-2 months.

Hi Klaus,

I've just voted to push forward with Flash10 only.
Usually I'm all for catering for older plugins/browsers to accommodate more users but for me at least it is simple:
With KRpano tours on my website I am promoting them as something special (which I think they are) and as such if some users have to perform a tiny upgrade then so be it; they will be better for it anyway.
Already you create killer features that are genuinly useful to me and if going Flash10 only means the features will become more powerful then I'm all for that.

Thanks

T12

Flash 10 only for me too !

Just to clarify, would version 1.0.8 be Flash 10 only or would that be done in 1.0.9? If the change would take place in version 1.0.9, then that would leave the pano provider currently using Krpano the option to use the current features in a NON-beta version with Flash 9 if they choose to. All further development would be targeted toward the Flash 10 with the next beta and later release.

Just my 2 cents.

Jarred

The example page clearly demonstrates that.
I'm browsing under the hood of some of the panoramas and quickly realised that I can't see the code editor because I have an current krpano player and it keeps telling me wrong Krpano version.
I guess a little house cleaning is required before we embark upon pushing forward.

Can we please make the editor reveal in the current version.
Thank you

please Flash 10 only!

my stats show that Flash 9 is used LESS and LESS and Flash being so easy to update now a days (a Flash player update was found earlier his week without opening my browser) I think dropping 9 is a good choice, besides I have never seen a panorama that looks or performs better on Flash 9...

but about the GPU, there is already a beta version of a new player (TPP ? ) that uses only 4-7% CPU to show the panorama, it even worked on my 6-7 year old video card, so using flash 10 + gpu is a good idea.

and 1 byte is 1 byte! some guys might not notice it because they have 10+ MB fast connections, but here in Mexico even tho we have 5 MB (someplace even 10MB) connections, they are REALLY slow at some times of the day (the fine print says UP TO 5mb) and still 1MB connection is the "average" so every little KB counts!

but there is probably another solution for the purists? if the code is already duplicate why not create a Flash 9 version only and a Flash 10 version ? I mean the current version could be used as the Flash 9 version(striping the Flash 10 part) and the newer one use Flash 10 only, I am pretty sure using some JS you could detect which version and deploy accordingly, new features and updates will only be available on the Flash 10 version but critical bug updates on both... hope that even makes sense

Quote from klaus.krpano

Hi,

it's not possible to have any direct access to the GPU from Flash!
the TPP player only uses the fact that the Flashplayer sometimes seems to use the GPU when using the Flash10 PerspectiveProjection to transform flash objects, but that works only on some specific GPU cards, and when Flash is not using the GPU (which can't be detected), this method of drawing 3D transformed images is slower than the usual Flash10 drawTriangle method...

only the 'renderer' code is 'duplicated', the core is always Flash 9 based, and when starting to use Flash10 capabilities in the core, building a Flash9 version will not be possible anymore

best regards,
Klaus

Ohh that explains the GPU issues, from other posts around the net I was under the impression that Flash used the GPU directly

but I wasn't saying create 2 parallel versions, I meant create 1 version 9 (or probably just leave the current one as the last v9) and leave it like that, just for "backup" then the new features will only be Flash 10 :)

I still have just slightly over 5% of my users on flash 9. I'm not ready to turn them away (and saying you have to upgrade might as well be turning them away in my experience). OTOH, it should be trivial to auto detect in Javascript and just load an older version of the viewer for them. So dropping flash 9 would not be a tragedy as far as I'm concerned.

I guess my vote would actually be to leave it up to Klaus. If you can significantly reduce complexity and keep your life easier thereby making time to add all kinds of cool new features I'd have to say I'm all for that.

Either way I have to say KRPano is an outstanding tool, thanks for all your hard work!

Voted for flash 10.
Most internet users can follow on screen instructions and upgrade their plugins. There are exceptions of course, and should be taken in consideration.
From the programmer's view, it saves time to leave behind older versions and concentrate to the current version development.

Best regards
Yannis

No Flash 9 :)

From my experience Flash player 9 has bugs that were never fixed. Encouraging people to keep using it means showing a potentially broken version of your work to certain visitors. Legacy software also tends to have security problems and worse performance. There is no reason not to upgrade to version 10, and no reason to support any version other than the latest, which itself is supported by Adobe.

Is it not possible to detect flash 9, and then just jump to a different swf, ie. the older flash-9 compatible swf? Or at least a version that is programmed to not barf if it sees xml it does not understand -- possibly with a tag one can add to xml to tell the old player whether it should just ignore it, or abort?

I'm one of the UX designers (and responsible for part of our front-end development) at a large Dutch website (350.000 daily uniques, 11 million daily page views) and our statistics show that Flash 9 is used by 3.2% of our visitors over the past month (4.6% in the past 6 months). In our back office system exclusively used by users in a small to medium business environment (users who often do not have the system privileges to upgrade their own software) the figures are 5.1% in the past month and 7.2% in the past 6.

I just wanted to show support for dropping Flash 9 compatibility, as I completely understand the benefits of dropping backwards-compatibility at certain key points in development of your product. Our aforementioned figures have been steadily declining and even though only a small percentage will still represent a large number, we'd be willing to go with it if the compatibility wasn't dropped in the next six months. I'm more or less confident the numbers will be neglible within the next six (or let's just say I really hope so :-)). As such, releasing 1.0.8 with Flash 9 compatibility would be our preference.

The alternative views such as stereographic and Pannini seem to operate in a Flash9 mode. If dropping Flash 9 support would disable those, then I am against it 100%. Otherwise I don't care.

-- Tom