San Francisco’s Macromedia Inc. continued its strong relationship with chipmaker Intel Corp.
Monday at its
DevCon conference in Orlando, Fla. when it said its Shockwave Player would be
distributed with Intel desktop motherboards.
Macromedia said its Shockwave Player is pretty ubiquitous on Web desktops and that some 270 million, or 70 percent of Internet users
have the ability to access content from Shockwave. Unlike media players such as Microsoft Corp.’s
Windows Media Player or RealNetworks Inc.’s
RealPlayer, Shockwave is primarily for graphics
intensive media such as multiuser games, interactive 3D simulations and other online entertainment, such as cartoons.
Macromedia actually co-developed Shockwave with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, so the new pact is, as Macromedia General Manager Peter Goldie said, a
“natural step.”
“This agreement will make installing Shockwave Player on new desktop systems a no-brainer for manufacturers and a value-add to end
users,” Goldie said.
But Macromedia and Intel didn’t stop there at the conference targeted for developers who delight in tinkering with such software
applications as Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, and JRun; JRun 3.1, Macromedia’s Java-based application server, achieved
compatibility with the Intel Itanium processor.
In other DevCon news, Maromedia unveiled details on “Neo,” the technology strategy for ColdFusion, which will run on Java technology
based application servers. The initiative is supported by such Java lovers as BEA, IBM,
Intel, and Sun Microsystems.
Separately, Perl and
Python programmers will now be able to develop in Microsoft’s .NET plaform with the addition of Visual Perl and Visual Python for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET from ActiveState. Both these tools also have features that let programmers quickly build and consume XML Web services.