Category Archives: Flash

Which UX Platform would you bet on?

Posted on by Scott Barnes
21

If I could get paid for each time I’ve been asked which UX technology/platform should one bet on in order to produce the next generation of software in day to day business – I’d be quite well paid!

I don’t have an answer, and what’s really sad about that is that I should have a few answers not just a single one.

Today, you’re spoiled for a choice of technologies to help you produce some user experience namely for mobility. Since the introduction of the iPhone and iPad it’s arguably put something we’ve all kind of known into the mainstream hands, which is “experience matters”. Businesses are now keen to ensure that the next piece of software they produce works like it would on an iPad or iPhone (the amount of times I’ve been given a brief that uses that as its baseline for success is almost 90%+).

Why the issue in selecting today then? Well let’s look at the brands in question.

Apple.

You cannot disagree that Apple’s influence on the UX discussion has been quite loud and obvious. Almost all phones and tablet devices have pretty much copied the entire existence of their products to the point where even though they hadn’t invented some of the ideas, they now look as if they did. Having said that, Apple still is a prescribed existence in that in order to play on their hardware you have to develop & design to their standards. You also have a limited amount of agility in order to take the device and slot it into various enterprise/industry verticals (mining, finance etc).

Distributing your solutions via a closed private cloud like existence can be done with iPad/iPhones but its still a bit messy in deployment. Furthermore inside almost all large organizations your cubicles of developers don’t have “Objective-C” in their resumes.

Whilst it has become the baseline for what a device driven UI should look like in the eyes of most business and technical decision makers, it’s still got a lot of latency and turbulence around its software development life cycle (i.e. it’s fast become a specialist skill not so much as a mainstream one).

Google / Android.

Google have managed to hold strong with their device platform story, that is to say their entire development and design pipeline isn’t that bad. Having said that I’ve seen, heard and been in enough meetings to see it being instantly rejected and it has to do with versioning and security as the core reasons for rejection (right or wrong).

Furthermore Java development at its core isn’t something you see go hand in hand with design focused teams, so again you have this issue with as stated by Apple around specialist skills vs. mainstream skills mixed with some market acceptance issues.

Microsoft.

Just read my blog for a few pages you’ll see a theme emerge. Microsoft had a few ideas around what the UX space should look like, they put some bets on the table around these ideas, they got some semi-successful acceptance worldwide on these ideas but now they’ve kind of hit reset on the said ideas, taking two steps back and pissed the developer base off in the process.

To summarize, Microsoft has a whole new round of trust issues around long-term decision making, their tooling is good enough to build large enterprise applications with and lastly they still have a healthy developer base that have mainstream skills in C# & XAML.

The downside is their entire strategy around what you should or shouldn’t do going forward is out of control and requires a focused mind to unravel.

What I would say though is that Windows 7 is likely to be around and in a healthy state over the next 3-5 years and I think the hardware market will still look into ways in how to socket Windows 7 as their native OS when possible (for business, not so much for consumers). Given Windows 8 Surface is making their own hardware it could also be a negative for Microsoft, so whilst the only real option for hardware makers is to adopt Windows 7 or other, this in turn puts a long-term question mark around whether or not Silverlight or WPF should be something you double down on?

Adobe

I often praise Adobe more than I have in the past as despite how close they came to overtaking HTML as rich media technology platform, they have managed to regroup nicely around being focused on tooling.

Given the turbulence above this company may solve the problem through tooling so it could even abstract the decision making process around which is the next bet by simply saying “it doesn’t matter, just use Adobe XTool”.

It’s still a long way off before that idea is realized, but none the less Adobe Flex / Flash aren’t something one should ignore outright. It still has some legs and although its clear Adobe Flash and iOS will never meet, they do meet however on Android and potentially Microsoft Windows device(s).

Despite Silverlight’s attempt to knock Adobe Flash out of the decision process if anything Silverlight’s demise has strengthens the runtime’s position further.

HTML5

I’m going to say that this has become a brand not so much a technology; in that when you say “HTML5 is the future” you’re not saying “these additional tags are the future” you’re actually saying “HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the future”.

It’s a brand now so with that I’d simply say that it plays well on all of the devices above and will most likely continue to do so. The developer base out there is pretty vast in its knowledge around HTML/JavaScript and the various frameworks they use to obfuscate the fact they are writing JavaScript.

