Adobe Looks to Future at Flashforward Conference
On the tools side, they’re making significant progress integrating the Macromedia and Adobe toolsets. Ironically enough, the tabbed palettes that Adobe forced Macromedia to remove from the Flash tool are back in the next release, code-named Blaze. As an example of interoperability, Mike Downey, the senior product manager for Flash, demonstrated exporting a video created in After Effects, utilizing alpha-channel capabilities, into an existing Flash animation that included another video, and then the entire presentation was exported using the On2 VP6 codec for the video, which maintains alpha channel information. The result was two separate videos in a Flash animation, one seamlessly overlaid on top of the other.
(My biggest complaint about Flash video is that no one ever includes controls to stop, pause, mute, etc. During the demo, Mike Downey actually said, "I don’t want controls, because I just want it to loop." Gah! It comes from above! Mike, please encourage developers to include playback controls.)
Other developments include an ActionScript 3 compiler scheduled for the 8.5 release, and several incremental advances to the ActionScript editor in Flash. They’re not trying to recreate Flex (their action script editing environment), but they do want to improve usability. ActionScript 3 uses a new virtual machine that was written from scratch, as opposed to ActionScript 2, which has evolved over the years. Adobe claims the complete rewrite has improved performance up to ten times over previous versions of ActionScript—meaning you’ll be able to do more complex interactions. A public alpha will be released on Adobe’s labs site . Perhaps the best news was that all the product managers (Flash, Photoshop, etc) were holding a meeting later that day to hear from attendees what they wanted.
On the mobile front, Lynch showed a couple of demos of the new Flash Lite 2, which runs natively on a number of phones. The scripting level in Flash Lite 2 has been raised to ActionScript 2, so creating Flash applications for the mobile arena will be nowhere near as painful as it is now.
The tail end of the keynote included a demonstration of Flex 2, Adobe’s UI-building environment, and a sneak peek at their new project, at this point only code-named Apollo. For the Flex 2 demonstration, a simple media-player application was built from scratch in five minutes by dragging and dropping a few elements and typing in a few lines of code. It was quick, slick, and a UI builder’s dream.
Things got really interesting, though, when Ed Rowe, a senior Adobe engineer, talked about the Apollo project. He explained that Adobe sees the browser as limiting; because it was designed for documents, the browser "chrome" (the browser itself) is always in the way. You always have to be online, and there is limited ability to work with the local environment. Apollo is all about creating an environment—based on Flash, HTML, and PDF—that can do everything a browser can do and more. As an example, he ran the previous demo (the simple media player) using Apollo technology—without a browser. It was the exact same size, and had the same functionality, but no browser interface mussing up the UI.
At first, this didn’t seem like a big deal, but I slowly realized the implications are immense. This could be seen as an innocent effort to provide users with the best possible experience, or a blatant attempt to circumvent the browser platforms we’ve gotten used to over the last decade. The reality is no doubt somewhere in the middle. As a content creator, I’d welcome any technology that frees us from the constraints of a browser. But if I were an Adobe competitor, I’d be worried. Very worried.