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Earlier today Ryan Stewart wrote about taking a somewhat softened stance in the debate around open sourcing the Adobe Flash Player. Given some of his previous comments on the issue it was nice to see Ryan taking a second look. Especially so given the fact that Ryan makes no bones about being firmly in the Adobe Flex camp when it comes to RIA platforms. He took a bit of grief from some for that post but honestly, having someone in Ryan’s position riff on the subject can only be healthy in the long run. It’s easy for the somewhat insular Flash community to dismiss a “zealot” but when someone like Ryan asks “why not?” it forces defenders of the status quo to actually articulate their position.

I’ve always been surprised at how the Flash Player tends to be seen as a a sacred cow by Flash developers while a number of open source tools used to target the platform have gained a well deserved legitimacy. The argument could be made that OSFlash was a big driver in transitioning Flash from an “animation tool” to the application platform it is today. In the period following ActionScript 2 and prior to Flex it really was the open source community that picked up where the Flash IDE left off. Before Flex Builder, Flash RIA development was all about FAME.

Based on that history alone the Flash development community should have a better-than-most sense of the potential for open source in the Flash platform.

While Robert Scoble’s headline for this post follows the tired old “technology x is a technology y killer” formula you have to hand it to him for putting a finger on the significance of last Monday’s CES announcement from Adobe and Verisign.

There are two things that I think we can take away from the press release. Scoble skipped the first one, (probably because it’s pretty ho-hum), which is that Verisign will be using Flash Media Server to stream video on it’s CDN. No big news there - Verisign is trying to put together a network to deliver high-quality, full-length movies over the web and struck a deal to do so with the hottest web video player going. Makes sense.

What the press release is pretty vague about however, (aside: is it just me or was that a CES and Macworld trend this year?), is the possibility of integrating Verisign’s peer-to-peer technology in the Flash Player. This is an interesting play on Adobe’s part and has the potential to be a pretty serious move. As Scoble mentioned there are a few P2P video networks spinning up right now and they all face a couple of similar challenges - one of which is getting software onto user’s machines.

As we all know, with the Flash Player Adobe holds an ace card when it comes to distributing software. It is widely installed and Adobe have a proven capacity to get updates distributed in fairly short periods of time. Even if the penetration stats published by Adobe are optimistic I’m willing to bet the vast majority of pcs without the latest Flash Player are within enterprises - not machines you’d need to worry much about when trying to set up a movie distribution network. The question Adobe have to be asking themselves is whether to play that ace in the brewing web video gold rush.

Adobe, and Macromedia before them, have made serious efforts to transform Flash into an application platform and right now that has alot of momentum. The plan is that Apollo will build on the momentum and become the platform for building a new breed of web connected desktop applications. A big part of what made that effort as successful as it is today has been Adobe’s concentration on building the platform upon which applications are built. As the legend goes the “tin can” project was a plan to add a small video codec to the Flash Player. It was the YouTubes and Brightcoves who drove the Flash video revolution by taking that platform functionality and building upon it. By adding a piece of peer-to-peer type technology on which content delivery networks could be built Adobe may feel they can cement the Flash Platform as the technology for delivering high quality feature length films over the web.

Of course there are risks in such a move. Peer-to-peer technology still has a bit of a nefarious reputation. I’m not sure how receptive enterprise IT managers will be to allowing a Flash Player with P2P capabilities to be installed on their networks. As it stands now IT policies in many corporations keep the Flash Player a version or more behind Adobe’s releases. The risk for Adobe would be in undoing alot of the work they’ve done to make Flash a viable platform for enterprise software applications.

The other problem for peer-to-peer in general is with ISPs and bandwidth caps for their customers. If the perception among users becomes that a Flash Player with P2P capabilities is causing them extra bandwidth bills it could lead to a backlash. As Flash developers will tell you, the ancient perception of Flash as a bandwidth hog and being slow to load is a bit of a sore spot. After years spent battling against that argument we can be a little sensitive to anything that could rekindle that debate.

Reading through the comments on Scoble’s “Netflix is dead” post alot of people are reacting by arguing against any imminent demise of movie rental stores. What’s interesting however is that most are qualifying that with “downloading movies is the future” flavoured statements. Ironically, the real story here is that Adobe and Verisign appear to be making plans to build the foundation for that future. That was Scoble’s real point; unfortunately he distracted from it with a sensational headline.

