“We’re making video easier to work with, we’re giving better mobile options and we’ll have a much better user interface,” said Doug Benson, leader of the Flash development team.
Although Macromedia declined to name firm release dates, the company said it will make available new versions of its Flash Player, authoring tool and content-delivery technology for cell phones.
The company emphasized improvements in speed, clarity, ease of use and compatibility.
“This is the biggest Flash update ever,” said Kevin Lynch, chief software architect. “We’ve included radical new video and text-rendering quality. Video is a huge new trend for the Flash Player.”
Lynch said Flash Player is a preferred application for presenting video because, unlike products from competitors Microsoft, Apple and RealNetworks, it is ubiquitous on users’ desktops.
To drive the point home, Macromedia execs showed a presentation that poked fun at the steps users sometimes have to go through, such as choosing bandwidth rates and the appropriate technology, to watch videos online.
“When you hit the ‘play video’ button on a website, it should play video,” commented Mike Downey, technical product manager for Macromedia’s Flash authoring tool. “It shouldn’t take you to a page where you have to pick a player and a speed to view the video.”
Downey said Flash Player 8 eliminates these steps because most people already have the player on their PCs, and the player has automatic bandwidth protection.
According to Lynch, recently completed deals with Nokia and Sansung will put Flash Player on most cell phones sold within the next two years.
Lynch added that the upcoming 8ball version of the Flash authoring tool makes it easier for programmers to work with video and to create content for mobile devices.
Not everyone in attendance at the conference shared Macromedia’s excitement over Flash.
“Flash is the enemy,” fumed Stanford professor and open source advocate Lawrence Lessig during a conference workshop.
Because Flash is a proprietary technology and its use is subject to “outdated copyright law,” it does not meet modern programmers’ demands for openness and sharing, Lessig said.
Lynch addressed Lessig’s criticism during his presentation by demonstrating a new button software authors can use to automatically make their source code available.
“Flash has always been very open,” he said. “We’re all sharing information with each other. Now you can share your content and your source code. You can even make your own link to your source code to share it, and I encourage you to do that.”
However, there were other critics in attendance besides Lessig.
Several programmers at the Flash workshop pointed out that Google does not index pages written in Flash as well as it does pages written in HTML, SHTML, ASP and PHP because it treats the page as a single file and calculates keyword ratios based on total word count on the site.