However, if you have a subscription to most research companies around RIA in the past and present, you’ll see a theme emerge that is to say that in Enterprise (not consumer space) the whole JavaScript/HTML combination has left a very sour taste in their adoption loving minds. Furthermore the limitations and slow growth of HTML in general has also left concerns on the table that whilst it maybe a uniform technology set that helps shape UX, it’s still doing a lot of emulation and fakery to get to the point where most rich client technologies are today (HTML vs XAML vs MXML etc).

That’s all argumentative, so who’d you pick?

There the above working summaries overall and it really comes back to the question of making a decision. A decision like this is important and still necessary as when you start making architectural bets for the life of your next industrial grade solution, you need to line up how you’re going to present your connectivity to its vast user base.

Walking into a meeting and saying “all of the above” won’t fly, walking in and holding the posture of “right tool, right job” mantra also may make you feel like you’re a software mountain sage it does little for productizing ideas/solutions to a customer base who have a variety of IT environment(s) that are looking to your company as a lifeline to making the said decision.

Bottom line is someone somewhere has to be the one that says let’s go with “X, because…”

If I was asked today which one I’d pick out of the lot, given I’ve worked in all the above.

My bet for enterprise would be WPF for one simple reason – Windows 7.

Microsoft spent all of last year praising how successful Windows 7 was in terms of sales, record profits and so on. What I got from all that bravado was that whilst Windows 7 was stomping on Windows XP wind pipe, it also was replacing the old problem with a new. That is it won’t be something in which gets deleted from Enterprise machines that cubicle workers and field agents use today anytime soon.

That for me has a much further and greater ubiquity story than most either realize or choose to acknowledge.

iPads are definitely something that may get some traction going further in large business but ultimately it’s such a specialized decision that I think having those devices do anything outside of a HTML app in its first generation of solutions in the enterprise is something that I’d say isn’t a worthwhile bet (it’s still in pioneering mode).

WPF and WinForms will still have a much longer usage than most will also care to agree outloud but I think once Silverlights engines get shut down more and more the retreat position for most will be back to WPF whilst they wait for the whole WinRT story to stabilize.

Adopting WPF today gives you also some healthy amount of skills to target WinRT later on, but it also gets you into a position where there is a likely chance of some additional changes / upgrades should the WinRT vision fall flat (Which I’m thinking it may very well).

That’s what I’d say out loud, as I’d say this based simply on your HR recruitment potential, tooling story and lastly ubiquity related decisions that are made in organizations where little patience is given to solutions built in HTML of the past.

My opinion has now been noted, so what would you bet on and why?

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Future UX showreels.

Posted on by Scott Barnes
6

image There is something important you must do, in that if you are a regular reader of my blog and often read my rants about how UX this and UX that, then you need to get to the core of why I exist in this space.

Grab a beer, wine, Red Bull whatever your liquid of choice that kind of breaks you out of your mundane existence and sit down and watch the following videos. I guarantee you that if you’re not excited enough to crack open Flash, Silverlight, AfterEffects, Photoshop or whatever your software poison of choice is, then well, this space is simply something you’re not going to be great at – maybe good, but never great.

Warning: Do not sit too close to your monitor as drooling has been known to occur

(1) First

. Let’s do a lap around Mark Coleran’s private collection, I despise this guy’s talent and the constant opportunities he got to work on these projects and never once did he Skype me before hand asking for a chance to do them. *waves fist at Mark, damn you..daaaamn you!*..

Coleran Reel 2008.06 HD from Mark Coleran on Vimeo.

(2) Second

Microsoft has been slammed recently for lack of creative innovation. Look, its mostly true, the company does fumble a lot around this space but every now and then, they outsource to the right agency who manages to tell a story that exceeds peoples expectations of what the company is capable of. Microsoft Sustainability video by Oh, Hello in Seattle, is an example of this. If you suddenly don’t get all excited about Silverlight/WPF after this, then you’re just not into Microsoft.

(3) Third

This ones a local vision, but its from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). It’s there vision on how the future will look via the CBA. The comedian in me chuckles a little at the notion that if I ring the hotline i get an immediate answer from a bank manager, but, it’s not about that its about painting a vision and for that, I’ll bank with CBA. Would love to know which agency did this? (Anyone know?)

(4) Fourth

Back to Mr Coleran, he’s done it again that talented so and so  (UPDATE: Not Mark Coleran, its from Peter Menich and 27Forty Studios for Alcatel). I like this one as I look at the concepts used and I see a lot of commonality in patterns used in either today’s UI’s as well as some of the future UI’s that others have through-up as well. My thinking is that if its a common collective vision it stands a greater chance of becoming reality.