Why not let Kevin Lynch do it for you.

Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has a podcast of a conversation he and Steve Gillmor had with Kevin about the soon to be released to beta Adobe Apollo. It’s a good conversation about the combination of new and existing technology that will make up Apollo. They also do a great job of explaining how Adobe is positioning Apollo as a tool to bring the advantages of web applications to the desktop.

http://www.talkcrunch.com/2006/12/16/here-comes-adobe-apollo/

When Adobe released the long awaited Flash Player 9 for Linux as a public beta on labs.adobe.com I took it as a nudge to (again) try running a Linux desktop on my home computer. The Linux experiment is going fairly well this time, and the Flash Player seems to be coming together rather well too.

Of course, the Linux Flash Player is beta software (beta 2 was released earlier this week) and that means the odd bug will pop up that hasn’t yet been discovered or fixed. As both a Flash platform developer and user it is in my best interest to report these snags as I come across them. And you’d think that it would be in Adobe’s best interest to make that bug reporting process as efficient and useful as possible. Why then is the only public facing issue tracking a simple web form?

Maybe I’m overlooking some important fact but I really can’t imagine how having the feedback information flow in only one direction is an advantage to anyone. As someone who’s reported a bug or two in my time, (don’t worry - I’ve created more than my fair share too), I’d much rather start the time consuming, and sometimes painful, process of properly reporting an issue by searching a database to see if someone else has already done the leg work for me. From there I can simply tack on any information I feel may be useful and get back to say, fumbling around a “foreign” operating system.

I’d also be curious to know how the quality of the feedback Adobe receives through the web form compares to reports in public bug databases such as Mozilla’s Bugzilla or the Connect system Microsoft used for the IE7 pre-release.

There, I’ve said it.

IE7 shipped yesterday and among the many changes is one that has caused Authoware Web Player calls to JavaScript in the embedding HTML to fail. (The bug ticket in Microsoft Connect was here). This is a significant issue as e-learning content delivered in the Authorware Web Player is commonly accessed through SCORM Learning Management Systems (LMS), and SCORM requires that content communicate across a JavaScript API.

There does seem to be a workaround which involves loading the page that embeds the Authorware content as either a frame or iframe element. While tests indicate this is a successful workaround, it is a disconcerting one as I haven’t been able to track down why it works. Depending upon various LMS environments it can also be a difficult, or at the very least, time consuming workaround to implement.

This has been a known issue since the early IE7 beta releases and was reported to both Microsoft and Adobe. After a last ditch campaign by members of the AWARE list and some persistent questioning during the October IE7 Expert’s Chat the significance of the problem was brought to the IE7 team’s attention. As I both suspected and feared, Microsoft seemed to indicate that this was a problem that would need to be resolved by the Authorware Web Player.

Where was Adobe through all of this? Good question. As I mentioned, the bug was communicated through official channels sometime ago (May 2006 to be exact) and was also discussed on mailing lists and in forums (on at least one of those lists members have an expectation of monitoring and participation from Adobe representatives). All has resulted in deafening silence.

As things currently stand I have lost confidence in Adobe’s commitment to the Authorware community. Authorware developers, like developers everywhere, are a resourceful and independent lot and have grown used to “fending for themselves” (perhaps more so that other developers) but now Adobe needs to stand up and support them.

Among the numerous Flash anniversary posts of the past few days I especially enjoyed reading John Dowdell’s reminiscence on the first 10 years of Flash.

One of the anecdotes he shares described Flex as the fulfillment of a quest for an authoring environment that uses XML to natively describe multimedia “experiences” and once again reminded me of what I’m starting to think of as “Authorware’s past glories”. When Authorware 7 was released in 2003 it included functionality that allows one to export (and import) an XML description of Authorware files. (Sadly, it remains just too incomplete to fulfill it’s true potential). Nevertheless, while JD does a good job of connecting the XML dots to Flex it bears noting that Authorware was also a dot on that path.

Authorware, a dot in so many ways.

Last month Sys-Con Media posted an interesting interview (brace yourself before clicking - ads on that page tend to get in your face) with Adobe General Manager David Mendels. One of the first points David makes addresses a question about “hiccups” during the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. He does a great job of dismissing the suggestion, mentioning that any hiccups are “internal”. I have no doubt this may be the case from a Flash or Flex perspective however I think that a few Macromedia products and groups actually have stumbled under Adobe’s guidance.

