Spark Europe 2005
Wednesday 30 November 2005 ◷ 19:12
From the 16th to the 18th of november I was attending Spark Europe 2005 in Amsterdam. I kind of forgot whether the really cool stuff was already available in the version 8 player or the alpha version of the 8.5 player, but in the near future Flash will offer interesting things, that's for sure.
But the program also made me think, or it could just be the track I followed, or wishful thinking on my part: The Flash IDE is dying... Adobe is taking over and even when Adobe applications have a rep for being not very intuitive in their GUI, the Flash IDE is even worse. I'm sure Adobe can come up with something better than the Flash IDE to edit .flas, and After Effects is just the beginning. So "Flash" will be more focused on the player itself, the VM, bytecode, server communications and things like that, in both the regular and Lite version, while swf development will be integrated in the Adobe CS product line. Maybe swf and pdf merge at some point or one will be a container format for the other. For Flex development Macromedia has developed an Eclipse plug-in, which to me already seems like abandoning the Flash IDE.
The future of the Flash player is depending on how big they are able to make the download. In broadband-land - like The Netherlands - Flash sites aren't even aimed at modem users anymore. ADSL rules the nation and Flash stuff is big. So what could Flash do when the player can have a ten times heavier payload? From a development point of view Flash is still lagging behind fully-blown programming environments like .Net, Java, Perl and alike, just like Flash Lite lags behind Flash for footprint purposes. It would be nice to have common libraries incorporated in the player so Flash becomes a platform with more capabilites. And then I'm not talking about dynamically loading PNG and stuff, but doing tricks like qemu.
And some of the cool stuff depends on the endusers: do they have an operational webcam, and will they allow sites to use their webcam as part of the application? I doubt it will take off, because PCs are about the only devices with a webcam. Game consoles don't have them as standard, office workstations don't need such a security/privacy risk, people don't have them on their home-entertainment systems, and most of them make you look as bad as you sound on a cellphone: flat and broken up. Maybe with a new generation of webcams the available Flash functionality will become popular.
(This post could be longer than intended because I'm typing this on the 1600x1200 part of my iBook graphics)