Adobe bought Macromedia in April of 2005, and the entire web development community has eagerly anticipated what would happen to Macromedia’s flagship product, Flash. The Flash environment has long been established as the end-all be-all of rich media on the internet, having been used for everything from cutting edge animations to creating super sexy application interfaces. With such a broad range of potential uses, many of us have long wondered where this application was going, and the purchase by Adobe only brought more questions to the table.
In 2001 Macromedia acquired Allaire, the company that owned and managed Cold Fusion, a small scale application development environment on the web. Competing with such technologies as PHP, dot NET, and JSP, Cold Fusion seemed like a natural extension to where Flash had been heading in the last few years – an application development environment.
Flash was a product originally called Future Splash and was developed as an animation tool for artists. There were some rather fun features such as a smooth line tool, and some built in morphing features that let designers turn one shape into another. All very exciting stuff, but really pretty pictures in motion at best – think cartoons.
Throughout the late 90’s and early 0’s Flash’s versions steadily became more geared towards programmers and less towards artists. The programming language ActionScript was rethought a number of times; resulting in a much cleaner and more modern object oriented methodology. New features like XML integration and the idea of application “Screens” started to work their way into Flash. Macromedia’s marketing spin became ever more focused on “creating rich internet applications” with the idea that IT folk could use the Flash environment to create a consistent audience experience for their serious minded business applications. While some fun extranet tools have been built, there are still just as many movie trailers and “oooh it spins” examples of Flash at work in Macromedia’s success stories today.
Would Macromedia be able to deliver what the IT world demanded out of a robust application environment just by acquiring Allaire? Nobody could say for sure, but the rather unexpected purchase of Macromedia by Adobe brought even their intention to do so under scrutiny. Adobe focuses very much on desktop applications for the design world, and while these programs are incredibly complicated and not only lead their market but rather define it – they’re not in the server business. Much of their product line actually competed with many of Macromedia’s products, leaving most observers thinking that many applications like Freehand, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver were going to be killed off. Cold Fusion itself seemed like more of a potential problem for Adobe to manage than a potential boon – and one can’t help but to wonder what Adobe’s vision for Flash is.
Adobe has recently released Flash 8, the first major version since the buyout, to the joy of the developer audience. Nothing huge has changed, but a great many little things have been improved. The development interface which had gradually been getting more and more convoluted finally has started to show some sense of sanity. Simple changes like allowing a compile without moving all sorts of windows around the desktop automatically make a tremendous change in the quality of life for your average coder. Fixes for complicated event model problems have started to slowly emerge, and Adobe started to add some fun bells and whistles as well. The most obvious is a set of new features that are reminiscent of Adobe Photoshop’s filters, allowing developers to programmatically create visual effects including the Blur and Distortion on bitmap images.
At Concrete, we take great pride in using the latest technology when there’s a good business case to do so, which we found with Flash 8. The masking animation you see at the top of this page (and other pages throughout out site) would have been impossible to pull off without a lot of brute force work in earlier versions of Flash. Now all we have to do is pass a few image names to a XML handler, and Flash will take care of the sexy image blur and rendering animation you see between each slide. There’s also improved handling of 3rd party content, including the SWF’s that popular screen capture software Camtasia produces. “It’s fantastic to see Adobe working with competitive products; they’ve got their own screen capture app called Captivate that doesn’t do what we need. To have developers at Adobe working collaboratively with the competitive product Camtasia to make sure there’s a seamless experience for us developers is just fantastic” says Franz Maruna, President of Concrete CMS.
About Concrete CMS
Concrete CMS is dedicated to making the web a useful place through simplifying content management. Based on open source technology, Concrete CMS is entirely object oriented and supports over 10,000 simultaneous users. The flexible architecture allows the rapid extension of core functionality. For over three years, Concrete has built online applications for organizations including Microsoft, Logitech, the Ad Council, and PECI.