Simon Willison’s Weblog

Adobe made an AI image generator — and says it didn’t steal artists’ work to do it. Adobe Firefly is a brand new text-to-image model which Adobe claim was trained entirely on fully licensed imagery—either out of copyright, specially licensed or part of the existing Adobe Stock library. I’m sure they have the license, but I still wouldn’t be surprised to hear complaints from artists who licensed their content to Adobe Stock who didn’t anticipate it being used for model training. # 21st March 2023, 5:08 pm

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas. This looks pretty awesome—Illustrator CS5 and Flash CS5 can export to a new “FXG” format, and Adobe are providing a JavaScript library to load that format via Ajax and render the contents (including Flash animations) in a canvas element. Could be great for displaying newspaper infographics on the iPad. # 11th April 2010, 6:33 pm

The Widening HTML5 Chasm. Simon St. Laurent’s commentary on the HTML5/Adobe situation. The most interesting piece I’ve read on it so far. # 15th February 2010, 9:51 pm

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.” # 31st January 2010, 12:05 pm

Cross-domain policy file usage recommendations for Flash Player. One of the best explanations of the security implications of crossdomain.xml files I’ve seen. If you host a crossdomain.xml file with allow-access-from domain=“*” and don’t understand all of the points described here, you probably have a nasty security vulnerability. # 5th November 2009, 4:24 pm

Adobe is Bad for Open Government. The problem isn’t just that PDFs are a bad way of sharing data, it’s that Adobe have been actively lobbying the US government to use their PDF and Flash formats for open government initiatives. # 1st November 2009, 12:51 pm

No PDFs! The Sunlight Foundation point out that PDFs are a terrible way of implementing “more transparent government” due to their general lack of structure. At the Guardian (and I’m sure at other newspapers) we waste an absurd amount of time manually extracting data from PDF files and turning it in to something more useful. Even CSV is significantly more useful for many types of information. # 1st November 2009, 12:04 pm

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash. A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well. # 5th October 2009, 9:15 pm

Adobe: Akamai Download Manager FAQ. Tip for Adobe: if the bizarre, buggy custom Java applet you force people to use to download your software requires an FAQ this long, maybe you should provide a “just do it the way everyone else does” option. # 16th December 2008, 10:13 am

Document startups in chaos as Adobe’s Flashpaper discontinues. Don’t be a sharecropper. # 5th September 2008, 1:57 pm

Running C and Python Code on The Web. Adobe are working on a toolchain to compile C code to target the Tamarin VM in Flash. This will allow existing C code (from CPython to Quake) to execute in a safe sandbox in the browser. # 4th July 2008, 8:26 am

Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project (via) Talk about burying the lede... the real story is that Adobe are going to drop the license restriction that prevents other people from implementing SWF players. They’re also publishing the AMF and Flash Cast protocols and removing licensing fees for Flash Player on devices. # 1st May 2008, 9:43 am

H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone. # 21st August 2007, 8:28 am

ActionMonkey (via) SpiderMonkey + Tamarin = ActionMonkey. New JavaScript engine for Mozilla 2, incorporating code from Adobe’s Open Source ActionScript VM. # 24th July 2007, 3:29 pm

Adobe open sources Flex. Ted Leung says that this might indicate the possibility of Adobe open sourcing Flash itself in the future. # 26th April 2007, 11:24 am

Adobe Apollo: beyond the hype. Niall Kennedy explains Apollo. # 24th March 2007, 7:10 pm

Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web. The base platform technology for RIAs is too important to be controlled or designed by any single party. # 2nd March 2007, 1:01 pm

The Adobe PDF XSS Vulnerability. If you host a PDF file anywhere on your site, you’re vulnerable to an XSS attack due to a bug in Acrobat Reader versions below 8. The fix is to serve PDFs as application/octet-stream to avoid them being displayed inline. # 11th January 2007, 4:23 pm