(5) Fifth

I love this concept of how mainstream media like magazine can be turned into more of a interactive experience – in that no longer just static pieces of information. Kindle, iPad, Courier etc are all hinting in this space so its not that far removed from fantasy vs reality.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

 

(6) Sixth

This one is kind of weird, I kind of feel like Homer Simpson in that episode he finds his facial features in a Japanese Video and getting freaked out but excited at the same time. I don’t mind this one as it kind of goes to the extreme end on how Augmented Reality could occur should the right eyewear or face shield be built (think IRONMAN). (Thanks to: infocycde for the link)

(7) Seventh

This is the minority report come to life, and its exactly how a concept that Mark Coleran worked on in a movie suddenly appears in real life, again, FUI meets reality. Thanks Mark for the heads up on this one!

oblong’s tamper system 1801011309 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

(8) Eighth.

Cynergy Systems have put together a brilliant presentation of how a portable device meets a surface table, whilst allowing a buying style concept to occur. It makes me think that whilst everything these days is pushing to be online that with this concept a store owner can still exist, but the physical component to a store doesn’t have to exist. In that you go into a store, speak with the store owner etc and simply drag the book into your device for purchase etc. I like this concept and what’s cool also about it is the fact its already done, it’s not so much a Fantasy User Interface for the future.

(9) Ninth

.<insert your find here> If you know of other showreels like this, please send me an email or drop a comment below with the URL, as I want to build out this page to include them all. I want them like a crack addict needs a new fix.

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Adobe the platform company that relies on other platforms.

Posted on by Scott Barnes
3

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In my twitter feeds I’ve been reading a lot of mixed opinions on Adobe, and given I often weigh in on all things Adobe, I thought I’d write down a few of my ideas on where I would take Adobe if I were CEO of the day and was talking on stage to the staff within (now that I don’t work for Microsoft I can express these opinions more in the light of day).

PDF vs SWF?

We are tools based company at present, we can replenish our market every two or so years, but this isn’t going to sustain us for too long. We need to spear heard the Enterprise in a way that allows our file formats to take on more of a de facto standard, much like PDF has today. We can expand more on the concept of “what is a document” further through the use of Flash technology. We however, must approach this concept from a completely different angle.

We must consolidate the two formats into one, but we must also provide developers and designers a HTML like experience in producing these formats. Our mandate is not to pick sides on the plug-in vs HTML battle, our mandate is to absorb both ideas at the same time.

We can provide interactive documents to those who want to go beyond the limitations of HTML today. We also want to enable these same documents to exist on the internet for those who don’t subscribe to this philosophy and a degraded experience isn’t a bad thing, it’s a palatable compromise. In other words, we need to ensure our future file formats work in all devices but done in a way that our tooling is the most superior.

HTML is Flash’s friend.

Browsers are our biggest competitor and at the same time ally. Enabling Flash technology to be injected as the preferred rendering engine for HTML5 will require us to open the runtime more. Instead of all or nothing approach which we have today, we should instead provide a turnkey based approach to this equation. At a core level, Flash should respect the current HTML standards we have today but provide a hook point for us to make additional changes on that suite different file formats outside of HTML.

HTML is still not portable, providing companies the ability to take their web like experiences into other software is our mission. Again, our PDF methodology is much the same as what HTML is today, the difference is we provide a much richer experience in around presenting document based experiences. We stand a greater chance of allowing Microsoft Office works to produce interactive experiences that can work on multiple platforms and devices whilst stil adhering to intended experience being asked from such workers.

We must invite companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple to help shape this future as they do not want to be the tooling providers for our core audience – designers. They want the developer base and its a highly contest arena that we simply don’t have the manpower or finances to contest.

User Experience is our future.

Our customer base represent majority of all user interface design, we should and continue to own the way forward for these types of customers to move the human race forward. Our job is not to compete with Apple, our job is enable tools that empower companies like Apple to do better and more agile user experience assembly. If Apple want an Appstore, our job should of been to provide a tool that enables their customers to produce experiences for their devices – to a specification they need and we can respect. If Microsoft Windows Mobile 7 needs our help to enable their customers a tooling experience that helps design audiences create the next generation of mobile apps, we should be there. We shouldn’t be the platform in which runs these experiences, we don’t have permission to do so.

We are not a platform company. We are a creative experience company.

