Flash makes its move
This happened days ago, and I don’t know how I missed it. It’s the Open Screen Project, which boils down to Adobe making a big move with Flash.
What did they do, and what does it mean?
- The file formats will be open. Anyone can write their own player on any device, for free.
- Their player is free too, to integrate wherever.
- The protocols are open too.
Here’s a few ways to think about this:
One way to think about this is that Flash is trying to be OpenGL. In other words, it will be a device-agnostic, hardware-agnostic rendering technology and API. It has a ways to go, but of course, Flash 10 just launched its beta.
Another way to think about it is that Flash is trying to be Java. It wants ActionScript 3 to be the default development environment on every device, and then stuff written in it will be write-once, run-anywhere.
If you want, you can think of this as Flash wants to be the OS. It would be the virtual machine and the runtime environment for apps, both in a browser and standalone. You’ll have your machine OS, then you would use a common suite of apps both in AIR on your desktop and in browsers.
Lest you think that I am overstating this last one, note the partners in the initiative. This is aimed at putting Flash as the default player on devices that don’t have operating systems — like TVs and set-top boxes — as well as phones and other devices.
The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.
The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.
Is this good? Well, sure, except that having one provider is bad, and Flash is still kind of kludgey in many ways. But my whole “Flash is the new console” just took on some hefty new meaning. And of course, it will take time for this sort of direction to come to fruition. I expect to see bunches of SWF libs and DLLs popping up for every language under the sun as soon as this project gets seriously underway.
This of course has implications for the 3d web sort of thinking. if there’s truly a default player on any device that provides standardized rendering APIs and a network layer (a bad one for arbitrary purposes, btw — needs UDP support!) then why would you choose to develop native clients? With the device layer APIs open, native device hardware support can be added to players for each platform — think native acceleration for a given platform. Heck, Flash itself might conceivably handle things like device fallback levels for you.
Or all these newfangled things might not get adopted. 🙂 As was pointed out to me by a co-worker, Flash 8 didn’t get widely adopted, after all.
Still, something to watch.
7 Responses to “Flash makes its move”
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With flash as a console and running on all kinds of hardware, it would create interface issues like none we’ve ever seen. I think it would be fantastic.
You could make a game that works with your mouse and keyboard, a touch screen, a remote (or wiimote), and so on. You could specialize your game for any one of those if you wish.
The whole concept of console wars and peripherals would begin to evaporate, or transform, or do something crazy.
I like all of this.
The “flash player as universal console” idea can be seen as the plan, or perhaps this is Adobe surrendering to the inevitable and wanting to be ahead of the curve this time instead of trailing. The thin-is-in meme is dieing on the sword of the rich client experience for the common users who see the web as a source of entertainment. This is not true in the business systems where high rates of exchange of just-in-time information are the products. There the creeper technologies are the db-to-RAD-to-app products that enable a SQL Server/Visual Studio team to get to publication with medium large database systems fast and cleanly without the cat-herding problems.
As to it coming down to ‘one provider’, I think it like the ‘one world government’ fear. It just won’t happen. Alliances are too fragile and greed is too strong a motivator. This is like the political parties in America: loose coalitions of petty groups that hate each other but hate the other party’s coalitions more. It is a reliable source of chaos and chaos is still the engine of evolution.
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This is Adobe. One thing to factor in is their previously successful strategy with PDFs. This would fall in line with the Flash-as-console line of thinking: PDFs are to documents what packaged Flash apps will be to cartriges.
Not that consoles use cartridges any more, but still. :p
I am not entirely convinced that Adobe is telling us what their intent is. My guess is that they are trying to fight off SVG and Silverlight on the mobile platform and that there are issues here that are not reported in the news. I could be wrong, but as the format has been available for a while with fine-print-added, I’d be suprised if they turn 360 degrees and go full open source.
I view Flash as a least-common-denominator technology. If they start to require expensive hardware to play all Flash files then they are shooting themselves in the foot IMO. I hope for their own sake that they don’t try to be OpenGL. They should try to be a client-side “Java console” for casual/business, i.e. stay pervasive, but forget about the hardcore minority. Flash files should be bounded by the CPU and average memory configuration, not GPU and other specialties. I like the hassle-free write-once run-anywhere philosophy even if it means sacrificing performance on more capable platforms.
Great article!Thank you!
[…] briefly noting that the Open Screen Initiative, which I have mentioned before (1, 2), seems to be moving into higher gear. The company will on Monday announce its latest version of […]