Ted Patrick - Flash Platform @ Adobe Systems
Note: This is the personal blog of Ted Patrick. The opinions and statements voiced here are my own.
Flash - An open interactive medium
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Published
Monday, February 22, 2010
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9:06 AM
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Flash is an open interactive medium. In creative hands it can be used to build advertising, documents, video experiences, games, applications, art, music, graphs & charts, meetings, graphics, 3d content, and much much much much more. Flash was a success long before video arrived on the web and given open ended capability of the medium it will be around for a very very long time.
One problem with Flash is that as an open interactive medium, designers and developers can do anything with it and often do. There are no SWF approval police or terms of use for Flash content, it is the wild west of interactivity. This freedom has allowed Flash to create simultaneously both the best and worst user experiences on the web. Many users have a negative experience with web advertising but that doesn't make de-facto medium, Flash, bad. Many developers push Flash to its technical limits and fail to optimize their content in regards to CPU and memory consumption. Developers are allowed to openly succeed or fail with Flash without restriction. Platforms should never limit creativity, they should enable it openly and this strikes at the core as to why Flash has succeeded for so long. Flash is truly an open interactive medium where anyone can succeed or fail.
Flash will never stop innovating both inside and outside of Adobe. The Flash ecosystem is one of the greatest in terms of creativity and technical ingenuity. Internally we are constantly shocked by what developers are trying to accomplish with the medium. Internally Adobe is focused on building a quality high performance platform to support the new and emerging use cases of Flash. Moving forward we will see amazing capabilities added to Flash that rival the last 10 years of innovation on Flash Platform.
We are days from seeing the full scope of the Flash Player 10.1 and there are lots of improvement in quality and performance we have never talked about. For the next few weeks I am going to be highlighting key improvements within Flash Player 10.1 with the help of the Flash Player team. There is a ton of amazing engineering to talk about and I am very excited about Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 arriving this week.
Flash is an amazing medium and is truly limited only by the design creativity and developer quality applied to it.
Flash Forward!
Ted :)
UPDATE: "open" links related to Flash
SWF Specification - Make your own player to run SWF.
AMF3 Specification - Exchange serialized data with Flash Player.
Tamarin Virtual Machine - The vm in Flash Player is open source here.
Open at Adobe Video
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I, for one, am really excited by the upcoming advancements of the Flash Platform. As more API's become available in the run time the more creativity you will see from the countless designers and developers in the world. Sure, these experiences might not be perfect for every device or user, but thats not the point. Its about a platform that lets you easily realize your ideas and easily distribute them to the people who want it. Long live Flash.
Since Flash is open now, can you post a link to where I can download the source?
Yeeeeeeeeeeeee-Haaaaaaaw!!!!!
I believe you're correct on all that you state. I wonder though if it is feasible to make a task manager type setting for users to control the RAM and CPU usage etc. for Flash Player.
Take for example that old in-line settings thingy. I assume it's like moving mountains getting that thing out--but it even hits the 15 second timeout on an otherwise performant machine. Maybe trash that thing and make a dialog that gives users control.
Maybe then I wouldn't see runtime exceptions on banner ads (yes, I have the debug player).
I think there "should" also be a similar control panel for AIR.
I don't think there's any access users have (except maybe through some non-civilian pref files).
Anything like that coming? I think Adobe has done well to encourage well behaved apps... that code performance tool for example. More of that (but for the consumer) might be useful.
"it can be used to build ..."
Don't forget to mention the area of e-learning where Flash is an important component to build interactive, multimodal, engaging and visually appealing content!
I find it difficult to swallow "One problem with Flash is that as an open interactive medium, designers and developers can do anything with it and often do."
I dont like that stance at all. Here you give us some great software, take credit for all the great Flash experiences on the web, yet the bad ones are the fault of the developers.
You have to own the positive critique as well as the negative. Those bad developers are still your customers and your platform will be remembered just as much for the memory hogging apps as the optimised ones.
Anonymous:
Source for Flash Player VM: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
Source for Flex SDK/Compiler/Debugger:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK
There are 3rd party codecs and code within Flash Player licensed by Adobe that we cannot release source to.
