Flash: Looking Back, Looking Forward - New Directions
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The Internet is not television, Downy pointed out, so there is a need to get away from the "television metaphor" of passively watching. "Burger King's Subservient Chicken was the trendsetter," Downy says of the well-known web site that allowed visitors to type in commands to a man dressed in a chicken costume, who would then do what the command told him to do. (The Subservient Chicken site is still going strong). The addition of interactivity to Flash adds a whole new layer to the user experience.
Indeed, Adobe's latest version of Flash uses a whole new codec to make it easier to create interactive video content. It also significantly increases the quality of the video. There are a number of ways that developers have taken advantage of this ability. For example, at Red Bull's web site, sports (and particularly races) play a major role. With many videos, users can control the camera angle at which they view a race. Flash also allows users to view synchronized data next to the main video -- for example, to show the air speed and other supplemental information next to the video of an airplane race.
A major plan for the future is to make Flash interact better with other products, especially Adobe's. Naturally, this was very difficult up until last year, since Adobe and Macromedia were rivals in the marketplace. The next version of the Flash authoring tool, however (codenamed "BLAZE") will feature support for Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects, with integration of the rest of Adobe's products to "happen incrementally over time," according to Downy. For example, in the next version developers will be able to bring a mock-up of something they were working on in Photoshop into Flash.
Another important direction for Flash is the mobile market. Here again, the use of vector graphics in Flash Player delivers a competitive advantage, because the content automatically adjusts to the size of the screen. Additionally, since Flash was created in the early days of the Internet, a lot of the solutions that the company came up with for the problems of making it run well over slow connections give the software a competitive advantage for running on mobile devices. For example, content automatically streams to the Flash Player and starts playing before all of it is received, reducing the amount of time a user has to wait before he or she views it.
In fact, Adobe has been working on getting support for the Flash engine on mobile devices for years. "We've just worked out a deal with Qualcomm that will allow content developers to deliver the Flash Player over the air to any BREW-enabled device," Downy notes.
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