Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier to develop applications across devices—using Flash, of course. David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe’s platform business (which includes Flash/Flex, AIR, and Cold Fusion), says:

We believe it is time for an industry-wide movement for a consistent way to develop across the Web for PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.

To help the project along, Adobe is:

1. Opening up the runtime to its Flash player for the first time so that anybody can create their own customized player. Specifically, it is going to open up the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. In the past, developers had to sign agreements not to create derivative Flash players because Adobe wanted to avoid the fragmentation that Java experienced during its early years. But now it feels that Flash is a strong enough standard to withstand the introduction of some new evolutionary branches.

2. Removing licensing fees for Flash on mobile devices. While Flash is free on PCs, cell phone makers and other device manufacturers must pay a royalty fee. This was a $52 million business for Adobe last year. (Versions of Flash are on 500 million mobile devices already, and that is expected to grow to one billion over the next 12 months). That business (which represents only 2 percent of Adobes overall revenues) is going away. Starting with the next major release of Flash (and AIR) for devices in 2009, it will be free to device manufacturers. That should help Flash spread even more.

3. Publishing the APIs for porting Flash to other devices. This currently also incurs a royalty fee. By opening it up, there is no reason why every device shouldn’t come with Flash pre-installed.

4. Publishing Adobe protocols for pushing content to devices like Flash Cast and AMF. Adobe will also work with wireless carriers on protocols for over-the-air software updating. (This is actually a hard problem because most software downloaded to a mobile phone gets stored in read-only-memory, where it pretty much stays until the device is replaced. Getting mobile software to update as easily as desktop software is the key to making sure mobile apps keep up with the times.

On the application creation side, Adobe increasingly will be adopting a widget approach. There is not much difference between a widget that runs as a module on a Web page and a mobile app that runs on a small screen. Wadhwani explains:

These things can expand up. Developers are looking to optimize for these small screen sizes. Instead of squashing it down from a desktop experience, it is easier to start small and build up.

The same approach can be used for apps on other devices as well, such as set-top boxes.

The promise of the Open Screen Project to developers is the age-old dream of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere across any device. Adobe and its slew of partners in the Open Screen Project (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Toshiba, NTT Docomo, Chungwa Telecom, ARM, Intel, Marvell, Cisco, NBC Universal, MTV Networks, and the BBC) are not alone in this desire. Notably absent from Adobe’s list of partners is Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Each has its own ideas on how this cross-device compatibility will work.

Apple thinks you should just buy Apple products that work seamlessly together (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV). Steve Jobs also notably snubbed Adobe by refusing to put Flash on the iPhone. Maybe his engineers can now make their own version that satisfies their exacting standards.

Google has never been a big fan of Flash, preferring the speed of Ajax in its Webtop apps. On the mobile front, it is betting on Android, its own open operating system. And it also develops mobile apps the traditional way—one device at a time.

But the company with the most overarching and different approach to Adobe’s in this regard is Microsoft. It is pushing its own alternative to Flash: Silverlight. (Although it has licensed Flash Lite for Windows Mobile as a stopgap measure until Silverlight works on mobile devices). More radically, Microsoft differs on how to make apps work across devices. It’s answer ultimately will be Live Mesh. As I wrote last week when Microsoft officially unveiled Live Mesh.:

The basic foundation of Mesh is this feed-centric programming model. A Web developer can build an app using any programming language or tools he likes (Python, Ruby on Rails, Flex) and then sync it across devices and other applications using two-way feeds as the basic data and communication channel. The promise for developers, says product unit manager Abhay Parasnis: “If you Mesh-enable your application, we will let you extend it to other devices.”

In many ways this effort is a counterweight to what we are seeing with Adobe Air or Google Gears, which are efforts to take browser-based apps offline. With Mesh, Microsoft is in effect reasserting the primacy of client-based applications. . . . Developers can customize their apps for whatever device they originally reside on—whether it is a PC, a smartphone, or a set-top box—and then Webify them by syncing them to other applications across the Web.

The more competition we get for ways to bridge applications across devices and screens, the more likely that we’ll actually start to see some of our favorite Web apps on something other than our laptops.

(Photo by AMagill).

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AlertThingy, the Adobe AIR desktop application for FriendFeed that we previewed last month, has just launched. It is one of the first applications built on the new FriendFeed API.

The application allows users to see the data stream from people they follow on FriendFeed, and post new messages directly to the service. Users can also comment on posted items, and bookmark them.

Alert Thingy is now the second Adobe AIR application that is running full time on my desktop (the other is Twhirl, for Twitter). I expect it will be very popular with the Centralized Me crowd.

The application was created by Howard/Baines.

See Sobees for another desktop FriendFeed application, although it runs only on Windows machines. AIR applications are cross platform.

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Adobe has launched Adobe Media Player 1.0 and a Adobe TV.

Adobe Media Player is a cross-platform Adobe AIR application that offers content discovery and interaction. Companies that are offering content for the player include CBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, PBS, CondéNet, and Scripps Networks.

