Adobe to the MAX

Adobe held its annual MAX conference in Los Angeles in October. Tim Anderson was on the scene.

HardCopy Issue: 46 | Found In: Design & Media | Published: 01/11/2009 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

Adobe used its global MAX conference to launch a new phase in its campaign to make the Flash player a universal runtime for applications as well as multimedia. Flash Player 10.1, in public beta shortly, will be the first release to be fully consistent across both desktop and mobile devices (previous mobile versions have been cut-down). In addition, Adobe announced wide support for Flash from mobile partners including Windows Mobile, Palm for webOS, Google for Android, Nokia for Symbian and RIM for Blackberry, all of whom will be working with Adobe to get Flash Player 10.1 on their high-end devices. The glaring omission is Apple, whose iPhone browser lacks any support for Flash. Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch emphasised that the problem is Apple’s to solve. “In order to get Flash to run in the browser on the iPhone we need Apple to support the APIs for enabling Flash to plug into Safari and those APIs don’t exist today,” he said. “We need Apple’s co-operation.” Adobe is keenly aware of the importance of Apple’s product in mobile. Apple recently announced over 2 billion downloads from its iPhone App Store. Therefore, Adobe unveiled a workaround at MAX with a new compiler that converts a Flash application to native code for the iPhone. Applications for iPhone will initially be a feature of Flash Professional in the forthcoming Creative Suite 5, but will eventually be part of the code-oriented Flash Builder as well. Although the workaround does not bring Flash to the iPhone browser, it does give developers a new way to create applications for the App Store. Another new feature of Creative Suite 5 is Flash Catalyst, for which a new beta was released at MAX. Adobe’s positioning of Catalyst is evolving. Originally it was primarily a means of converting assets such as Photoshop mock-ups into functional Flex applications. Designers can import images, designate parts of the image as controls, and Catalyst will automatically create corresponding components. Catalyst projects can be exported to Flash Builder, formerly known as Flex Builder, though it is a one-time step: round-tripping is not possible. Image conversion remains important, but Adobe is now emphasising Catalyst’s broader scope as an interaction designer. Using Catalyst, designers can create simple applications and export them directly to a Flash SWF or to Adobe AIR. The new beta also adds support for video and sound. Long-term, Adobe plans to integrate the three Flash IDEs more tightly, so Flash Builder will become an advanced editor for Flash Professional, and Flash Professional (perhaps along with Catalyst) will become advanced visual designers for Flash Builder. The forthcoming Adobe AIR 2.0, the desktop wrapper for the Flash runtime, is getting the ability to execute native applications on the local machine. This will enable developers to integrate more tightly with applications like Microsoft Office.

Flash in the Enterprise

Everyone has Flash, as Adobe never tires of pointing out; according to the statistics site riastats.com Flash is installed on over 97 per cent of active Web browsers. Still, the truth is that the majority of Flash content is marketing and advertising. How credible is Flash as a runtime for enterprise applications? At MAX, developers from Lab49 addressed this scepticism by presenting an application created for Morgan Stanley for financial trading. Developed by 30 Flex programmers over 18 months, and including over 600,000 lines of code, it is a large-scale project that uses best-practice design patterns based on the Cairngorm 3 architecture. The team expressed their satisfaction with Flash as a runtime, though like other developers they find the ActionScript language a little behind alternatives like Java and C#. MAX also saw the announcement of LiveCycle ES2, a suite of 14 server-side products for creating applications based on Flash and PDF. A particularly interesting piece for developers is LiveCycle Data Services, which sits between Java application servers and Flash clients to simplify and optimise their interaction. The new release of LiveCycle introduces the Mosaic Framework, which lets you create composite applications in which each panel connects to different LiveCycle services, creating a customised portal. Together with other Flex components, this will make it substantially easier to build LiveCycle clients. Adobe also promoted the concept of embedding applications into PDF documents or portfolios for a new kind of document-based application deployment. An odd idea but it can make sense for things like smart forms. A highlight of MAX is the Sneak Peeks section, where we get to see products under development that may or may not ship. Attendees loved a feature called Photoshop intelligent hole-filling which removes unwanted objects and replaces them with other parts of the image for a seamless effect. Another feature shows that Adobe has not given up on HTML: Smart Paste takes Flash animations or Illustrator graphics and renders them on the HTML 5 Canvas element. Other sneak peeks looked eerily familiar to those who know Microsoft’s platform: pause and continue in the Flex debugger, and integrated client and server development for ActionScript projects, both of which are similar to features already in Visual Studio.