Friday, March 14, 2003

Flash Applications … Also, most people host Flash applications in a browser today, but it would be really great if people could run these on their local machines. The engineering teams here are hard at work on these things and more -- you'll see a lot of cool stuff coming out to help bring Flash into its next phase of evolution. In the meantime, we publish the SWF format (starting back in 1998) so lots of other people can create software and tools for Flash, not just Macromedia. I'm happy to see that there's a lot of software now to do this, and now that Flash is enabling applications we're starting to see third party solutions such as Laszlo, Screenweaver, gModeler, and others building on it. While we're certain to overlap in some areas, having a lot of different takes on this will definitely foster innovation and benefit developers and end users as these new Flash applications are created! [Kevin Lynch] This all looks very exciting. As an marketer, I see software swinging back to the desktop, and am excited by Macromedia's Rich Internet Application approach. As a developer, I must evaluate various technical options for creating cross-platform GUIs for desktop apps (such as MFC, .Net, PowerPlant, wxWindows, and Swing, to name just a few). It will be interesting to compare Flash-based solutions to these other platforms. 11:17:02 AM