Zavvi (ex-Virgin) are going under.
I think it would have happened whether or not there was a recession – just it’s happened sooner. Same was true of Woolies, sadly. Same will probably happen to HMV. They’re just not very sustainable as business models.
When was the last time you paid for a full-price DVD or CD from HMV/Zavvi rather than online from Play or Amazon or similar for much cheaper..?
A friend’s SWF had really odd pixel artefacts being drawn on the background of an animation – but only in Firefox with wmode=transparent.
This is a problem that I hadn’t seen before – I’ve blogged about the problem and solution on the Awen code site, here.
All our workstations are Windows. So we have a mix of CS3 Design Premium, CS4 Design Premium and CS3 Production Premium on Windows. Quite a lot of money invested in that, really.
Our main server is OSX, for various reasons – partly because we won’t have a Windows server (a pain to administer).
We would very much like to run Version Cue on our OSX server. But all our CS packages are for Windows.
So to do so, it looks like we will have to buy the cheapest CS4 package – Web Standard – for around £850. And we will not use any components from it apart from Version Cue.
I was hoping there was a way around that. I mean, we’ve paid a lot of money. Some sort of deal or something.
So this morning I spoke to someone via LiveSupport (online) – who when I asked if it was possible to purchase Version Cue separately or to do some sort of deal insisted it was a technical issue. I could have sworn it was licensing, but they insisted I talk to tech support.
So I phoned tech support. Really helpful, agreed with my conclusions, passed me to Volume Licensing to see if they could solve the problem for me.
Volume Licensing spent fifteen minutes repeatedly bringing up the wrong name for me (based on all our recent order numbers) until eventually agreeing that I was who I said I was after being given my Adobe ID. Then they went off to search for my issues about using a ‘Version Key’ (I repeatedly corrected them, but I guess it’s the Indian accent/UK accent barrier.) Lovely woman, falling over herself to help, but eventually of no help. She did pass me on to Direct Sales, though.
Direct Sales listened to my problem (having had to hunt for my ID again), and passed me on to Customer Services to raise this as an issue.
Customer Services spent a long time on hold investigating, and eventually concluded that we could purchase an upgrade from CS3 (Windows) to CS4 (Mac) for £600-ish. Hardly brilliant, but a £200 saving over £800.
But… hang on… we use all our copies of CS3 Windows on our Windows workstations. Won’t buying the upgrade mean we can no longer use one of them?
Yes, said Customer Services.
So what you’re offering me gives me Version Cue on our server, but loses me one Windows license completely? There’s no other way to do this – no volume licensing, no discount, no bulk deal?
That’s right, said Customer Services.
I hung up in the end.
http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/video/video.php?v=49650932618&ref=nf
I’ve put up a post – and a class – on the Awen Code site to allow you to specify sounds via CSS.
The man never sleeps!
Nicolas Cannasse has added Pixel Bender support to haXe – and for reading/writing PBJ files. He’s set it up so you can send low-level instructions to PixelBender – i.e. at a lower level than Adobe’s PBK language – and so get more optimised code.
Check out the page here.
Well, how annoying.
For apps installed under AIR 1.0, we were able to query our application’s installation path/version etc. (for our disk launcher) using the registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{Our App ID}.{Our Publisher ID}
It was really handy – when the user inserted the CD, we could check whether the app was already installed – if so, launch it, if not, get AIR to install the new version.
But no longer. Under AIR 1.5, the uninstall key has changed to some mangled Windows GUID that we can’t find a predictable way to reproduce without manually running the AIR OSID generator; and given that our build system is automated, that’s not going to happen.
Not only that, but the generated OSID doesn’t map directly to the registry, but needs to pass through several Windows query functions (that our installer doesn’t have access to) to get a value which does map to the registry.
So we can’t query for the app’s info any more. And there seems to be no other way to find out if our app is installed.
Bah!
..and fans of Neil Gaiman.
The Coraline trailer is out.