Our job is simple, provide the missing workflow required in order for platform companies to succeed, meaning we want to empower our design audiences to design for these platforms. Flash technology is simply our portable rich format, it is not a platform – it could be, but we aren’t able to sustain this investment for much longer if we should head down that path.

Humility

.When a company like Apple or Microsoft rejects us, act with humility. End the conversation with “I think we agree to disagree on this one”, finger pointing and passive/aggressive assaults will not yield answers to why they reject us – it simply puts more distance between us.

Instead, listen, understand why they are forbidden to use us in context to what we are doing above. Should Microsoft or Apple wish to compete with us in the tooling space around what we produce, then its clear we are doing something wrong. We are limiting their potential and that is the heart of where we must compete. Silverlight and QuickTime should never of existed, we should have had a solution in place that was palatable to their needs. We failed in that regard, none the less enabling Flash Tooling like experiences to produce Silverlight or QuickTime is where we can regain our strengths. Expression Studio is our competitor not Silverlight.

Summary.

Adobe have squandered a lot of potential in the last 10 years (inclusive of Macromedia). Their staff are aggressive behind the scenes and they often remind me of the “old skool Microsoft” where Kill Sun Kill Sun type attitude ended badly for the said company. Their assaults on both Apple and Microsoft has continued to backfire, yet there doesn’t appear to be any outwardly change in behavior. It’s time they consolidated their efforts into a consistent message behind PR / Marketing spin.

They own the design audience’ at the moment, this however is likely to change at the rate the current competitive climate is looking. Products like Acrobat and Flash are file format stories only, Photoshop, Fireworks etc are tooling to enable these file formats and others to succeed. LiveCycle and Coldfusion are a distraction and should be culled or handed off to the open source community grow on their own and in a manner that is passive to other brands.

Adobe are skating on some very thin ice with all the large powerhouse brands. They require permission for Flash / Acrobat etc to exist, and whilst on the PC there has been great success but those days are starting to wind down. Everytime an operating system is released on a device/pc, Adobe is not there. Customers are easily swayed to new things, and at the rate of where the industry is going, lock-outs are an acceptable process today.

Its easy for me to guess that Windows Mobile 7 will not ship Flash, it directly couter-acts Silverlight’s existence should it. iPhone/iPad/iNext will not ship Flash as Apple see no value in providing such experiences and more to the point video online is the contested space for Apple/Microsoft/Google – so sacrificing that for Flash isn’t palatable at this stage for all involved.

OSX, Windows 7 and beyond doesn’t come with Adobe technology pre-installed now, the saving grace right now is there is a deeply seeded saturation of file formats such as SWF on the web today. That being said, the more lock-outs that occur the less powerful this argument becomes – as it puts downward pressure on webmasters to start considering avoiding using these or albeit provide alternative file formats to solve the said problems.

Adobe need to now ready, aim, fire and less ready, fire, aim.

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Revolutionary Incremental UX Going unnoticed.

Posted on by Scott Barnes
1

Friday I was on a flight from Perth to Melbourne and was watching the movie IRONMAN on my iPhone (3hr flight – welcome respite from Qantas’ usual propaganda TV). I love this movie for a number of reasons mostly because every time i see the FUI (Fantasy User Interfaces) it just gets my creative mojo going again. I find these types of Hollywood movies inspirational and firmly believe they bleed out into real life and affect UX designs world-wide.

One scene did catch my eye, it was a scene where the guy from Mad Money tells everyone to sell stocks in Stark industries.

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I chuckled at seeing this scene, as for me I can’t but help laugh at the fact here we have this fantasy based device that 3 years ago, made people drool at the very idea of its existence. Fast forward to today, Apple announces the iPad which is probably the closest looking device of this kind on the actual market and has received mixed reviews, mostly how it lacks innovation.

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Innovation, what does that mean? Wikipedia says:

The term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products .

Incremental and revolutionary are often not allowed to be used in the same sentence as they kind of fight with one another in terms of adhering to people expectations.

image For instance, I’ve often heard Microsoft Surface table being declared a “missed opportunity” and I can’t but help disagree with that remark. Today for instance I ordered a Dell Multi-Touch monitor and a new Dell Laptop with Windows 7. 1 year ago, it didn’t exist, today it does. Microsoft Surface did it’s job, it dared the mainstream hardware manufacturers to beat it in an open market place, it provided the necessary research and development skills to the Windows team to ensure multi-touch was baked into the next operating system (which has recently reported enormous growth potential). It’s expected by 2012, multi-touch devices are going to be as normal as a mouse/keyboard – yet, 5 years ago, it didn’t exist.

