Flash Article

Last December Adobe completed its acquisition of Macromedia. Mike and I ruminate over the cultural differences between the two companies and speculate about the ways their products can be combined. Mike also points out the effects of the expanded talent pool and financial resources.

Mike and I talk about ways that Flash can continue to grow as a platform. After discussing Adobe's plans for Flash on the desktop and the possibility of hardware acceleration, we cover the tradeoffs between device-level optimization and cross-platform compatibility.

Finally, we marvel at the impact that Flash video is having on the web now that Google Video, YouTube, AOL, and many other high-profile video distribution sites are using it successfully.

Adobe Labs is Adobe's early-access software portal where users can download and try products that are still under development. I ask Mike how Adobe Labs is working out and what motivated the drastic change in Adobe's software production and release model.

Mike weighs the benefits of increased adoption and feedback against the possible risks involved in allowing the general public to use emerging software, complete with bugs and unfinished documentation. Will the next version of Adobe Photoshop be prereleased on Adobe Labs?

Everyone knows at least something about the Adobe Flex product line but many Flash developers still aren't sure how it all applies to them. After Mike talks about how Adobe is meeting the challenge of educating the Flash community about Flex's capabilities, I reveal that I haven't even used the Flash authoring tool in eight months because I now use Flex Builder 2 for all my ActionScript development.

Finally, I ask Mike whether the Flex framework's UI component set will be built into the next version of Flash. Mike relates some interesting comments about the options being considered and alludes to the titillating possibility of a future Flash authoring tool file format designed to enable tool interoperability.