My Flash Platform Year In Review

I’m sitting in my room at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas waiting to go and see UFC 79. It is now almost expected that a blogger do some kind of year in review post. What follows is my ramblings of what I remember from last year. The biggest event for me was obviously my move from frog design to Adobe. The good news is that my time at Adobe has been even cooler than I had imagined.

While I was still working at frog I got to work on some pretty cool projects including the WPF-powered Yahoo Messenger, the Disney Travel AIR application, and many more that I still can’t talk about. Going to Apollo Camp at the SF Adobe headquarters was a very wise move as it got me talking to Mike Chambers and Mike Downey about the onAIR Bus Tour. This led to frog securing the design work for the tour and I got to build the accompanying website. Working close with the Adobe guys was great and it obviously led me to want to work all the time with these guys.

Through my work on the site I got invited to actually go on the first leg of the tour which was an amazing opportunity for me. This cross-country traveling allowed me to hone my presentation skills and also allowed me to work closely with the rest of the evangelism team. It was at some point on the bus that the idea first surfaced about me joining the team. The rest is history.

My first day on the job with Adobe was the New York stop of the onAIR Bus Tour. Not a bad first day. From there we went to Adobe MAX in Chicago. It was my first time at MAX and I was impressed with what Ted Patrick put together. Next up was FITC Hollywood which again was my first time at one of their conferences. It was also a great conference and it was a pleasure to speak there.

Next up was the European User Group Tour which consisted of Mike and I taking trains around Europe speaking to the various Adobe user groups. This was probably the highlight of my year since it was great to meet so many designers and developers that were excited about our technologies. Ten cities in two weeks was really tough but it was my first time in most of these places so I was pretty excited just to be there.

So what were the most important things that happened with the Platform this year? That’s tough since there were so many announcements over the course of year. There were a few things that seem particularly important.

The continuing maturity of AIR and the tremendous response from the community is definitely a positive. I spent most of the year talking about AIR and had a lot of fun creating sample applications.

Microsoft trying to grab some of Flash’s market share with Silverlight is something that definitely kept us all on our toes. This is seen as a positive by most as it will only make Flash stronger in the end.

Papervision3D continuously impressed the community by pushing Flash further than anyone thought was possible. Event the engineers on the Flash team were blown away by what they saw. This has led Adobe to work closely with the PV3D team for future endeavors into the third dimension.

The many announcements at MAX were really something that shook up the community. Thermo, which is a new design tool for Flex, probably got the most buzz. This will be an amazing tool for Flex developers who don’t want to work with the Flash IDE. Flash Player 10, code-named Astro, was demoed and showed some exciting new features like basics 3D, advanced text rendering, and a new filter language called Hydra.

The whole slew of Adobe open-source announcements generated a bunch of buzz. I’m not one who is that excited about this stuff but I thought I should at least mention it.

The recent announcement of BlazeDS, which is an open-source AMF remoting package, is exciting if only for the fact that it now legitimizes libraries like AMF-PHP, which before now were technically not even legal.

It wasn’t all good though. Flash and Flex still seem like they are created by two different companies. The addition of Thermo will add the complexity of the “what should I do where?” problem. The evangelism team’s job is only going to get more complicated as the number of tools grows. The Flash IDE is having an identity crisis and there needs to be better communication with community about where it is headed. Guess what? That’s my job and I plan on making it a priority for 2008.

I suck at writing closing summary paragraphs so I’ll just leave it at that. I have to take a shower and go down and watch Wanderlei knock out Chuck.

Lee

PS – gotoAndLearn version 2 will be live the first week of 2008.