Why I Stand With (Adobe) Flash Ellen Wagner Sage Road Solutions LLC June 15, 2010 © 2010 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Used With permission, mLearnCon, June 15, 2010 Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe AIR, the Adobe AIR logo, the Adobe PDF logo, AIR, ColdFusion, ColdFusion Builder, Flash, Flash Builder, the Flash logo, Flex, LiveCycle, and Reader are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Do You Know What Flash Is? “It's a serious question. During the past few months, volumes and volumes have been written about Flash. It's dead. It's dying. It's lazy, buggy and bloated. It's everywhere. It's efficient, it makes the web work. It's ubiquitous. It creates rich, engaging digital experience. It is going to drive the knowledge commerce economy. It's proprietary. It’s mostly open. It is irrelevant. In its future iterations, it's where the mobile Web is headed.” http://elearningroadtrip.typepad.com/elearning_roadtrip/2010/05/flash- primer-for-non-techies.html The Many Faces of Flash • It's a file format. Most commonly known as SWF. Like PDF for web content. • It's a free media player available on the web. You need it to view SWF files - movies, video, animations. Comes in two forms: Flash Player and AIR. • It provides a way to share animations, interactive content and video on the web. • It's a web animation scripting software, known by the name of Flash Professional. • It provides a Flash-based path for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) • It's a published web specification. • It's the basis of most non-technical authoring for rapid elearning. • It’s the foundation for much of the learning content developed for use over the Web. SWFs have defined eLearning (Almost as much as LMSs have) • “Flash equals SWF” • Many rapid elearning tools produce SWF files. In fact, there are so many SWF tools that there are entire websites dedicated to sharing information about them. • A 2008 survey of Flash tools sponsored by Adobe and conducted by the eLearning Guild showed that 52% of all Flash tools do NOT come from Adobe. • Adobe has a lot of Flash producing tools...Presenter, Captivate, Flash Professional, Connect, Flex to name a few. But there are lots of other SWF tools out there, as well. NOT from Adobe. News Flash: To paraphrase Mark Twain…reports of Flash’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Beyond SWF desktop apps: Rich Internet Applications Users who find a web site difficult to use will simply switch to one that isn’t. “Rich Internet Applications: What’s the Business Case?” Info-Tech Research Group, December 2008 http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/pdfs/infotech-ria-business-case.pdf Data Changes Everything Phil Ice, 2010 http://educomm2010.sched.org/event/a1248128f71ab444a4476052c20f943d Rich Internet Applications - RIAs • Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) enable the creation of user experience (UX) that is more responsive and engaging than those found in traditional web applications • RIAs span a range of technology alternatives: Flex, Ajax, Silverlight • RIAs are based on the premise that a rich productive user experience can be achieved using only standards based technologies built into a modern browser 9 Common use cases for RIAs Customer self-service applications • Intuitive, guided self-service applications lower costs, increase visibility and use, increase overall customer satisfaction • Guided selling applications increase revenues, while reducing errors and returns driving down costs Data visualization • Rich, interactive data visualization simplifies complex data and leads to faster decision making • Dashboards enable real time pulse of critical business metrics, uniting key data from disparate sources • Reduce data entry time up to 40% The Flash Platform The Flash Platform leverages data from any back-end system and exposes it in a rich, easy to use user experience. DESIGN & CLIENT APPLICATION TIER DEVELOPMENT TOOLS Creative Flash Player AIR Browsers Suite Flash Professional HTTP/S, Sockets, AMF, RTMP, SOAP, WS*, SMTP, REST, … Flash Catalyst Flash SERVICES TIER Builder 3rd Party Flex Flash Platform Flash Media Framework LiveCycle Services Services Server Family RESOURCE TIER ECM Message EIS Databases Directories SAP… Repository Queues The Flash Platform solution for building RIAs Multiscreen Content and Applications TOOLS FRAMEWORK SERVERS SERVICES CLIENTS Flash Flash Flex Flash Media Flash Flash Player Professional Catalyst Server Family Platform Services FLASH PLATFORM FLASH Flash Builder LiveCycle AIR Creative Suite ColdFusion Analytics & Optimization