Adobe (and before them Macromedia) have long had a vision of Flash everywhere — in mobile phones; on set top boxes; and, of course, computers. I’ve never been a give fan of Flash, given its proprietary origins and I’ve had some truly terrible integration experiences with extremely high CPU load. It seems to me that Flash suffers from many of the same problems that early versions of many interpreted languages (Java, PHP) have — poorly written code that the optimizer has a hard time figuring out. Think of PHP before Zend or Java before Hotspot. Where are these products for the Flash ecosystem? Will Adobe allow their existence or foster their growth?
I had been thinking that Blu-ray and BDLive would lead us out of this morass with an open system for interactivity. However, it seems that the title authors have been slow to leverage this technology. Now I read recent announcements from Adobe, http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200904/042009FlashDigitalHome.html, that references many of the industry interests — content, distribution, silicon, software, operators — giving support for a Flash-based system that can be embedded in players (set top boxes, disc players). I, like Cactus Jack, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nance_Garner, don’t give too much credence to press release quotes as they lack any real commitment. However, in this release, I find the support from Sigma Designs to be particularly telling. If Sigma is going this route, that could dictate the universe for both packaged and electronically distributed media in terms of interaction. Bye-bye freedom of choice and innovation. This could be PostScript all over again.
Perhaps I’m a bit of a dinosaur with all this open source, free-as-in-freedom, ideology. The time for religous wars about this stuff is long over and I stopped bleeding in six colors or any other way over a decade ago. I’m on the lookout now for what the title developers do. If BD’s start coming with Flash, I’ll tip my hat to the new revolution (thanks Pete). But that supposes that BD’s continue to matter. And that’s a topic for another day…
[...] I know this will upset the flash crowd–but they’re prolly not my friend anyway after this. Social Networks in particular need to heed this or loose their following [...]