Flash Player 10
Flash 10's new text engine ("Vellum") provides advanced text rendering capabilities. Layouts such as text wrapping around images, which is very easy to do in HTML, is now supported in Flash 10. Bi-directional (R-to-L) languages are natively supported. Text rotation does not require embedded fonts in 10. New York times demo-ed a new AIR-based news reader application that takes advantage of Flash 10's new text capabilities. CS4 and Flex Gumbo components use the new text engine which is written entirely in ActionScript.
The ability to allow search engines to index/search content inside a SWF file was unveiled. While it requires some extra work, the fact that this now possible is significant.
The new text and search capabilities address what used to be one of the major drawbacks of Flash for text-oriented content. One wonders if Flash 10 will usher in a new era where we will see more traditional consumer-facing Web sites adopting Flash.
One intriguing announcement was the "Alchemy" project which allows your C++ code to run in the Flash player. This project provides libraries that can be used to generate ActionScript code from C++ which can then run in the Flash Player. A demo of OpenSSL code ported to run in Flash was very interesting. Encryption may be a good example of established, existing C++ code that one may want to run in the Flash Player.
Another cool demo was the new feature that enables direct Player to Player communication using the new RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) protocol. This is peer-to-peer communication but does not support file or document sharing. It requires a server for the initial connection hookup between peers.
Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo)
This is a new design tool that allows designers to import creative graphics content from Photoshop or Fireworks and turn them into real application components. The designers can control the look and feel of the application including state transition animations. The output of Catalyst is a "FXP" package that can then be imported into Flex by a developer and used directly.
Catalyst leverages the new XML-based FXG graphics language. This language lets you declaratively define look and feel of components - effectively this is doing programmatic skinning without writing code. Hopefully this will reduce the need for graphical skinning and reduce the proliferation of image assets for skinning and leverage all the advantages of programmatic skinning.
Couple of concerns I have about Catalyst are 1) Will this end up in "XML hell" with projects containing hundreds of FXG XML files, and 2) Will round-tripping between Catalyst and Flex (designer and developer) really work well for large commercial-grade projects?
Flex Gumbo (Flex 4)
This is the next generation of Flex which was previewed and is due to be released next year. The main feature seems to be the new MVC separation at the component level. This ties in with Catalyst - the separation allows for designers to have more control over the look and feel of components using the Catalyst tool. Other than this separation for Catalyst, there does not seem to be anything of major significance. There is some new ColdFusion integration but that is of no use to those of us who don't live in the proprietary world of ColdFusion.
A disappointment for me was that there is no change to facilitate runtime changing of CSS. CSS files are still compiled into the SWF. The same applies to FXG files. If you need to be able to change the CSS/FXG files after deployment of your application at the customer site, it requires custom code to be written to allow this.
AIR
There seems to be more buzz around AIR with several well attended sessions around this technology. The application that won the top award in the Enterprise category was a trading desktop AIR application from NASDAQ.
Adobe announced the new "Wave" AIR application for desktop notification. Using this application, users can get desktop notifications from (say) their favorite social networking sites without having to browse to each site to look for anything new. There is a notification service in the back-end that Adobe hosts and that content producers integrate with.
Sneak preview of "Nitro" widgets provided glimpses of a formalized framework for building widgets that can run on multiple screens. Drag and drop of widgets from the Browser to the desktop reminded me of the JavaFX demos of similar functionality. The "Durango" preview showcased AIR mashups - dragging and dropping application components to weave together a composite AIR app.
AIR, with its platform independence, local database, WebKit embedded Browser, JavaScript and ActionScript scripting capabilities, and of course the Flash Player runtime, seems poised to be a powerful channel for widgets/gadgets. It is possible that AIR on the desktop could be as ubiquitous as Flash in the Browser. Interestingly, downloading the free Adobe Reader 9 also installs AIR by default showing Adobe's desire to try and get AIR on as many desktops as Reader. Smart strategy!
Acrobat sessions introduced new features of version 9 released recently. The most interesting feature to me was the new embedded Flash player in Reader/Acrobat and better support for a SWF file running inside PDF. It is possible to script JavaScript to interact with the SWF within the PDF. Adobe is moving Acrobat from being a viewer for static documents to a full-blown application platform. Given the popularity of Reader on desktops, this is very promising. However, the ability to debug/profile code in Acrobat needs to be improved if it needs to really be an application platform.
