Apple: "Who needs Flash?"

Ouch - from the grand poobah, Steve Jobs: "version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone"

Adobe's response notes the difference between "Flash lite" (for mobile) and "Flash" (the desktop version Jobs alluded to in his comments).

From a technology perspective, this hilights a subtlety Jobs implies that most (including Adobe's Ryan Stewart) either missed or mis-directed in their responses: Jobs doesn't want the half-assed version of the Web that most users experience on their handsets - he wants the real thing.

And that means, for the iPhone, Flash, not Flash Lite. The point being, the iPhone is a general purose computing device, and, though it may require interaction paradigm adjustments (form factor, input schema, etc.), it shouldn't have to compromise richness and robustness.

The current Flash Player really is optimized for the desktop (especially the Intel platform)- but, to be fair, that's an engineering deficiency, not a phyics problem; it is possible for the Flash platform to address...

Adobe: Engage and AIR

I'm at the Adobe Engage event is SF today, for the launch of Adobe AIR. Its been a while coming (beginning with Adobe Apollo), with much written about it.

Interesting elements: desktop integration (peristent storage, UI touchpoints, etc.), full HTML(via WebKit) support, integrated PDF display, and an application packaging model for easy install and update (distribution).

The two most important pieces (IMHO) are the persistent storage model and application packaging model - these start to bring the benefits of "content" to executable applications... that its "Flash" underneath is interesting but not necessarily the important part. These technologies do provide a differentiated but overlapping feature set that I don't mean to downplay, but HTML, Flash, PDF, etc. are, I think, going to end up being more about onboarding developers.

Hard to appreciate how important distribution is as a part of application lifecycle management.

The natural comparison points are Silverlight and Prism, and as with those two, distribution will be less the issue than finding the compelling applications will be (although you should note that Silverlight, in particular, is more an answer to Flash than AIR).

Adobe is significantly advantaged in this regard because (a) they're cross-platform (by that I mean crossing OS, browser and Web/Desktop boundaries), and (b) they're committed to the platform - the biggest knock with Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation is that its hard to tell how serious they really are. Remember when all of Vista was going to *require* .NET? Or remember ChromeEffects? Or Blackbird?

That said, I think one chink in the AIR platform (IMHO) is that it provides no way for third parties to natively extend the platform - Adobe still thinks about applications as B2C propositions. A second knock is that they still haven't gotten the "just in time" element of application and platform install quite right (I've written on this before) - it will limit (again IMHO) where users prefer websites to applications.

Still - there's a lot to like.

More shortly - Kevin Lynch is talking now...

Flash rulez

Courtesy of Corey.
Fairly impressive set of announcements from Adobe's MAX conference this year.

Most notably (for me):

• Aformentioned Flash player support for H.264/MPEG-4 should be released in the next few weeks (though media streaming is still tied to their Media Server, which kinda sucks),
  
• 2D Shading language for Flash code-named Hydra; you can check out a HW accelerated only version here,
• C/C++ compiler for Actionscript; not sure if this will be productized, but the demo of Quake I software rendering compiled to the AS3 VM is pretty cool (end of the second video, here),
• Substantially expanded text control: flow, wrap-around, tables, etc.,
• 2.5 rendering, e.g. a perspective display system.

Get (slightly) more detailed info at Adobe Labs.

With some significant focus of the developer productivity/debugging chain, Adobe could make things very interesting for the current generation of incumbents (Sun, Microsoft, etc.).

Certainly it turns up the heat intensely for the Silverlight team... and even moreso for the future of Java on the desktop for RIA.

Microsoft's good at this...

I'd love to see Microsoft's "best practices" guide on the platform effect - they're good at it (generally). Like the developer entanglement Adobe's attempting with their eco-system, hard to argue that 4 gigs of Silverlight storage and streaming is bad for developers... just check out the community response (from a self proclaimed Adobe "Flex Machine", no less).

Though, these days, this seems more like a Google tactic than a Microsoft one... what does that tell you?

Adobe Flex Open Sourced

Adobe announced today that they're open sourcing the Flex SDK (which includes the compiler, debugger, and Flex ActionScript libraries). It shouldn't come as too big a surprise, considering the recent MPL release of their ActionScript 3 VM to the Mozilla Foundation, Tamarin.