While eLearning wasn’t exactly a primary focus at Macromedia they did have a few of the leading tools for developing learning content (Captivate, Authorware, Director…), people (Tom King) and even an “enterprise solution” (Breeze). Add Flash and Dreamweaver to the mix and they had a reasonable offering for the broad spectrum that is “eLearning”. While some of the tools are becoming long in the tooth and had languished, (to a degree), with small dev teams and little marketing there was also strong community involvement from MM folks. In many cases this was the product developers themselves out in forums and on mailing lists supporting users. Unfortunately, it would seem that has changed under Adobe’s watch. The fact that Adobe recently felt the need to release a set of FAQ documents stating a degree of commitment to the continued development of these tools really makes it apparent. What can be said about the state of your community relations if one the most frequently asked questions about a product is ‘what’s going on’ ?

To be fair to David the interview was focused on his Enterprise and Developer group and most specifically Flex and large scale application development. However, it is worth pointing out that as these large business applications are built, as rich and collaborative as they are, the organizations that own them will be looking for ways to get employees up to speed on ways to use them effectively. This will become even more true as tools like Apollo come about and even further change the way people do their jobs.

As a developer I find it kind of ironic that I’m thinking about this so much. While the development I do is training related, I really consider myself more of a developer who happens to develop training rather than a trainer who develops. Because of that however, I tend to subscribe to mailing lists and read forums / newsgroups where some of the true eLearning thinkers are and from my perspective a good number are becoming increasingly frustrated with Adobe’s apparent neglect of the tools and communities they use.

Now, the good thing about hiccups is that there are a number of simple “cures“…

Looks like Captivate and Authorware have joined Director in getting a ‘commitment FAQ” from Adobe:
http://www.adobe.com/resources/elearning/products/special/crossproduct/faq.html

According to the FAQ, Captivate 2.0 is currently undergoing beta testing (again?) and an Authorware update (presumably the long awaited Authorware 8) is slated for an expected release sometime during the second half of 2007.

As someone with an appreciation for irony, I choose this item as my favourite from the document:

Can I participate in the Authorware prerelease program?
Adobe will actively engage the Authorware user community as we continue development.

Adobe’s Tom Higgins is pointing to a new Macromedia Director and Adobe Shockwave Player FAQ on the Adobe website:
http://www.adobe.com/products/director/special/crossproduct/faq.html

Most significant is that Adobe is expecting a new Director release in 2007 and are committed to continued investment and development.

With 14 of the 21 FAQ items dedicated to the Google Toolbar bundled offered with Shockwave Player I wonder if the document would be more aptly named the Macromedia Director, Adobe Shockwave Player and Google Toolbar FAQ.

This Cnet article titled “Flash to jump beyond the browser” has been getting some links today. It’s an interesting piece and the information it contains comes from Adobe’s Kevin Lynch so I think it’s fair to say it’s a solid piece factually as well. I’m a little concerned though that the Apollo hype is treading a little too close to just that - hype.

While I’m all for the advantages that come from developing projects in public (Adobe labs is a good example of that done right), I think Adobe have to be careful with over hyping Apollo before having something tangible to deliver. It can be a slippery slope to the kind of predatory preannouncements that companies like Microsoft have been accused of in the past. I guess the true litmus test lies in the spirit of the announcements - when used genuinely the goal is to solicit user feedback and create a sense of community while at the same time fostering critical developer relations (if developers don’t believe in a product it won’t fly, no matter how good it is). When the competition begins to heat up however, (I’ll bet the sun was shining in both San Jose and San Francisco when the latest delay to Vista went public), it can become an easy tactic used to stifle competion.

Don’t confuse these comments with pessimism for what Apollo will be. I really believe Macromedia, (and now Adobe), have done their homework and it is because I truly want to see this project succeed that I’m making these comments. It has enormous potential to make my life (as both a developer and a user) a heck of alot easier.

So, while I’m not the only one with observations of Apollo hubris, I would really like to see the buzz be due to the tech itself and not some ‘next big thing’ feeding frenzy.

