Adobe have despatched Flashpaper to the same grave of irrelevant products as FreeHand and ImageReady. Considering Flashpaper was made by Macromedia before their assimilation, it was kind of on the cards due to it’s competition with PDF.
From the article the CEO a doomed startup whines:
What about all the websites that have been storing all their documents with Flashpaper? It will be a major job having to transfer all those documents to a new solution
Perhaps if instead of willingly submitting to vendor lock in they stored their documents in a recognised, open standard that’s widely implemented by multiple vendors they would not have this problem.
Popularity: 40% [?]
December 6th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Why do people keep saying that? Just because the product is going away doesn’t mean the files are going to die…. if you have converted stuff to flash paper, they are just flash files and can stay that way basically FOREVER.
And as long as the program runs, you can convert to Flash Paper all you want. The files are just plain ol’ SWF and should remain supported for many many many years to come.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:43 am
With no support from the vendor, there’s no safety net for when things go wrong. This may not be a problem for the contents of your My Documents folder, but if your entire corporate archive is stored in a format you can no longer access or even only partially access, it would be somewhat problematic.
That is obviously a worst case scenario and as such may never happen, but would you want to take the risk?