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Balthaser Patent Makes No Sense, Says UK Flash Expert Dave Williamson
"One of the most ludicrous patent awards I have heard of"

It would appear that some of the earliest Flash and Generator work myself and some of my colleagues were involved in back in the earliest days of Flash has broken one of the most ludicrous patent awards I have heard of.

Neil Balthaser has been awarded a Patent relating to the online production of RIAs using RIAs over a remote connection.

I find this incredible given the number of Flash applications that were around at that time that must have existed to be listed as prior art that would have shown quite obviously that there was not a single original idea, process or product related to the Balthather FX/ProFX site.

In the UK there is the MoonFruit platform for a start that was live before the Pro FX site, not least the fact that Macromedia's own Generator product offered exactly the engine of such automated production online.

So here for your delectation is ‘Casper’ - an application born in 1998/1999 some time originally utilizing Flash 3/4 and Generator and then more recently updated through Flash 5 and Flash MX. In the future I fully intend to bring the code base kicking and screaming into Flash AS2/3 and re-introduce the capabilities to ‘export’ or ‘produce’ rich media presentations from it.

For those of you who where also around producing this form of ‘RIA’ back in the day, I highly recommend you dig out and dust off your old FLAs and report those productions over at OSFlash.org as prior art.

Where this patent leaves future development of similar concepts in relation to Flex, server based MTasc/swfMill Ajax or any other form and or mixture of technology(ies) you can think of remains to be seen.

Boy am I cross.

About David M. Williamson
Dave Williamson is a freelance developer with 10 years of industry
experience in the production and deployment of RIAs and rich media
website development. His work has been focused on the production and
integration of Flash and Flash Platform based technologies since 1997,
with a special interest in localization and multilingual content
presentation. Dave is also a frustrated surfer based in London UK and
wants to live in Costa Rica. Pura Vida.

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I have started a petition to show that this patent is affecting many more than the patent office probably ever conceived.

http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/balthaser

Thanks!
Sean Gates

I know for a fact that while Dave Williamson and myself were part of Spooky and the Bandit we developed at least 2 of these 'site building site' style web applications. The most advanced one was called Casper (1998 - 2003).

However from a more commercially comparible perspective what about Moonfruit? http://www.moonfruit.com/ They launched their product around late 1998 / early 1999 (and Macromedia were an investor if my memory serves me correctly on all points)

So For Neil to try this he's going to have a hard time getting any further. I remember when he first posted about it - when it was still under the Balthaser.com site under the monicker of Balthaser|FX. This finally morphed into the 'profx' site and the product currently living there (obviously development has progressed but...).


Your Feedback
Sean Gates wrote: I have started a petition to show that this patent is affecting many more than the patent office probably ever conceived. http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/balthaser Thanks! Sean Gates
Mike wrote: I know for a fact that while Dave Williamson and myself were part of Spooky and the Bandit we developed at least 2 of these 'site building site' style web applications. The most advanced one was called Casper (1998 - 2003). However from a more commercially comparible perspective what about Moonfruit? http://www.moonfruit.com/ They launched their product around late 1998 / early 1999 (and Macromedia were an investor if my memory serves me correctly on all points) So For Neil to try this he's going to have a hard time getting any further. I remember when he first posted about it - when it was still under the Balthaser.com site under the monicker of Balthaser|FX. This finally morphed into the 'profx' site and the product currently living there (obviously development has progressed but...).
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