10 months ago, Silverlight was just a plug-in, today it’s a plug-in that sits within a browser but also has the option to pop out of the browser, sit on your desktop and then get this – have a browser within itself. It’s fast becoming a concept where you have browser meets desktop and the division between desktop client and browser start to blur.

Approx 2 years ago, Steve Ballmer wrote off the iPhone as just some luxury device that wouldn’t sell as well as folks believed it to. He was partially right, the iPhone hasn’t sold as much as people think, but what it did do was light a huge fire under the mobile device markets butts. Now, today, you’re being bombarded with “iPhone” envy based devices.

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My overall point is this, somehow we are owed more yet we don’t seem to take time out to pause and reflect on what we have before us. User Experiences is a prominent fixture in our daily lives now, the “good enough” approach is fast becoming taboo, we are innovating and we are doing it via revolutionary increments. The software industry is probably at its most exciting point in time, its the time when operating systems and devices need to bring more to the table than they have that or find ways to expose what they have in a more UX favored light (innovation is often also hidden deep within the bowels of existing technology, waiting to be exposed).

Steve Jobs this week allegedly called Adobe lazy and in the same breathe cited HTML5 as the future. I agree Adobe have been lazy and immature for quite some time (its the core of my frustration with the brand) but I disagree with HTML5. The reason I disagree with HTML5 as i feel it goes backwards in innovation and not forward, its an incremental growth spurt that is taking forever to land. What happens with HTML5 thereafter? what’s next?

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I’ll buy an iPad for the same reason it was shown in the movie IRONMAN as for me its going to be my interactive tv and newspaper in one. Fit for initial purpose to be exact. I bought a multi-touch capable computer now, because i want to implement some ideas I’ve had for quite some time, albeit implement my Fantasy UI.

I’ll continue to look at every device I can find that touches on User Experience and look at it from the lens of “What does it do? and what will it inspire its competitors to do?” and then judge it a success or failure. Incremental change needs to come from lessons learned.

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Links you should click on:

Learn to Appreciate Technology

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iPad is still missing iPlugin due to Compete wars

Posted on by Scott Barnes
1

image I am currently sitting in a hotel in Perth, working on a presentation about Silverlight and at the same time like most people around the world, listening or reading as much information as I can find regarding the new Apple iPad.

Firstly, I like the device and it fits my needs well given I travel a lot and often want to read, watch movies and play stupid games like “Dig It” in Airports or Planes etc. It’s a great device fit for purpose with me, others may find it useless.

How you feel about the device aside, the part that left me uneasy is simply that this will be yet another device to ignore outside technology like Silverlight or Flash. My first instinct is wave my fist at Apple and plead with them to please allow a more open after-market add-on access much like Apple OSX does today.

It however isn’t really just Apple, its pretty much the entire industry today. There is such a competitive marketplace now in around folks trying to dominate the web for profit, that it’s in turn kind of stifled a lot of potential experiences that we as consumers could have.

iPad for example has a nice comfortable looking “surf the web on your couch” feel to it, but you’d probably spend about 20mins on the device before you start seeing a lot of whitespace with this little box in the middle, which represents “oops, this site uses Flash..oh well..” mentality attached to it.

Already your experience is reduced and is this the website it self’s fault or is it Apples?

I’d argue its both these two entities and also Adobe’s – and Microsoft’s etc.

I think what needs to happen going forward is a turnkey functionality approach to the plug-ins, in that unless something like this happens Apple will continue to protect their backyard from invasion of 3rd party plug-ins; it invites a lot of competitive threat to their vision. Microsoft will do the same with devices like XBOX 360 etc and Adobe will push Flash’s agenda well beyond the “it’s just a plug-in, honest” agenda as its no secret they want to own the UX Platform for the web – albeit SWF is the vNext HTML in allot of their eyes ( A vision which concerns Google, Apple and Microsoft).

Google just want you all to stay out of the plug-in space and stick to HTML as it’s more palatable to their business goals. HTML Zealots will cheer but I can’t but help think that HTML is so 1990’s and lacks depth around engaging experiences.

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This is all grand and its interesting to once be in the thick of this competitive nonsense, but in reality we are suffering from a technology stand-off. A lot of great concepts are being presented to the world today, but they are being narrowed down to an obvious competitive stink – disallowing the consumers to gain a richer experience with their chosen purchase.

