Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up.
Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Here’s a summary:
1. Release of Adobe AIR 1.5. The Adobe AIR client now has better performance and memory handling, but most importantly it supports Flash Player 10 and Webkit (which is what the mobile browsers in both the iPhone and Android are based on). Flash Player 10 means more 3-d graphics. This version of AIR will also include an encrypted database that should appeal to developers of enterprise apps.
2. Flash Catalyst and Gumbo. Adobe is reaching out beyond its core base of developers with a new set of tools. Catalyst (previously known as Thermo), streamlines the hand-off between graphic designers and developers. It creates a two-way bridge between files created in Adobe’s Creative Suite products such as Photoshop as Illustrator, and Web apps built in Flash or AIR.
Adobe will be making some announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Catalyst basically converts everything back and forth. In a similar vein, Gumbo (aka, Flex Builder 4) will try to appeal beyond core Java developers to script kiddies of all stripes and sizes. It will be available as a preview release
3. Mobile Flash. Flash will be demoed on Windows Mobile.
4. A 64-bit Flash Player For Linux. A preview will become available at Adobe Labs.
5. Dynamic streaming comes to Flash media server. The server software can now deliver Flash video at different quality, depending one the bandwidth and device of the viewer.
Cool that they are releasing some new innovations. While I am investing/betting a big chunk of my career on Silverlight…no doubt having innovation on both sides of RIA is important.
Personally, in the long run I don’t think Adobe has the resources to take Microsoft in RIA without some partnership or maybe a takeover (i.e. Apple comes to mind).
Not so. Adobe are leaps and bounds ahead and have a mass of experience in this market. We’ll see Flash on the iPhone before we see Silverlight (if ever) there.
Though I’m not saying you should be completely put off Silverlight. If it succeeds I reckon government institutions and banks are likely to prefer Silverlight RIAs simply down to the MS backing. But the creative types amongst us are likely to stick with the Adobe workflow meaning cross platform entertainment apps are likely to remain and grow on the open Flash Platofrm.
Desktop support using AIR is very helpful for small developers. Long live flash. MS silverlight can never catch up.
not unlikely, MS has a vast community, capital and resources, they know the market and has plan to conquer it.
I have to say if adobe still keeping up their pace of development as they have at the moment within the next 5 years we will see their dominance plummeting significantly, and adobe knows that and we can see that by their – rather desperate – marketing strategy
Yeah right! What planet are you from?
“in the long run I don’t think Adobe has the resources to take Microsoft in RIA ”
I disagree. If they did not have the resources, they would not have made flash platform what it is.
Its not like microsoft will win every war it fights.. They have lost a few already
Great reply.
Oh btw,
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If you’re going to advertise your site, genius, it helps to type it correctly in the post. I’m just saying.
Mr. Venkat, pls drop India from your name, for sake of God. Your comments are good, but not all Indians are MS haters like you.
Point taken
Thanks for the compliment. And I don’t hate microsoft! Just annoyed with them .
Adobe do cross platform better than Microsoft. AIR makes applications ubiquitous. Install on MS install on Apple install on Linux, it just works. I can’t wait to hear what they release later this week.
i always hated flex name sounds bodybuilding related
About time for a 64 bit Linux version… that took them forever.
Back in the days of Macromedia Flash, Adobe, best known for it’s office document products purchased Macromedia. That move, in itself, is an indicator of their knowledge of the industry, the web and its potential.
Need we say more?
Also, MS is the only company that supports MS platfoms because they love to. *Everyone else* supports MS platforms because they have to.
That is bound to change, sooner or later. Sooner, IMO.
“but most importantly it supports Flash Player 10 and Webkit”
AIR has always used webkit. http://www.webg...s-adobe-air.asp
AIR’s always used Webkit, but this particular version upgrade has been awaited with unusual fervour as it includes Squirrelfish.
“in the long run I don’t think Adobe has the resources to take Microsoft in RIA ”
Its not about resources, its about developer and creative mind share. Adobe have that in spades and no amount of Silverlight marketing will change that reality.
- Luke
Geat News Flash Player only for Linux
Flash Ten is the next web milestone… Beta’s been working really well on vista for months… H.264 support as a feature should last des/devrs for years to come -video disintermediation. Michael you’ve really been on top of this for a while. You must know Marc Canter?
Will Adobe.com compete with google.com/docs etc.? Soon perhaps?
IMO, the RIA battle is over. Flash des/devrs will also choose Adobe over Google. Is about the des/devrs now -not only the developers as it was in the past. Although MS has done well in the non-pro video creator market.