One wonders if Adobe will start blurring the lines between its desktop runtimes - AIR, Flash Desktop Player and Reader.
Business Intelligence
SAP Business Objects had a demo booth where they were showcasing their XCelsius product line. A new demo that I haven't seen before was the ability to export a dashboard to PDF that contains a SWF providing rich interactive capabilities. See demo here on their Web site. Another new demo was their use of AIR for desktop widgets/gadgets delivering BI content. It ships a component SDK that can be used to put together custom dashboards - this is oriented towards IT and consultants rather than the end user. XCelsius uses a home-grown server-side SWF generation/manipulation library.
XCelsius is clearly ahead of the competition in terms of taking advantage of Adobe technologies such as Flash, Flex, AIR and PDF in its BI suite. BI aside, SAP in general seems to have a solid partnership with Adobe. Adobe's PDF generation libraries are baked into all of SAP's OLTP products. They use Adobe Connect Web Conferencing product for their training solutions.
ILOG (soon to be part of IBM) demo-ed their Flash/Flex-based visualization library Elixir. ILOG does have a history of experience in the advanced visualization space although their traditional forte is optimization and business rules. The library is quite rich including Charts, Maps, Org Charts, Gantt Charts, Treemaps and Gauges (they don't have Pivot table). Their library is re-sold by Adobe for $799 per license, but the catch is the hefty deployment fees/royalties which reportedly could cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Cocomo
This is a new Platform as a Service offering for building real-time collaboration capabilities leveraging Acrobat.com cloud services and the Connect infrastructure. Cocomo promises to make it easy to add chat, live file sharing, screen sharing, white-boarding and VOIP audio to applications. Given the high quality of Adobe's Connect product, Cocomo is likely to be a winner.
Mobile
While CTO Kevin Lynch demo-ed a number of phones running Flash, the big one was missing - iPhone. Kevin held up an iPhone and said Flash on it was still baking in the oven and that Apple's chief taster hadn't approved it yet! Looks like the obstacle for getting Flash on the iPhone is not a technical one but a business one. Apple is concerned that allowing Flash on the iPhone will result in a Adobe monopoly on the default channel for content and applications with sizzle. Apple however is doing a great disservice to developers because there is a phenomenal advantage to coding with one platform for all screens although you are likely to build the same application differently (scaled down) for a mobile device. I'm still in the process of picking up Objective C, XCode etc. which I need to build an iPhone app. I wish I could write the same ActionScript for the iPhone that I write for the Browser, AIR and PDF.
Miscellaneous
Some random thoughts from the conference:
- One way to feel the pulse of the market and understand trends is to look at which sessions at a conference are the most popular ones. At MAX the most popular and sold-out sessions included (in no particular order) CS4, Search-able SWF, Flex Introduction and ColdFusion. The majority of attendees at the conference seemed to be folks producing creative content using CS4 products and/or folks building Web sites using ColdFusion. CS4 remains Adobe's flagship product suite and hugely popular. I was quite surprised by the fact that ColdFusion, which I had assumed to be legacy stuff, is alive and well. Interestingly ColdFusion seems to enjoy a cult following among its users who don't seem to care that it is a proprietary platform. The popularity of the Search-able SWF session shows that consumer-facing Web sites using Flash are very keen on a solution that lets search engines get to content within their SWFs. This may have been the single biggest concern of Web sites using Flash for whom search hits are important. The fact that Flex introductory sessions were so popular shows that while Flex is gaining a lot of popularity, it is still an early-stage technology that more people are beginning to discover.
- Google's session on Flash support in Google Maps was interesting not just from the perspective of users now being able to use maps natively in their Flash/Flex applications, but for what Google mentioned were the advantages of Flash over JavaScript-based Maps solution - 1) performance advantage of Flash in manipulating 5-10K vertex polygons in real-time and 3D; 2) vector graphics drawing APIs of Flash to be able to do specialized markers such as a rectangle with glow filters or video markers overlay-ed on Maps.
- Scrapblog is a company that won an award in the RIA category. Scrapblog is a tool for creating online multimedia scrapbooks and is an example of what still remains the primary use of Flash - creative design with graphical and audio/video content.