Geoff Stearns who is the author of the popular FlashObject Javascript library has a post describing a somewhat disconcerting exchange with Adobe’s legal department. According to Geoff they have requested that he stop using the word “Flash” in his project name. Geoff, somewhat grudgingly, has agreed to rename the project SWFObject.

I really do hope this is just a matter of Adobe’s legal and public relations not consulting one another. In any event, it makes it clear that Adobe needs to provide a clear statement on it’s perspective regarding trademark infringement (and other legal issues) and then enforce it in a reasonable and consistent manner. I think this would also help clear up some of the legal ambiguity of a few open source Flash projects.

The OSFlash mailing list currently has some discussion on the matter in this thread. And Peter Elst has posted a good level headed appeal to Adobe regarding this manner.

The Article I Think I Read
I burned a good hour of time that I didn’t really have today looking for an article that I’m pretty sure I read a few years ago. The way I recall things it was sometime in maybe 2002, the article was published on macromedia.com and it described a fictional “day in the life” in which the principal “character” was helped in their day to day routines by various “intelligent”, occasionally connected devices and software. Things like reading and writing email, buying concert tickets, tracking current events and making social plans all being done while she made her way to the coffee shop, rode a train to the office etc. A vision that’s pretty common today but back when I read this article it all seemed quite revolutionary to me and ever since I’ve been watching for it to become reality.

Did Kevin Read the Article?
In October I was lucky enough to be sitting in the audience during Kevin Lynch’s keynote at Macromedia’s Max when he first talked about “Apollo”. Something tells me Kevin read the article too. Here, go check out the video from that keynote and you’ll see how familiar it sounds. Choose ‘Day One’ > ‘Platform Future’ (3rd thumbnail from the right), then jump ahead to around 1:08:00 (yup, the ability to direct link that would be easier for me too).

Read the rest of this entry »

flashvideofaq.com provides a really nice way for quickly comparing the various Flash video encoding options.

Via Scott Fegette.

Yeah, so it’s not really a New Years resolution, but with today’s release of the Flash Lite 2 update for Flash on Adobe Labs I think 2006 is the year I attempt to build a Flash Lite app.

I’ve never really considered trying to develop for devices until now. I actually sat in on one of the Flash Lite sessions at Max this year and while I found it very infomative I can’t say I was eager to jump into Flash Lite development. The old Flash 4 AS syntax of Flash Lite 1.1, the limited data transfer, device inconsistencies, and those crazy memory and filesize constraints all just make it so unattractive. Obviously Flash Lite 2 won’t solve all of these but hopefully it’ll be enough to make things alot less painful. Check out Bill Perry’s Flash Lite 2.0 Preview for a good Breeze presentation on the new features.

There, now I’ve pledged to it. Hopefully this post won’t be haunting me in December…

Avner Acquisition Sub, Inc. is the name of the Adobe subsidiary that will be merged with Macromedia according to the Securities and Exchange Commission filings from the original Adobe - Macromedia aquistion anouncement.

Seems to be a wise move on Avner Acquisition’s part - their soon-to-be colleagues could probably help ‘em out with a website.

;-)

So many reasons to keep an eye on the Adobe blogs launched last week.

Obviously it’s great to see Adobe open up this line of communication. One of the main concerns Macromedia developers have expressed in regards to the pending acquisition is the (apparent) contrast between the two companies when it comes to fostering community interaction. This move would seem to indicate that Adobe is moving closer to the Macromedia end of the spectrum.

It will also be interesting to watch the Adobe bloggers gain their “sea legs” (blog legs?) as the inevitable ’slip ups’ are made, controversies flare and (most importantly) insight is shared. So far it would seem things bode well (check the comments in this post on John Nack’s blog for an indication of the “culture shift”).

In another post John (who is the product manager for Photoshop) also throws some props to the Flash Player guys.

It would seem that in a way an unofficial amalgamation has begun.

Forbes.com is running an interview with Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop. It gives a good recap of this (one time) Canadian boy’s career to date.

No idea what this means (if anything) but it seems that Stephen Elop moved to the CEO position in January when Rob Burgess stepped down to focus on mergers and aquisitions. Within weeks, he (Elop) was talking to rival Adobe Systems about a $3.4 billion merger..(link).

(That Rob Burgess bio on MM is out of date as is the executive profiles page).

