A Decade with Flash Friday 2006-08-11
Flash celebrates its ten year anniversary inside Adobe, its new owner.
Turned down by the same company at its infancy, when its name was FutureSplash, Adobe now has great plans for Flash. It is to become more than just a platform for animations on the web, an application for desktops and mobile devices alike, according to Flash product manager Mike Downey.
In my opinion, Macromedia did a great job over the last years to lay the foundation for these new adventures. Most importantly they made Flash a platform for animations and video delivery, so popular that more than 90% of the browsers carries the Flash plugin.
They changed their obscure scripting language to a really powerful programming language with the introduction and development of Actionscript, an ECMA standard language, which make it possible to do some real programming on the Flash platform. After some strange behavior, mainly due to backward compatibility issues, they managed to turn Actionscript into a truly object oriented language.
Another important boast for Flash as a media platform came with Macromedia’s streaming video format, which makes it possible to serve video in either true streaming mode form a vido server or in what they call progressive download, where video can be streamed from an ordinary web server. If I cannot afford the rather expensive Video server, or I cannot run it with my service provider, I can settle for using just the web server. The user experience is almost the same in both cases.
All this builds a firm foundation for Flash as a media client on all kinds of devices. If you like to hear about the future of Flash from the horse’s mouth, CNet news.com has an interview with Mike Downey. Of course it is streaming video presented in your Flash player plugin.
- Posted in : Media
- Author : Petit
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Comments»
Sunday 2006-08-13
It almost sounds like Adobe is trying to make Flash the next Java. Really that’s not a bad idea, since everything is already there: A scripting language, and a nice presentation layer.
Sunday 2006-08-13
Yes, it really sounds like the early days of Java. Here is an OO language to program for all platforms, and a well proliferated framework to make it run everywhere. It comes with a nice presentation layer and it is network aware. The net *is* the computer.
My experience with the Flex beta testing made me just a tad cautious though. It was sluggish to say the least, it was complicated and in the end it was very expensive – $10k per CPU.
This will change, and I think we can look forward to a bright future for Flash, as the mobile platforms mature, and we all want to reach every service everywhere. Flash enabled mobile phones already crops up on the market.