I think the only way that this can work going forward, is that the plug-in providers such as Microsoft and Adobe probably need that turn-key approach to the products. In that instead of getting the whole hog Flash or Silverlight, you in turn get partial bits instead.

Why?

This enables companies like Google/Apple for example to show face and sacrifice a little to gain more, while at the same time it underpins Microsoft and Adobe’s vision further than what they have to play with today.

It also still allows websites like MSN, CNN etc to still have plug-in experiences and should have little or no impact to what they use the plug-ins for today. As lets face it, most of the broken experiences that you are blocked on in mainstream sites like this are either Video, Informative Slide like experiences or Ads. Are they using webcam? pixelshaders etc? no, not really.

It won’t happen though, as companies like Apple will continue to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It just is a shame that an opportunity like the iPad gets fumbled due to the current competitive landscape. As personally, I really don’t care if Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight wins out in the end. I just want to enjoy the experiences.

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Adobe Open Screen Project – reality check.

Posted on by Scott Barnes
2

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Despite what some folks in the Adobe community think, I’m actually still a big fan of Flash and what it represents. I do however hold Adobe up to a much higher standard than I did with Microsoft, as for me they have shown endless amounts of potential but have in my opinion squandered through either in-fighting or misalignment with the rest of the industry.

I’ve read a many a post on the “Open Screen Project” and whilst the concept of putting Flash Runtime on multiple devices etc is quite an appealing concept, I just don’t see them pulling it off beyond a few million units here and there. It’s a reality check that I think a lot of the Adobe staff need to take a step back and review.

Putting Flash on the iPhone or vNext desktop device is the easy part and I don’t think a lot of companies are realistically against that idea on it’s own. They would be typically skeptical of the technical dependency when you start too look beyond the “Open” PR spin and start focus on the tooling and ecosystem surrounding it.

Adobe just don’t have the developer numbers to support a sophisticated ecosystem it requires. There are a lot of exceptionally talented programmers in the Adobe community, some of which are fighting well above their weight – these however aren’t the majority. Adobe needs more of a groundswell of developers, ones that typically hail from either .NET, PHP or JAVA as their previous breeding ground. To date, they haven’t yielded that as fast as they should/could.

Adobe have been plagued with getting their community to move from ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 over to ActionScript 3.0 and for the past 2-3 years that’s been a campaign of there’s in motion (i.e. being a little more aggressive in ensuring future roadmaps lock the next generation of ActionScript etc into place, essentially what I call a “duress adoption”). They’ve also recently started picking up on the reality that Microsoft fears daily, PHP has become the 800lb gorilla. There are quite a groundswell of PHP developers out there who don’t typically favor Adobe or Microsoft in a lot of ways and are more than happy to punch out solutions built in a HTML/CSS/JavaScript sandbox.

So why me, someone with little PHP experience? I’ve always felt like evangelism is about growing your developer community and developer relations is about helping the community you have – Ryan Stewart, Adobe Evangelist.

Adobe needs to court these folks and fast, as if they can get these folks to switch gears into the Adobe community lifestyle, they in turn and increase there developer base in a much more significant way than they have in the past by pounding at the Java and/or .NET developer doors.

Assuming they fix the Developer base, they next need to convince OEM manufacturers that their tooling isn’t the liability in this equation. I say that, as whilst its fun and 10x more productive to build Flash based solutions via Adobe specific tooling, this in turn creates effectively a liability in around the concept of being “”Open”. It’s not really Open, its more of a half-hatched Open concept, as producing a SWF outside Adobe tooling is actually not a likely thing to occur in the industry. The reason being is, whilst you can technically make your own SWF, you are still required to fall into line with Adobe’s roadmap and vision of where it all heads.

Implementing software which creates SWF files has always been permitted, on the condition that the resulting files render "error free in the latest publicly available version of Adobe Flash Player." – Wikipedia.com

Point is, that whilst their intentions are righteous and feel open, you have to face reality that this is just shifting the boundaries on a total lock-in and instead of declaring the Runtime and File Format as completely locked, its really the tooling story behind it is where the money tree begins. After all, Adobe aren’t in this business for free, they have shareholders and a $3billion+ fiscal profit expectation to meet.

The tooling component to this equation is really the bottleneck as could you imagine what would happen if say ActionScript 3.0 and Flash were solutions that a Visual Studio .NET developer could write inside the said tooling? It would have a huge impact on both sides of the isle roadmaps that’s for sure.

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