Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Tue Aug 9 11:13:34 CDT 2011
This product looks like Adobe's replacement for it Flash. Flash's greatness was its richness of graphics and its wonderful programming interface. It problem, like the new Silverlight, was that it is a closed source product and an additional plug-in that has to be on every client computer to work. That just was never going to happen. It final demise may have nothing to do with its nature but that its content is unsearchable on the web. That relegates Flash and Silverlight products to little more the website candy and little more. Adobe for its part has made incredible efforts to make sure that Flash works in every browser and platform and updates are always current but it has been seeing a slow erosion of its use as developers need a universal open product which runs on all browsers straight out of the box. Enter HTML5 and CSS3 which all the major browser designers have been adopting. Microsoft is still a bit of a hold out as it has invested huge amounts in Silverlight and they still believe, at times, that they still control 90 percent of the browser market. They have been watching a 1 percent drop in IE's use per month for the last 5 years and now they have been forced to comply with an open standard of which they have no control and therefore see no profit. They will of course, eventually, embrace the inevitable. Adobe is now giving away a beta product called Edge, a HTML5 editor specializing in simplifying the development of Flash like graphics using HTML5. Here is a post by an early adopter: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/on-the-cutting-edge-with-adobes-edge/ Jim