World: r3wp

a problem I've noticed about flash is that performance is very uneven 
under different OS'es. Macromedia...oops Adobe :-) might not prioritize 
the OSX version as highly as the Windows version. Flash for OSX is 
absurdly slow compared to other graphics engines for OSX. It alienates 
the OSX users because of those issues. REBOL/plugin may not necessarily 
suffer such crossplatform issues.

Henrik, Reichart - there is no need to reply to flash being widespread 
or not, that all is misunderstanding. I did not start talks about 
multi-billion kind of stuff ;-) My only care and point was - how, 
UI wise, do we allow to invoke rebol/plugin configuration, so let's 
please stick to it :-)

would we allow to invoke any configuration at all? what's to configure? 
SMTP settings? Possibly sound. this makes me think of another thing: 
would we want to be able to send mail through the plugin? it would 
be very easy to create a spam bot this way.

Henrik, with my suggested default network restrictions, that kind 
of security problem just won't happen without bringing up a security 
requestor that the user must agree to first.

what is there to configure? lot's of things, just read my posts ....

sorry, I missed that. How does java do it? does it use the browser 
to tunnel data?

I am not sure .... my thoughts for config were more towards if/how 
often should it check for updates, manual proxy settings, sound, 
whatever else makes sense.....

but I would too not like to complicate things, if not necessary ....

Q: go, find whatever website flash plug-in part of website, press 
right mouse - you will see menu for controlling flash script itself 
... that is what I am talking about -

A: That is a choice of the developers.  The fact that people leave 
it as "default"


Q: Reichart - and you imo overestimate Flash's importance - they 
can be milti-whatever company, yet I would have to see some noticed 
real-life app someone uses in corporate sphere :-)


A: "I" over estimate Flash?  Uh, er….you mean like how Yahoo over 
estimated Flickr (front end is Flash), and bought them?  


Or, while you might not like it, if you are looking at an animated 
ad on the web, there is a good chance it is Flash.  That would be 
a 500 billion dollar industry that is using Flash as their delivery 
mechanism.  That is the app, animated content with games and click 
through.


And if you use T-Mobile, then you are using Flash.  Yup, it "is" 
the interface for their cellphone content provider.



Pekr, I'm not a fan of Flash, or Macromedia…I'm simply stating that 
Rebol should consider Flash's model as a pathway to a clean install 
and plug-in interface.

A smart plan is simply take the plug-in that is the most pervasive 
(I'm voting Flash for this) and copy their interface.  That simple.

reichart, it's possible that pekr means that you overestimate flash 
for use in applications, but I agree, we should definitely look at 
what Flash did and copy that where applicable.

I have only seen very few actual applications written in flash myself, 
but it's used everywhere for animated graphics.

And flash works in Apple widgets.

I have seen a dozen applications used by companies.  The Neilsen 
Media company (famous for their Neilson Report of TV) uses Flash 
for all their applications.  


They could have used Rebol, but Flash is actually better for what 
they are doing.  If Rebol had more front end, or could play back 
SWF files thorugh AGG, then we might have something.


Rebol on the other hand is better for the heavy lifting, parsing 
websites, etc.

So, let's write up an overview of what is needed "exactly" to have 
a clean interface for a plug-in.  this needs to be done for 4 browsers 
(IMO): IE, FF, Safari, Opera (in that order).

See…this is where we need a wiki…like a Qwiki.

With Java, the applet is only allowed to communicate with the server 
that served up the applet. We could make that same restriction by 
default in the REBOL plugin with SECURE, and then relax the restrictions 
at runtime with SECURE again. Of course, that will cause the security 
requester to pop up and the user would then know what they should 
know and agree to anyways before such behavior is allowed at all.

how about a simple flag, like a checkforupdates="true" attribute 
or something.  Every other operation, including the sort of actions 
that are necessary to install update is handled through normal security 
requestors.  ... yeah, like Brian said :)

At least that is the case with anonymous applets. Signed applets 
may be able to do more, as signed REBOL scripts should be able to 
do as well.

Reichart - it is exactly as Henrik said - I just meant "real life 
apps", while you mentioned mostly media stuff, which is imo not Rebol's 
target and imo never will be, unless we would get some rebol authoring 
IDE, which I don't see coming in a year or two ahead ....

so all the point was that Flash does not necessarily mean Rebol is 
in the same league. But it was my non-knowledge - I did not know 
they can change menu, thanks for enlightenment, I thought the menu 
is the same because it (the plug-in)  is only a player .... I would 
vote for context menu, but in rebol, what is menu, right? We don't 
use native OS widgets, so just how to do it ....

