Flash On The Beach
Flash On The Beach kicked off in Brighton yesterday morning with a keynote from Adobe representative Mike Downey. Entitled “Flash and the Adobe Engagement Platform”, Mike started out by reflecting on developments around Flash in 2006 including among other things: opening of Adobe labs in January, the 10th anniversary of Flash in August, and the 100 millionth device running Flash shipped in April 2006 (helped no doubt by the PS3, Wii, and Xbox - all of which run Flash). Downey also emphasised the increasing uptake of the latest Flash 9 player and the runaway success that is Flash video. There was also a sneak peak of a new application slated for release in early 2007 called ‘Adobe Device Professional‘, which apparently emulates most of the major mobile devices on the market.
However the clear focus from Adobe for this keynote was Apollo, and the next version of Flash. Mike Chambers came on to talk about Apollo, Adobe’s cross-platform runtime that allows developers to build web applications outside of the browser (using Flash, Flex, HTML, and AJAX). Chambers demonstrated an mp3 player he built using Apollo, and demonstrated an app being worked on with Ebay. The key messages were: the browser is reaching its limits as an environment to build web applications in, Apollo comes with its own html rendering engine, and with the low-level integration Adobe has done a new world of development opportunities are just about to open up. Apollo 1.0 is slated for mid 2007, and with Microsoft developing their own alternative it seems like 2007 will kick-start a lot of changes in web development.
The keynote ended with a rundown of the new features in Flash 9 (released in the first half of next year): universal binaries available for Mac users, the same UI between Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator (Flash will take on the Adobe interfaces including icons), a much better importer which retains all layers from Photoshop / Illustrator, revamping Illustrator to share the same symbol metaphors as Flash (allowing you to specify objects as MovieClips and apply instance names from within Illustrator), better fidelity of bezier points when importing into Flash, a redesigned pen tool (after criticisms from designers that using Flash’s pen tool was like drawing with your feet), a new set of AS3 components designed by top Flash developers (half the file size of existing components, simply double-click component elements to reskin them very easily). Quite a few improvements obviously driven by the recent Adobe / Macromedia merger.
