 | Flash makes its moveMay 15th, 2008 |
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.
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