Via: photoshopnews.com

Update: FWIW, a more up to date executive bio page can be found here:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/management/exec_bios/

Burak KALAYCI pointed to Macromedia’s Securities and Exchange Commision filings. The database doesn’t have one of the more useful of user interfaces (a bit of RSS wouldn’t hurt either…) so I found myself clicking random links and eventually ended up at a transcript of Monday’s Adobe - Macromedia conference call.

Here are a couple of tidbits I gleaned from that document:

It would appear that 8ball (the next version of Flash) should be out by the end of September. (Gene Munster works for securities firm Piper Jaffray, Stephen Elop is President and CEO at Macromedia):

Gene Munster:
And then just one final question, is MX still on track for kind of August/September?
Stephen Elop:
Yeah.

Microsoft will be (is?) competition. The point was made earlier this week that in the past Adobe has been vocal about competing with Microsoft so this should not be a surprise. (Jay Vleeschhouwer is from Merrill Lynch, Bruce Chizen, is Adobe’s CEO):

Jay Vleeschhouwer:
Okay and competitively if you look out a couple of years towards what Microsoft is trying to do on the OS side, is there anything that you know for a certainty that at a minimum they’ll do that would compete with anything on the PDF or Flash side?
Bruce Chizen:
So, you know, historically both Macromedia and Adobe have been focused on the mission that we’ve articulated as helping people and organizations communicate better. And really what that meant is information that needs to be more compelling, more interactive, richer, impactful, reliable, more secure and that has not been a strong suit for Microsoft.
Clearly it’s an area that looks like based on what they tried to do with InfoPass, what they say that they’re trying to do with Longhorn, their code name for their future Windows Operating System, is similar to what we together are - have been doing and will continue to do. Clearly we are focused not only on the Windows platform but we do cover both Windows, Macintosh, Linux and many, many, many non-PC devices. So it’s hard to really say, you know, what Microsoft will do going forward but they are a $40 billion software company and we will always keep an eye out for them.

Obviously mobile was a big motivator for this deal. I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to draw any conclusions in this regard but some of the trancription errors made me chuckle. Flash Flare, Flash Fare both catchy (and ironic) names but I think he was talking about the Flash Player. And speaking of ironic, “very compelling risk platform”. Man, that is just too rich (groan). (Shantanu Narayen, is President and COO of Adobe):

Shantanu Narayen:
So I think with respect to the mobile space the reality is even Macromedia has been pretty heavily involved in defining SVG and working in the W3C Working Group that defined SVG Jay so I should mention that.
The reality is if you look at the Flash Flare—the four (unintelligible) around the Flash Fare, the small download, the high performance, the interactivity and the ubiquity really do make it a very, very compelling risk platform. And I think as we said earlier one of the things that’s exciting for us is we can bring the benefits of everything that they have done with animation and interactivity and video and see what we’ve done with documents and build an even better rich integrated platform for these mobile devices. So we think we can accelerate actually the adoption with a common flare on these devices.

Here’s a link to the transcript.
Here’s a link (.asf) to the conference call webcast which I found on the Macromedia investor relations page.

Like most, I was quite surprised to read the announcement this morning of Adobe’s planned acquisition of Macromedia.

Really I don’t yet see what this brings to Macromedia besides a whole whack of cash. Perhaps Mike Chambers will disagree with me on this but that’s how I distill his blog entry as well. Of course he has some good facts in there so go read it if you’re interested. He’s right - the combined resources will be pretty significant and will make driving Flash as an application platform that much more substantial. I see the marketing power this brings, especially in the enterprise marketplace that Macromedia has been chasing pretty hard recently. This is the clout that Macromedia needs to turn the Flash Player into the application engine they envision - something they need to establish before Microsoft and Avalon come along. What I fear is that the innovation and openeness (relatively speaking) I associate with Macromedia with suffer. So for now I see this as an alignment of forces in preparation for the battle of desktop application environments of ‘07.

As far as Authorware is concerned this cannot be seen as bad news. Yes, it means things are likely to change but if we really think about it that has to be a good thing. Authorware has been getting only the minimal of support from Macromedia for a long time now and suffering from it. I can see the Authorware team at Macromedia working hard on the product (and for the developer community) but I can also see them not getting the resources they require. For Authorware any change is good change.

I don’t know where all this will wind up but the ride just got a hell of a lot more exciting and I wish the best of luck to all our comrades at Macromedia during this transition.