The Future of Flash

An anonymous reader writes "Adobe is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Flash, and News.com has an article looking at the company's plans for the future of the technology. No longer just a choice for 'innovative' web designers, Adobe is positioning Flash as an application development platform, with special emphasis on video delivery and mobile device applications." From the article: "On Tuesday, the company intends to launch a microsite showing the evolution of Flash over the past 10 years, including video interviews with developers. Those videos will no doubt be played with the Flash Video Player, something many high-profile Web sites, including YouTube, have chosen to use as well. The success of Flash in the next 10 years rides largely on whether leading-edge customers like YouTube will design their Web sites with Flash, Lynch said. Adobe, which gained the Flash technology when it bought Macromedia, is trying to build an 'ecosystem' of developers and partners, he said. "

Comments

Flash FTW

[WPIDalamar]

In the past I've always classified flash as a cute toy that web designers play with to get some interactivity that consisted of timelines and hiding little snippets of code in obscure places in the timeline.

However over the past month I've been imersing myself in the Flash world and have been amazed.

Did you know...

- You don't have to use the Flash IDE to create applications, you can use:
    Eclipse (My preferred environment for this)
    FlashDevelop
    Notepad/Emacs/vi + a compiler
    A crapton of other environments
    Flex Builder (another adobe product)
- You never have to deal with a timeline if you don't want to.
- Real object-orientated programming is possible.
- Actionscript 3 (available in Flash Player 9) is clearly targetted at developers and not designers and removes many of the oddities of AS2 that you may have heard about.
- Real applications, not web toys can be created.
- With the upcomming apollo runtime, native applications can be created with full access to all machine resources.
- There's a ton of open source libraries out there
    Want an IoC container like Spring? Sure!
    Want a port of the java swing library? Sure!
- The new version of Flex Builder (the environment targetted at developers) is simply an eclipse plugin.
- Adobe is now making tools and libraries available free of charge to developers. (not the whiz-bang IDE's, but compilers, libraries, etc.)

Re:Flash FTW

[WPIDalamar]

Seen a bunch more misconceptions in posts all over the site, so here's an addendum to my list:

- Full accessibility, including screenreader support, is built into Flash. To utilize that is about as difficult as implementing that support for a traditional desktop application. There is no need to have weird hacks.

- Actionscript is the language the flash player is the environment it runs in (the VM?) and it provides an API that is fully accessible from actionscript without touching adobe design tools.

- Flash has it's own control panel for privacy concerns that rivals most browser controls (not counting addons) for html content.

- Just because there are crappy flash things out there (animated ads, stupid games, etc.) doesn't mean real applications can't be built. You don't blame C for the latest internet worm, why blame flash for the latest annoyance.

- It can be indexed by search engines.

- The new target is at full blown applications. Think of something like iTunes. An application running on your computer that communicates extensively with online services. With an added bonus it can be delivered on-demand over the internet in addition to a traditional download/install or cd/install.

- Macromedia dropped the ball on linux flash player. Adobe's picking it back up.

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[bunions]

SVG has several disadvantages as well that no one ever seems to mention:

• No support for video or audio. I know SVG is a vector -graphics- format, but when you compare it to flash you have to compare it with all of flash.
• No support for -any- kind of gui widgets. Want to make a radio button? You have to draw it from graphics primitives and provide all the logic (rollover effects, press effects, callbacks, etc). Hell, there's not even built-in text wrapping (it's in the 1.2 spec, I believe, but no one is even talking about the possibility of making a 1.2 viewer)
• And when you DO make those widgets, oh god, they are slow as a butt.
• No animation timeline support. This is kind of a pain in the butt in a lot of applications. You can roll your own, but that's just more work on top of the previous item.
• Incomplete implementations. The Adobe SVG plugin is pretty buggy (and I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to fix it), and the Firefox implementation is still incomplete: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status.html

And that's just what's on the top of my head now.

I was a big fan of SVG when it came out. But I'm just not seeing it as a popular success in the long run, not without a ubiquitous viewer shipped with IE. My view is that SVG will follow in the path of VRML - still a success in some niche markets, but forgotten by most.

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[mrchaotica]

I'd agree, but put yourself in the position of someone who wants to, for instance, not simply give away their movie over the internet. Simply linking an .mpeg may not really be the solution to all your problems.

In that case, your problem is simply that you don't understand the nature of the Internet. The only way to not distribute something is to -- wait for it -- not distribute it!

In other words, even if you use Flash you're still giving away your movie because there's no way to stop the person at the other end from making a copy that they can keep. In fact, there's even a Firefox extension expressly designed for this purpose. If you think Flash will stop distribution, you're just fooling yourself.

And it's good that you can build your own player because if Macromedia won't make a player for your OS, you're free to.

Okay, you're talking about something completely different than I thought, apparently. In your previous post I thought you meant implementing a custom video player UI in Flash, that would run in a Flash player. But now you appear to be talking about implementing a modified version of Flash Player itself such that it would be a stand-alone application capable of running on platforms that Flash (as distributed by Macrom^WAdobe) doesn't support (which doesn't make any sense to me). Which is it?

FYI SLASH-TARDS -- What Flash can do:

[gaspar ilom]

Flash should be used where one needs to use Flash, and HTML/JS/CSS (+XML+XSLT) likewise.

Flash behaves consistently cross-browser, cross/platform -- and most features cannot be disabled by the user. (compare that to a user being able to turn off JS, or Java -- something often mandated in a corporate environment.) It's either "all on" or "all off." (w/ a few minor exceptions, eg: local storage and camera/mic access.)

Flash has a large install base. It's arguably the most widely available platform for delivering media-rich "applications" over the web.

Flash does not rely on anywhere near the number of kludges and workarounds necessary to replicate similar features -- where possible -- in different browsers and browser *versions.* (Unlike various browser technologies, supported features are more stable across updates of the Flash Player.)

Not to sound like I work for MM/Adobe, but, here's what the Flash Player can do at *run time*:

• Flash can load and play external MP3 audio.
• Flash can play video. That is not possible w/ HTML/CSS/JS.
• Flash can render text -- w/ custom-defined and packaged fonts. (not possible in a browser.) It can apply a limited set of CSS to the rendered text.
• Flash can load/parse/serialize/send XML.
• Flash can POST and GET a variety of data.
• Flash can access a user's webcam, allowing you to create your own video chat/IM app.
• Flash can programatically-build vector shapes, gradients, and fills.
• Flash can load and render external jpegs, gifs(v8), and pngs(v8) -- and in version 8, composite all that w/ vector graphics (+video?) -- *and,* sample the resulting display pixel by pixel. (w/ server interaction, you could dynamically generate graphic files.)
• Flash 8 has a "file upload" ability that goes beyond what a browser is capable of: You can multi-select upload files, filter files by type or size, and have programatic access to the state of the upload.
• Flash can animate stuff!!!
• Flash is like a 2 MB download that works in almost *every* browser out there. ...it's pretty phenomenal that all those features could have been crammed into it. (like: a built-in interpreter for a late-version-EcmaScript-compliant scripting language.)