They already do compete with Google Docs… They bought Buzzword, a really great app, several months ago
https://buzzword.acrobat.com/
It’s actually been referred to as The Flash Platform ever since the Macromedia days:
http://www.flas...atform_website/
You can rest assured that Adobe will continue to use the names Flash AND Flex in years to come as they’re both parts for the platform.
J
True, there has always been a Flash Platform. But the branding has been inconsistent. Generally, the developer platform has been referred to as Flex, now Flex will be lumped under the Flash Platform by Adobe’s marketers.
When Adobe marketing VP and product manager Michelle Turner was going through Adobe’s announcements with me, she specifically said about the platform: “We renamed it Adobe Flash Platform “
It will be a great fight on the Rich Internet Application:
–> Flash and Air as leader : cool tools, designer community
–> java and javaFx as challenger Force: the java developpers community. force: java jre installs 86% Weak: not a designer brand, Sun financial
–> Silverligh as a chalenger. force: Microsoft deep pocket weak: Installed in less 10% computers
French : “Une belle bataille pour 2009 et 2010 !”
As Jensa said, it’s been referred to as the Flash Platform for sometime now. I’ve been running the ‘London Flash Platform User Group’ for June 2006.
” Adobe is reaching out beyond its core base of developers with a new set of tools. Catalyst (previously known as Thermo)”
Reaching beyond its core base of developers? Surely Adobe’s core has been creatives for many years before they purchased Macromedia, and therefore the Flash Platform. Very little happens on the Flash Platform without creatives involvement, Catalyst is here to bridge the gap between the creatives and developers.
Good discussion,
I’ve been developing on MS and Macromedia/Adobe platforms since 1998. What I notice now is MS have better developer tools experience while Adobe is good with designer tools.
Examples:
MS’s Expression tools for designing Silverlight/WPF are not good enough and the workflow seems a little complicated. Maybe I’m using Adobe tools for long time. But I have read in reviews, others are saying same.
On the other side, MS Visual Studio is the best developer tool I’ve ever used for all my WinForms/ASP.Net development. It’s the best in every department!
Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash etc are best in class, while Flash, Dreamweaver in writing code department are worst I’ve ever seen. They can’t make a nice Intelli-sense/code-complete, and I can’t tell you how many guys request this in every beta. (Flex inherit’s from Eclipse, so, its not included). This is just one thing. And it’s also the reason I’ve so far not touched AS3, because I only work in Flash :/
Hopefully these companies will learn from eachother and we will have something from both sides good to work with. BTW, MS’s history about “learning” is quite good
// chall3ng3r //
It has been named by Adobe, Flash Platform for over 2 years now, glad that YOU are finally caught up Erik
Nice to hear these news, finally Adobe officially joins platform war.
Adobe Flex (or I guess Adobe Flash Platform) holds HUGE potential as it matures … but one of the weaknesses of that API is that it lacks a strong online community. The ones I’ve found aren’t all that active, and it’s difficult to commit to a constantly evolving platform without a strong user community for support.
Anyone know of a very active forum for talking about Flex(Adobe Flash Platform)-specific questions and issues?
flexcoders@yahoogroups.com
I completely agree. It’s very difficult to find any kind of solid third-party libraries or open source projects that aren’t just about doing simple, one-off things like recreating the Mac OS X dock or doing more with motion tweens. (Not that those aren’t both really cool…)
There are several site for Flash/Flex stuff specifically, but there’s no central location. Actionscript.org has a Flex forum, and Flex.org is disorganized and hard to use (except for the showcase page, of course).
“…The Adobe AIR client now has better performance and memory handling, but most importantly it supports Flash Player 10 and Webkit (which is what the mobile browsers in both the iPhone and Android are based on)…”
AIR has always used the Webkit browser rendering engine version 2. I believe that for this release, the version of Webkit used has been upgraded to be based on Webkit 3. That said there are certainly differences between Webkit 2 and 3, and I’m not sure which either Android or iPhone are based on — I’m guessing 2? If that’s the case, AIR has just moved from “similar” to “not”, so the basis of the quoted text would be incorrect.
Either way, as both a Flex and AIR developer I am definitely excited to see the upgrade, especially with Flash 10 support!!!!
As has been pointed out, Flash was being developed and positioned as a platform since at least 2005. Check out these old articles:
http://tinyurl.com/6l9loq
http://tinyurl.com/5udrww
It’s taken the world a while to catch up to the fact that Flash is indeed a platform with multiple cross-platform runtime profiles, content and application frameworks, a powerful developer/designer tool chain, and a set of server technologies for enterprise integration.