The model, as with Postscript, and, quite frankly, Windows, is the "Platform Effect" - monetizing both the runtime (Postscript/Windows/Flash) and providing rich(er) enterprise level authoring tools and functions (Authoring tools, servers, etc.). Releasing the specifications and "core" tools creates the illusion of freedom in tool chain, while actually delivering vendor lock-in - which isn't necessarily a bad thing for developers if (a) there's runtime ubiquity, and (b) the developer's not on the hook for distribution costs.

And getting developer buy-in (lock-in?) creates a "virtuous cycle" of scale for the platform provider... ultimately why API and specification ownership is so critical in the technology business cycle.

Although I think Adobe's Apollo (which is Flex driven) is still slightly off in its execution of product distribution, overall the company is doing a good job driving a giant truck over the ongoing bungling that is WPF (I mean... Silverlight).

And (naturally) this will impact (squeeze out) smaller players like Laszlo, Haxe, and mtasc more than affect the big players...

Adobe Apollo

Adobe posted the first public preview of their Flash-based content runtime (codenamed) Apollo on Monday. Its pretty good - were I Microsoft, I'd be concerned.

I've discussed the ideas at some length before and Adobe's offering is clearly the strongest one out the gate... Microsoft's WPF(/e) strategy is very confused (at best), and XULRunner, from the Mozilla foundation, is potentially promising, but in practice looks to also be unsure of what its real goals are (for example, I think the ECMAScript edition 4 spec that's at its core is poorly maturing a powerful dynamic language).

But the Adobe guys seem to get what the real problems are that the browser itself solves (from a developer perspective), which is to say, a unified cross-platform development model (not for cross platform apps, per se, but to enable broadest developer knowledge) and distribution.

It's an alpha, so there's quite some goofiness, and it suffers from many of the foibles and issues that Flash does, but all in all.... its very credible as a development platform. I think the distribution and navigation aspects skew too heavily toward the desktop application paradigm, and that's a big mistake, but its one strictly of UI, not technology, so hopefully that can be addressed.

One nice bit of icing is the inclusion of a full web browsing component, enabling easy consumption of existing web content and infrastructure in your new "desktop" application. Its also the first instance of the KHTML/WebCore (the same browsing engine in Safari on the Mac and Konqeror in KDE/Linux) that's broadly available on Windows. So if you want to see how your site might look on the Mac, you can check it out with one of the Apollo samples (you can use "Scout") on Windows...


(and minor item for team Adobe: if you haven't exorcised icu and iconv from WebKit on Windows - you can save a few MB from your distribution size - by doing so...)

Adobe's online applications play

Adobe seems to be throwing their hat into the "software-as-service" market: first they announced (and released into beta) an online video editing application ("Remix"), and now they've announced an online version of Photoshop in the next few months.

It'll be interesting to see what direction this takes... re-bundling applications with some online metering (ala GameTap or the like) will get some small traction in the short term, or maybe work for some niche markets or legacy application environments. But this is at best a bridging strategy - its a goofy "web" experience that doesn't embrace any of the real values (other than raw pricing) of software-as-services, and in the medium to long term.

Everyone's been experimenting with this for years and years, and it's just not workable... unfortunately the paradigm doesn't "feel" right.

Of course, that's not what Adobe's doing - Remix is a completely, ground up, brand new web application. That's good, though the problem is that, being brand new, its really not particularly more feature rich or capable than any other web video editor (like Jumpcut or EyeSpot). The only really "edge" Adobe has is brand value - and web users are pretty fickle.

So - I'm curious to see what "online Photoshop" looks like. One the one hand, a real web app is the right way to go, and what I'd like to see - and I think its important they start this now before someone else does it first (it'll happen). On the other hand, I think if its a true web app, version 1.0 will likely not be a real Photoshop replacement in any meaningful way... and it'll get dinged pretty good for that.

This has to be a commitment for the long term.

Cracking the right design patterns for "offline" web applications will also make a big difference for moving them beyond casual users, I think, among other things...