Adobe and “Flash 2.0″

Written on December 19, 2006 by Yasser Dahab and 9 people have commented

Jeff Croft recently published a short post advocating the rebirth of Flash ala the Javascript renaissance. You can read the comments to his original post if you want to hear a few good reasons why that probably won’t happen — at least not in such a cut and dried form.

Regardless of how you feel about Flash, however, I think the proprietary vector-driven technology is bound to reenter our lives once again, though in a slightly modified form.

Mac, PC, say hello to Adobe Apollo.

If you haven’t heard about Adobe Flex and Apollo, it’s high time you did. A quick search of the interweb is all you really need to become immersed in the recent hype surrounding Adobe’s (relatively) new runtime. Without delving too far into the details, Flex uses Flash as it’s runtime environment, so developers are essentially building rich internet applications with Flash and Action Script 3. Apollo promises to deliver rich cross-platform internet-based applications to the desktop — with or without Flash.

What does that mean for Croft’s revolution (and OSX, of course — this is the Apple

First, I think Flash will be making a remarkable comeback in the form of Flex-based internet applications. Since Flash supports AJAX, all of us Web 2.0 JS junkies will still have plenty to do, but Flex has the potential to retake the interface. However, I wouldn’t expect full-Flash websites to be making a comeback anytime soon.

Second, since Flex is being geared towards both web-based and desktop applications (via Apollo — Adobe’s cross platform runtime), Flash will soon be coming to a desktop near you. If you happen to use Lightroom like I do, much of the GUI already has. That means that a consistent OSX GUI will become even more difficult to attain, as Apollo-based applications bear their own distinctive interface. Take a look at Lightroom as an example. The menubar and the window pane are the only interface elements that carry over from the OS — the rest is all Adobe.

What do you think about the future of Flash? Are you excited about the cross-platform interfaces that Apollo promises to deliver? Should Mac users embrace a technology that breaks completely from the traditional OSX interface guidelines?

Comments RSSComments

#1 Sandy says:
The Lightroom GUI is in Cocoa with native cocoa control, they just customize the drawing part. So I don’t think that the look of Lightroom has anything to do with Apollo. An other example of an application that use native control with custom drawing would be iTunes…
#2 Tim says:
Apollo can have its own GUI, or it can inherite the GUI elements of the OS it is running on.
Therefore, my understanding is that you can have the same application which on Mac will use the Mac GUI and when run on Windows uses the Windows GUI elements.
#3 Yasser Dahab says:
You guys are right, Apollo does not need Flash. My point is that Apollo serves as a medium for the “Flash renaissance” that Jeff Croft is looking for.

Thanks for the added info on Apollo! It looks like a pretty slick runtime.
#4 MySchizoBuddy says:
Actionscript VM was recently open sourced. It will now be included in Gecko rendering engine. Hopefully the flash file format will be opened too
#5 Didier says:
Are the autoring tools on Mac or only the runtimes ?
#6 Eytan says:
The authoring tools and the runtime, and the html and javascript runtimes are webkit based and will play great in Safari as well.
#7 Jeem says:
The cliche is ‘cut and dried’.
#8 Yasser Dahab says:
Touché. Thanks Jeem.
#9 Lime says:
You’ve got to support Flash or before you know it we’ll all be using “WPF/e”