Jeff Whatcott
See above. That’s how Adobe is now positioning it. But, as you point out, there are precedents here.
Adobe is in a better position to upset Microsoft than almost anyone else. They have a runtime that is nearly ubiquitous (can’t say that about Silverlight), great tools that keep getting better on BOTH major platforms, Windows and OS X (can’t say that about Visual Studio or Microsoft Expression), and a shallower learning curve on the development side.
Regarding the last point… this could be very good, or very bad. Example: part of what makes Mac OS X such a joy to work in is the huge collection of high quality applications by microISVs. If you have a need, generally speaking someone has solved it and released a polished app. On the Windows side, there is, quite frankly, a lot of junk. Microsoft Visual Studio has made programming almost _too accessible_, and the market for applications suffers.
If Flash ends up doing the same with respect to RIAs, we could see a huge volume of low-quality applications popping up, spoiling the experience. Since Silverlight’s higher barrier to entry (both skill-wise and monetarily) would presumably only attract more serious developers, it’s likely they’ll turn out more polished RIAs and sites, thereby ‘branding’ itself as the better technology, when in fact you could get similar results with either stack.
In any case, it’s going to be an interesting battle. The current trend amongst indie developers is to shy away from technology that’s controlled by a single entity, which would include both Silverlight and Flash/Flex/Air. I personally have found Flex very enjoyable to work with, but there’s always that nagging thought of “but Adobe owns the runtime. but Adobe owns the runtime. but Adobe owns the runtime.”
Even though I have been pushing out Flash/Flex products for several years, I still see a tough fight ahead for Adobe vs. Silverlight. There are hordes of devoted .NET developers and Microsoft has very deep pockets.
Early adoption by the masses is key, and a major limitation in AIR is the lack of support for launching native apps, and otherwise interacting with the desktop. Sure, drag/drop support is there, but not much else beyond that.
There are a whole class of applications that need to “play nice” with existing Windows based apps, which makes Adobe AIR a poor choice. Even just reading a setting from the Windows Registry in not supported.
I have reluctantly had to use a 3rd party Flash projector in place of Adobe AIR on several recent projects because of such limitations. Perhaps we can get the Adobe Team to wakeup!
Maybe for desktop apps it’s a question of Air vs. .NET or whatever, but on the web, I see Javascript as the biggest threat to Flex… and right now, JS is winning on many fronts: Huge community, gigantic open source projects and frameworks, lots of innovation, support from Google, Zoho, etc., and it’s way, WAY faster for displaying complex information.
It’s really a shame, because some of the things that Flash can do, like make a socket connection for some kind of chat app, are rendered nearly useless by the insane level of difficulty of using built in Flex components to render lots of data – like a buddy list or a chat history. The List component has bizarre drawing issues with item renderers, and if you just add HTML text to one giant Text display object, it takes up several orders of magnitude more memory than doing the same with HTML/JS (ie Meebo). Add to that jumpy scrolling of Lists (the actual component with a capital L, not lists in general) and an inability to consistently copy and paste and… well… bleh.
If any of this were true, absolutely no-one would be using Flex. How on earth can you say that JS is faster for displaying complex information? And if you are having problems with ItemRenderers in the List component in Flex 3.2, maybe you should ask on Flexcoders or buy a good book on Flex. There’s plenty of apps out there that work flawlessly – photoshop.com, buzzword.com (copy and paste works fine), mint.com, blist.com, sliderocket.com – so don’t you think the problem might be with you and not Flex?
As far as level of difficulty, Flex is reasonably straightforward for anyone with a bit of OOP backfground, especially considering the API is really well-documented.
I also think that it is about developer and creative mind share and not about ressources. Finally adobe joins plattform constructs.
How accurate is the opening of the post? I have never heard of a “Flex platform”, Flex has always been a framework, the “Flex Framework”, not a platform.
You should fix it as it’s generating ripples on the web or cite where you see “Flex Platform” mentioned. There’s of course a Flex ecosystem, based around components and applications developed for Flex workflow, but a Flex Platform.
Anyone who develops in .NET these days is an idiot without a single braincell of creativity and without any idea about the wonderful open-source technologies that exist.
We have been waiting for AIR 1.5 for a long time … That’s great news for our Free Digital Signage serivce… You can check it out at http://www.MediaSignage.com
Open source technologies, that is true.
Fast flash maker for you to create flash movies without programming.