Bjorn,
Adobe does not restrict what is made with Flash. We do own the good and the bad and over time Flash has dramatically improved as an ecosystem. The days of "Skip Intro" and "Punch the monkey" are behind us but now we are seeing misuse of the number of Flash elements on a single page. We can encourage best practices but we do not limit customers, we enable them. When we do see great use of Flash we highlight it and help our customers succeed.
Ted :)
This is one of the reasons I'm starting a regional Adobe User Group. There was a conference today where there was so much mis-information, dis-information, and un-information (that's right, I just made it up, but it fits) regarding Flash, ColdFusion, and Adobe in general. And at a conference that was supposed to be about helping small businesses leverage leading technologies to help them better reach and engage their clients and customers. The irony is, the main driver of the conference is a web and marketing shop whose entire site is one big Flash file.
I'm not an evangelist, but man, I do love a challenge!
Adobe's leading the way and it shows by how many pundits and experts justify their meager offerings by trying to tear Adobe down.
Ted,
It was the Flash Player source code I was after. I thought you said it was an open platform?
I agree with Ted that developers who create slow and resource hogging Flash content are not Adobe's fault. Adobe takes steps to educate. I've seen many articles about optimizing Flash content from Adobe and others, but the bad developers don't seem care or realize that they're creating poor experiences.
Regardless, I think if Flash disappeared tomorrow and web content suddenly had to be all JavaScript and HTML (or even another plugin that didn't mysteriously disappear... haha), we'd still see the same people creating resource-hungry content.
Anonymous,
The Tamarin project is the VM within Flash Player, it is the source for the player VM.
"Open" and "open" have many meanings. Here is a video on Open at Adobe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNzrn8-JFSE
Ted :)
The number of beautiful experiences created for the iphone which I have truly enjoyed has already exceeded the number of flash experiences I have actually enjoyed in the last 10 years. (Unless you count every homestarrunner cartoon as a separate app.)
Plus... core animation doesn't stutter on a relatively slow iphone processor, let alone a wicked fast mac. A point that adobe has ignored for YEARS. (Why optimize for the 5% user base I'm guessing.) Can you really blame Jobs for saying "screw it"? I groaned when I heard that flash was going to be able to compile for the iphone.
I think this ignores the obvious problem that most people aren't very good, and generally create less than desirable experiences. A nice SDK with some patterns and rules here and there lets people who don't have a PHD in UX to create something I actually want to use.
Not to mention developing for Flash on the mac has gone to absolute crap in the last couple years. Flash Professional (and not to mention Fireworks) have become unstable behemoths with flaky UIs and persistent bugs (across MAJOR versions).
I don't think Adobe has done enough in the past 5 years to warrant this "that's not fair, don't tread on us" attitude.
As far as RIA's go.... RIP Flash. At least I hope.
@thinman -- please drop the Community team a line for some assistance getting your user group started!
We're at http://groups.adobe.com or adbegroups@adobe.com
Parts of the player that could help browser developers to better embed Flash Player in the future HTML5 are always closed source. Only those parts are important for Flash Player not to be forgotten in the next web evolution.
For that reason some argue that we need to ask Adobe to FULLY open source the Flash Player by signing a petition : http://www.openplayer.net/
Please sign and retweet.
Where can we find more info on the differences between FP 10.1 and Flash Lite 4? With all the excitement around FP 10.1 on Android devices, it's a bit confusing thinking FP 10.1 is a mobile only release, when we know it's a major desktop release as well.
I can't find anything talking about the upcoming Flash Lite 4 features, other than it will run AS3 content. Any more info?
Thanks,
iBrent
I think it's pretty obvious why the Flash Player internals are not open source. You have the usage of third party products and also the need to control product evolution and standardization.
I think is well within Adobe's rights to address recent "reality distortion fields" by pointing up the widespread use of the platform and, overall, how successful it has been.
i'am really excited by the upcoming advancements of the Flash Platform
can you post a link to where I can download the source? :)
and thank you
It is feasible to make a task manager type setting for users to control the RAM and CPU usage etc. for Flash Player.?