I am not sure I am for requestor, because if more than one setting 
is needed, then you end up with more than one, popping-up when you 
don't need-it .... such automatism should be configurable ...

there is other possible way - Java adds icon to control panel .... 
that could be good option, not to limit UI of plug-in itself. So 
then, from such icon, we could have dialog with tabs, with various 
settings, could be reblet too .... IIRC Java even installs to Start/Apps 
....

as for browser preference, for me it is IE, FF, Opera, other ...., 
I can see Opera dominating embedded space (PDAs, cell-phones), but 
maybe it is because penetration of OS-X here is nearly non-existant 
... but as someone pointed out - whole world except MS uses Netscape 
API plug-in and even for IE, you can develop ActiveX, which wraps 
the same plug-in, so maybe RT would not have to develop separate 
versions .... otoh we are talking wrappers only anyway, the main 
part is View in .dll form ...

At Etech, the leding conference on new technology, about half of 
the attendees were on Mac....

Whilst Mac is gaining in popularity with developers and may be re-gaining 
ground in the consumer market, it is still nowhere in the corporate 
world where it's still wall-to-wall windows.

..and "locked down" windows at that .... no user installs ... they'd 
 even disable browser plugins if they could

Yes, wall to wall windows, but Mac represents x2 to x4 in sales at 
thier %.

In other words, while they are about 2.5% world wide (4-7% in US), 
of personal system choice, they represent between 7% and 15% of individual 
software sales.

Wow!

I would not want to turn that market down. 

And……………my friends…………….the web is the great equalizer…

hmm, firefox extensions can get an entry in the options dialog, or 
they can be configured from the list of extensions ... haven't found 
anything like it for plugins, though.

Basically you have to target developers ...
Users have to use what developers create.

So, OSX above Opera .. if it makes any difference to anyone.

developers are the thought leaders

It is likely that most developers use Firefox or Camino rather than 
Safari on OSX (especially if they're into Ajax - Safari isn't known 
for the best JavaScript support at the moment).

However, it is the user's environment that is most important. Developers 
develop for IE because that what their target users have. I suspect 
that the average IE user is unlikely to change to Firefox just to 
use one application. Likewise the average Safari user .

Just a quick interjection, but I agree on the installation/interface 
being exactly the same as Flash.   The flash installation is mindless 
(see http://kealist.blogspot.com/) and the plugin should be identical 
to this.   I would have done the same for FF, but I can't get it 
to uninstall.

Yup...

About the settings: I would prefere something like built in side 
(top/left/down/right) bar which can be hidden if user want or still 
visible or even animated, where can be info about plugin version, 
configuration buttons or user defined buttons. In this bar there 
can be built in progress bar as well. I'm agains the right click 
context menu as the right click we can use for other user defined 
purposes, for example If I would like to make my own designed right-click 
menu etc.

But the advantage of the system right-click menu is, that can be 
out of Rebol boundaries. So maybe it's still worth to think about 
it. Here is example how it's possible to use user defined context 
menu in Flash: http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rswf/index.php?example=127

I think the inner border idea is a good one Oldes. That will give 
a standard look to rebol plugin instances. I imagine the border can 
have some controls to hide itself, go full-screen etc.

that is one of options I tried to suggest. The trick is imo to make 
it unobtrusive - will it be sliding? How long will you hold mouse-over 
the region to see it?

Anton - very good idea to eventually make it full-screen ....

I would make it also some 5% transparent, black and white design 
.... top bar displaying some basic buttons, date/time and progress 
dialog ... kind of minimalistic aproach ....

... and I dare to repeat the idea for rebol 3.0 - we need rebol native 
windowing, or imo we are in trouble ...

Hi all -- Carl and I are still talking about these versioning issues. 
So we'll have an update on that soon.

Cyphre, I'm taking a look at that mouse event bug now....should get 
an update to you soon.

Ah, Cyphre, I know the problem.

This is an architecture issue with the plugin...we dealt with it 
back in 2004.

REBOL can only function with its own Win32 HWND window that it controls 
completely (due to message loop issues), so, in order to change as 
little as possible within REBOL, we created an invisible proxy window 
that REBOL controls. When events come into the plugin window, they 
are asynchronously posted to the invisible proxy window, and only 
then make their way into REBOL.

So the delay you're seeing is the delay between the event coming 
into the plugin and being received by REBOL, due to the post-message 
delay (it's actually crossing from one thread to another, hence why 
we are using async).

I think we should look at re-designing this for REBOL 3.0.