Adobe Media Player offers playback of streamed, downloaded or locally-stored video in Adobe Flash and can be viewed in 1080p, 720p or 480i resolutions. iTunes style the player allows users to subscribe to television shows and other content and automatically receive new episodes when they are available.

Adobe TV is available at tv.adobe.com or as a network in Adobe Media Player and offers “expert instruction and original series programming” about Adobe products. Adobe TV offers four channels targeted at Photographers, Designers, Video Professionals, and Developers. Content comes from “Adobe evangelists, leading trainers, subject matter experts, and luminaries.” Over 200 videos are available for the launch.

The media player can be downloaded here

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FriendFeed released their API just a few days ago, but third party developers are already scrambling to build on top of the service.

We just heard that Howard Baines will be releasing an Adobe AIR application for FriendFeed in the next week or so. So far all we have is the screen shot and a confirmation from Baines that his team is working on it. The application will be called Alert Thingy (I assume the site will be here).

If this is anything like Twhirl, an AIR application for Twitter, it’s likely to be a hit. Since it’s AIR it will work on both Windows and Macs right from the start. If the application also allows users to comment on items, post directly to FriendFeed, flag items as “liked,” etc., users will have little need to visit the FriendFeed site directly. And that should be fine with FriendFeed, since users will have persistent interaction with the service on the desktop.

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As I alluded to in an earlier post, online photo-editing applications keep getting better as the competition heats up between startups like Picnik and FotoFlexer. Today, a very large competitor, Adobe, is entering the market by releasing a Web-based version of Photoshop for editing pictures called Photoshop Express. It is in public beta and anyone can sign up.

Photoshop Express is by no means just Photoshop ported onto the web. It would even be a stretch to say it’s a stripped down version of the desktop software, since it’s intended for mainstream consumers, not professionals.

This distinction shows in both what it lacks and what it offers. There are only 17 editing features in Photoshop Express: a tiny fraction of those available with the $650 desktop software. And all of these 17 features are filters intended for tuning and effects - you won’t find any tools for drawing lines, adding text, or creating shapes. What you can do is easily take out red eye, touch up undesirable areas, change saturation, pop color, and crop (among other things).

One of the most innovative features in Photoshop Express is the ability to revert any filter you apply to a photograph. You can do this to a particular filter regardless of whether you’ve made other changes to the photo since applying it. All you have to do is uncheck the particular filter and it will be subtracted from your changes, which are represented in a historical filmstrip with all versions of the photo you have gone through. This undo functionality for particular changes partly makes up for the unfortunate absence of layers, which are so vitally important in the desktop version of Photoshop.

Photoshop Express also differs from its desktop cousin by serving as an online storage and photo sharing service. You can upload up to 2GB of photos to the web app (or pull them in directly from Facebook, Photobucket, or Picassa). They are arranged in a collection that can be made available to others or kept private. Embedding and slideshow functionality is also available.

Adobe has other motivations behind this launch: Doug Mack, the vice president in charge of Photoshop Express, says:

It is a showcase of what is the best that can be done with Flex and Flash. Hopefully, it will inspire other developers. We are also setting up a hosted services platform that we can expand to other products.

So this is just the beginning for Adobe. Should smaller fry like Picnik be scared now that Adobe is, uh, flexing its muscles online? Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato isn’t too worried. He gives me the classic Innovator’s Dilemma argument:

We don’t envy the challenge Adobe is facing—they have to deal with not cannibalizing a highly successful finished-goods business. Adobe has a business to protect, while Picnik has a business to build.

Okay, but what about Adobe’s massive distribution through its existing products (Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). Sposato’s got an answer for that one as well:

Sure, I think their distribution is a great strength for them. And there’s definitely a Windows vs. Mac analogy here. But i think today’s internet is so incredibly efficient that traditional models of distribution may matter less and less. The cost of switching apps for most users is just so easy. They can find new things really fast and try them out.

Hopefully, I am not smoking crack but I do think the marketplace is so efficient that we can compete based ultimately on quality and ‘winsomeness’ of the product (to use a very old fashion word).

No Jonathan, you’re not smoking crack. May the most winsome product win.

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New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.

Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism.

Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears).

Read Matthew’s blog, Just Browsing, here.

Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet.

(more…)

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Engadget is reporting that Adobe plans to build Flash into the iPhone with the newly released SDK, even though Steve Jobs declared less than two weeks ago that the technology wasn’t ready for the device.

So what about all that fuss Jobs made about needing another version of Flash that was more capable than the mobile version but less power hungry than the desktop one? Well, I guess we’re going to have to see just what Adobe comes up with. Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen is quoted as saying “We have evaluated [the software developer tools] and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves.”

Now it’s Microsoft’s turn to declare plans for putting Silverlight on the iPhone with the SDK, something Steve Guthrie, VP of Microsoft’s Developer Platform, has suggested the company might do.

