Flash Turns 10

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Flash, the premiere platform for presenting audio and video on the web, turns 10 years old Tuesday. Over the last decade, the technology has grown from a simple sketch tool to a near-ubiquitous rich media application used by sites like MySpace.com, YouTube and Google Video to stream millions of video and audio files a day.

Flash began its life as SmartSketch, an illustration program for the stylus-driven Tablet PC. It was created by John Gay and Robert Tatsumi of Future Wave Software. The next version of the product -- renamed FutureSplash Animator in 1996 -- supported animations and came with a browser plug-in that let people watch animations embedded within web pages. This drew a great deal of attention from media companies like Disney, MSN and Fox Television, but also from the nascent web development software industry. Macromedia, a creator of tools for web content professionals, purchased Future Wave in December 1996 and renamed the product Flash.

Ten years and millions of "Click Here to Download Plug-in" screens later, Flash is everywhere. According to an NPD Online worldwide survey from April 2006, almost 98 percent of web users have the Flash Player installed on their computers.

Macromedia was acquired last year by its rival Adobe Systems, creator of Photoshop and Illustrator. On Tuesday, Adobe launched a microsite commemorating Flash's 10th birthday.

We spoke with Flash senior product manager Mike Downey about the history of Flash, some criticisms directed toward the software, and what's in store for the technology as Adobe steers it into its 11th year.

Wired News: Over its lifespan, Flash has gone from a way to display simple animations in the browser to a platform capable of presenting audio, video and full-blown applications. In your view, what were the major turning points along that road from presentation to interactivity?

Mike Downey: The first turning point -- hands down -- was the addition of the scripting engine in Flash version 4. That allowed developers to create games, interactive presentations and full-blown apps. That's when the entire Flash ecosystem radically changed.

We rewrote the scripting language in version 5 and called it ActionScript. I would argue even today that the single most important feature in Flash is ActionScript.

The next big turning point was the addition of support for video in version 6. Because of that, Flash has become the dominant video platform on the web. YouTube, Google Video, MySpace -- I could go on and on listing sites that use it. MySpace currently requires Flash Player 9 to access their default video and audio players. MySpace is actually the single biggest contributor to the penetration of our latest release.

When we originally added video to the Flash Player, it was more of an R&D project. There wasn't an executive decision to take over video on the web. But as we got it implemented and got it out on the market, all of a sudden, we realized that this is a great way for people to experience video. Users don't have to go download another player just to view video now. Instead of that old scenario where you'd have to click through nine different screens before you could start watching video -- pick your connection speed, choose a player -- you can avoid that whole process by going with Flash.

WN: The usability of Flash has been highly criticized throughout its existence, most notably by Jakob Nielsen in his famous essay, "Flash: 99% Bad." Even though things have improved, Flash is still faulted by some HTML purists and designers for being, in their words, totally unusable. How do you respond to that criticism?

Downey: There are so many proverbs that are applicable here, but one of my favorites is this: A great artist never blames his tools. With any technology, you can have poor implementation and poor usability. God knows that I've been to tons of HTML sites that were just terrible in terms of usability and have all sorts of issues.

What we're trying to do with Flash is create a feature-rich run time that's consistent across all of the platforms. That's something that has not been the reality for other web technologies. Browsers have not been consistent -- even the Java Virtual Machine is rarely consistent on different platforms. For the past 10 years, we've been able to say, "Here is a technology and a set of tools that allow you to create content once, then deliver it to a wide variety of platforms and know that it's going to work consistently."

We know Jakob quite well. We've worked with him and even published guideline papers with him. When it comes to bad usability, it's not necessarily about the tools or the technology. It's about helping designers understand how to build great content, usable content and accessible content.

The reality is that a technology like Flash makes it easy to create content that doesn't meet the requirements of some audiences. We're continuing to educate developers in order to try to solve these problems.

WN: Linux users have also criticized Adobe for its lack of support for the OS, most recently because of the absence of a Linux version of the Flash 8 player. What is the reason for this?

Downey: This is a very, very popular subject, and I'm glad you asked about it. First of all, we have a Linux player now. Flash Player 7 is available for Linux. We also provide players for Solaris and a whole slew of other platforms. We always build the Mac and Windows versions of our players first. That's the largest addressable commercial market for our products. Next, we have a section of our team go off and start working on the various distributions. Right now, we have a group working on the Linux version and a group working on the universal binary version for Intel Macs. The Mac-tel version of Flash Player 9 is in public beta right now.

The Linux version of the player is in very active development right now. We have several engineers working on it. That's one of the major misconceptions out there, that we have only one intern working on the Linux player. In fact, our lead engineer -- Mike Melanson, who is one of the best Linux engineers on the market -- has a public development blog. It's one of our highest-traffic blogs, because every time he says anything, thousands of Linux users link to it.

WN: Why was there no Flash Player 8 on Linux?

Downey: We decided to skip Version 8 on Linux and go straight to version 9 just because of the timing. We released Flash Player 8 in September 2005, and version 9 was just released recently in June 2006. Because of the short span between the versions, we thought it would be a waste of time to work on 8 and then turn around and work on 9 right away. So, we just skipped 8 and started working on version 9 for Linux a little early. It just made more sense.

WN: What about another gripe of the Linux community: the absence of a 64-bit version of Flash Player on Linux?

Downey: There's some confusion there. We haven't announced that we're not doing it. We said that the first version of the Linux player 9 won't be 64-bit. We're doing the 32-bit version first because that's the widest distribution of Linux clients out there, so it makes sense to start with the largest market. Once that is done, we'll decide on the timing for our 64-bit version.

That's the case with all of the OS flavors. Windows Vista is going to be available in 64-bit, as will Mac OS X. We haven't decided on our timing for any of the 64-bit releases, because the reality is that there just isn't much penetration right now. There's a very clear interest in 64-bit, and when that technology reaches a critical mass, we'll go after it.

WN: Looking toward the future, what advancements do you see for Flash as a presentation format? Or is the future entirely in interactive applications?

Downey: That's a good question. For the Flash authoring tool specifically, the focus will continue to be on the creation of interactive content and highly specialized sites, much like the kinds of experiences you see on FordVehicles.com and Nike.com.

WN: Will Flash play a part in media presentation on mobile devices?

Downey: We've been trying to get solid support for the Flash engine on mobile devices for about six years. It's been a tough nut to crack, but we've finally made significant progress there. We've just worked out a deal with Qualcomm that will allow content developers to deliver the Flash Player over the air to any BREW-enabled device.

WN: Recently, there's been some buzz about an Adobe Flash project called "BLAZE." Could you fill us in on what that is?

Downey: BLAZE is the code name for the next version of the Flash authoring tool. We're about halfway into development right now. The biggest thing we're focusing on this time is integration with existing Adobe products. Historically, we've found that a very high percentage of Flash users also rely heavily on Adobe's Creative Suite applications, especially Photoshop. In fact, over 90 percent of Flash customers also use Photoshop.

WN: Is it only Photoshop that will be integrated?

Downey: For the first development cycle, we have plans for integration within Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. Those are the products that our customers told us they'd most like to see incorporated into the Flash workflow. Integration of the rest of the products will happen incrementally over time.

We've only done some private demos (of BLAZE) so far, but I think that everyone will be really blown away by what we're doing with Photoshop and Illustrator.

Source

Adobe - Flash Tenth Anniversary