Last week we got back from Adobe Max in Chicago.
It feels like it took a week to decompress all the info we took in. A lot of big things are happening with Flash, and it’s pretty exciting. Some of the most exciting stuff:
1. Adobe Air: Imagine any Flash or Flex web application. Now imagine it running natively on the desktop with no browser, on either Mac or PC.
The only caveat is that the Air runtime environment needs to be installed first, but once a major company or web app (i.e. Facebook) pushes out an Air version, people will adopt this quick. Ebay’s app is a great example.
2. Future versions of the Flash player: Hot. That sums it up. I mean, .h264 HD video support, custom filters and (simple) 3D support? And thats just the Flash 9 player updates. The Flash 10 sneak peeks were out of this world. Although Flash’s current video codec of choice (on2vp6) is fantastic and allows for transparent video backgrounds, the .h264 codec supports much higher quality video while still keeping the bandwidth relatively low.
Flash Lite 3: The Flash Lite plugin has always come across as too weak for Flash devs, yet on most phones always ran kinda slow. With the advent of more powerful cell phones and the new flash lite plugin, things are getting closer to mimicking the web, like .flv video support. Youtube for the masses’ cellphones will finally be here, not just for iPhones anymore ha ha.