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Flash Lite for mobile phones might not be good enough for Steve Jobs, but Microsoft is less picky. It is licensing Flash Lite for Windows Mobile. This is an acknowledgment of two things: there are a lot of developers and existing Websites out there that work with Flash, and the mobile version of Microsoft’s own competing Silverlight software is nowhere near ready to be deployed.

On the one hand, Microsoft is just being practical here. Adobe’s Flash is ubiquitous on the Web, especially for video. Even if Flash Lite is a compromise (it doesn’t run any apps or Web pages built with Adobe’s Flex tools, for instance), it does run on 500 million mobile phones already. Microsoft cannot ignore all of the apps being built for Flash Lite. (Jobs can because it is more important to him to protect the integrity of the iPhone experience by controlling it tightly).

But for Microsoft, this is just a stopgap measure until it can gain more traction for Silverlight, its Flash-competitor. The mobile version of Sliverlight 2.0 does not ship until the second quarter. Making WinMo more capable won’t detract from Silverlight’s appeal. There is a desperate need to get a full Flash-like experience on a mobile device. Flash itself is supposedly too slow on mobile phones. That leaves an opening for Microsoft to win over converts to Silverlight by bringing video, animation, and other rich-media experiences to mobile. Nokia is already on board.

Apple or Google could also try to fill the gap left by Flash on mobile devices. Or Adobe could get its act together and bring a more fully-featured version of Flash to mobile. The only other option is to wait a few years for mobile devices to become as powerful as today’s laptops so that they can display regular Flash Websites. Which option do readers think will win out in the end?

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I attended the official launch party for Abode AIR (Pacific Region) today and as much as the tech is impressive, I walked away with one strong observation: this is a user base war.

Adobe’s Pacific technical director Mark Blair gave the keynote, and I can sumarize it as such: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere. There was a Q&A after the keynote that added to that, but the only main new addition I got from that is that AIR should be coming to Linux this year.

During Blair’s presentation was a slide on the companies developing AIR apps. Some we’ve covered already, like eBay, then there were other names like the NASDAQ developing with AIR. Locally the Commonwealth Bank was developing an AIR app for Brokers. There was also some impressive demonstrations post show, including a TripIt clone that runs on AIR (post still to come).

There’s no arguing that AIR is highly capable, but so is Microsoft’s Silverlight. Adobe and Microsoft have entered a war of attrition, where like HD DVD vs Blu-ray one will eventually come out on top. Having said that both may well happily co-exist side by side for years to come, but history shows that eventually the market will pick a favorite.

Disclosure: Adobe Australia paid for my trip to the launch

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One of the difficulties facing developers who want to create rich internet applications is HTML’s static nature, which requires that pages (unassisted by other scripting languages) must refresh in their entirety for any new information to load and appear. Technologies such as Ajax and Flash have been developed, at least in part, to overcome this limitation of HTML and facilitate the loading of new data onto a page without the requirement of a refresh. Many Web 2.0 companies have taken advantage of such technology in making their applications operate more seamlessly like desktop apps, but the technology still has quite a way to go.

Ajax, for example, isn’t designed to load new information onto a page unless that page has makes the initiative to request more data in the first place (i.e. the user interacts in a particular way with the page that causes it to ping the server for extra stuff). If you want to design an application that pushes information out to a page (say, up-to-the-second stock prices) whether or not the page has made a request, you can pull off the functionality with Ajax but your code won’t be “elegant” and it probably won’t be very efficient either.

Adobe is making a set of announcements tonight, the largest of which is meant to solve this issue of sending data back and forth with a visitor’s browser more elegantly, thereby helping developers create richer internet applications. The company has offered a product called LiveCycle Data Services (previously Flex Data Services) that works with Flex, a technology for building Flash applications. It provides advanced capabilities for Flash applets that allow them to connect up with server-side, back-end systems (in other words, to communicate “back home” with the server that originally loaded a page).

Tonight, Adobe is releasing an open sourced, beta version of LiveCycle Data Services called BlazeDS. The open source nature of BlazeDS will make it a welcome addition to the developer’s arsenal. But on top of opening it up, Adobe is adding extra functionality called HTTP streaming that enables clients (i.e. applets in end-user browsers) to initiate persistent connections with servers that allow those servers to push data back to the client whenever the server deems a transfer necessary (e.g. to send the latest stock price). The hope is that this technology will make it possible for data to flow both ways (from server and back) much more efficiently. The most notable difference for website visitors should be faster performance, and hopefully better functionality as well.

Adobe will also be making available something called LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition, basically BlazeDS but with Adobe quality control (i.e. certification) and support. This enterprise version of the technology, which the company compares to Red Hat’s enterprise offerings, will not be ready until early 2008 and pricing has yet to be disclosed.

In addition to the introduction of BlazeDS and its Community Edition, Adobe is releasing beta 3 versions of both Flex and AIR tonight. A commercial, non-open source version of BlazeDS (simply retaining the old name, LiveCycle Data Services) will also be maintained by Adobe and continue to offer some additional functionality not found in the open source version.

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