http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform The Flash Platform is open and reliable “.. Gartner has found that it [Adobe] is more heavily involved in a wide range of open- source initiatives than most of its industry contemporaries.” Gartner, June 2009 The Flash Player - world’s most pervasive software of Internet-connected PCs worldwide have of top 20 smart phones will Flash Player installed support Flash Player this year develop using the of Alexa 100 top Flash Platform websites use Flash Player penetration rate in of web games are enterprises - delivered using Flash Player Forrester of enterprise professionals will seek Flash Platform development skills in 2010 – Society of Digital Agencies Adobe AIR delivers RIAs outside the browser AIR runtime installations AIR SDK installations Installations of Adobe AIR within one year of release Applications in the Adobe AIR Marketplace Supported by communities, programs, partners 3.5 million developers PARTNERS TECHNOLOGIES PROGRAMS COMMUNITIES 150+ supporting technologies to help CAIRNGORM in application and project development ADOBE OPEN SOURCE (opensource.adobe.com) . 1,000+ global and regional . Frameworks . More than 70 Open . 337 User Groups system integrators, ISVs, and Screen Project members worldwide . Performance and load testing VARs . Tooling plug-ins . 52 Adobe Agency Partners, including the top digital . Pre-built components agencies . Product extensions, . 1,100+ training partners functions and code Adobe provides optimized Flash Player Adobe provides optimizedtechnology Flash Player to technology Google to Google for enhanced search engine indexing • Increases accuracy of web search results • Enables top search engines to understand what's inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page • Works with all existing SWF content, across all versions • Adobe provides techniques for building highly searchable RIAs on the Flash Platform to developers Open Screen Project • Open Screen Project was announced May 1, 2008. Many industry leading companies want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices. • Adobe has opened access to Adobe Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs), including: – Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. – Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player – Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services – Removing licensing fees - making future releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free Open Screen Project Partners • Adobe • FOX Mobile Group AMD Freescale Semiconductor Antena 3 Google Atlantic Records HTC ARM Imagination Technologies Intel BBC LG Electronics Burda Digital Systems Lionsgate CELL Marvell Chunghwa Telecom MIPS Technologies Cisco Motorola Comcast Movial Condé Nast MTV Networks Daum NBC Universal Disney Interactive Media Group Nokia EPIX Open Screen Project Partners • NTT DOCOMO • Sony Ericsson NVIDIA ST-Ericsson OpenPeak STMicroelectronics OpenTV STERN Symbian Foundation Palm Teleca Texas Instruments Paramount The New York Times PBS Tomorrow Focus Technologies Qualcomm Toshiba QNX Software Systems Verizon Wireless Research in Motion Vizio RTL Interactive Wind River Sagemcom ZiiLABS Samsung Sonic Solutions HTML5 • HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. • HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. • It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in- based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apache Pivot, and Sun JavaFX. • But people who don't want to program are going to want tools to build HTML5 programs and apps. The Flash Platform and HTML5 “HTML 5 and RIA platforms will be complementary technologies, and enterprise development shops will need to invest in both approaches to deliver expressive applications that combine reach and richness.”* -Forrester Adobe does and will continue to support HTML – The Flash Platform has integrated seamlessly with HTML for 14 years, and that won’t change – AIR 2.0 (desktop) includes support for HTML5 – Adobe is committed to supporting HTML5 in its leading Web development tools The Flash Platform delivers cross-platform, cross-browser, cross-device consistency – HTML5 implementations will differ and hinder content adoption of rich features, including video tag support – No consistency in codec support for video is yet visible Adobe offers best-in-class tool chain used by 3.5 million designers and developers – HTML5 will require and benefit from Adobe’s investment in breadth of tooling Rapid update cycles enable Flash innovations to reach ubiquity in less than 1 year – Flash will continue to lead