That's a lot of potential eyeballs turning Flash's way. However, the application's dominance may soon be challenged. Totally Hip's LiveStage Professional debuted in November, and this development tool is not for the timid. Its powerful scripting tools explore the outer limits of QuickTime. At next month's Expo, the company will release a free update to LiveStage Professional.
New features pump up the interaction possibilities, including support for wired sprites.
Look for another upcoming announcement from them at or before the Expo. Puffin claims that the Velocity Engine optimizations in this version make their motion tracker between 3 and 20 times faster. Recent changes in Mac hardware have created a few problems for MIDI users. Copy protection, very important in the realm of expensive audio software, has traditionally been controlled by a key diskette. But when Apple said sayonara to the floppy drive, companies had to find other methods, shifting to user-entered key codes that unlock a program on a particular machine.