AjaxWorld keynote: Kevin Lynch
Kevin Lynch - CTO Adobe
How to move the new generation of computing forward. Four areas: better tooling, …. (rats, I wasn’t quick enough)
Better tooling. Dreamweaver support for adding arbitrary Ajax components directly in visual view in Dreamweaver. Consistent support for open source. Flash definition is open and unencumbered.
Better frameworks. Flex free and open-source. Same run-time across all platforms. Flexbuilder can turn on source enabled version, enables view source in deployed apps. Good for helping others to learn from examples.
flash content indexing at search engines. Project Ichabod: headless flash player deployed at web crawl sites. Can the available text in an application, and click on the buttons, etc. But how to get the user back to an inner page. How to index the state of the application? Something we (framework companies, developers, customers, etc) need to work together on. Good practice: update the state identifier by changing the address bar in the browser.
Advanced browser capabilities. HTML 5. Flash plays most of the video on the web. HTML 5 video tag can play video on page via flash. Can be controlled via javascript on the page. Open-source release, available in “a few weeks”. Flex adds programming power to Flash. Global framework cache - caches the Flex app, but can be used for other frameworks. Flex databinding: binary sockets (roll your own protocol), bi-directional messaging, clipboard access, local storage.
Increasing web clients, too much diversity. Flash player widely deployed (Flash 9 deployed over 80% of clients within 9 months). Provides a more consistent platform.
New features in Flash 10: 3D engine; dynamically generated effects; with user’s permission, can access camera and save to local disk. 10 million installs per day. new scriptable music and audio effects. Nice example of scriptable image editing effects. Text handling in flash 10 much improved, including full i18n support. Aiming to bring flash player 10 to mobile platforms
Web apps in new contexts. Air: run web apps on the desktop, can do things that browsers can’t do. Aiming for 100 million Air installs this year. Blackbook example code – sample context manager showing off visual effects to enhance the UI. Same runtime works on Win, Mac and Linux.
Desktops and devices. More mobile phones are connected to the web than PC’s. Emerging markets: 1 billion people will use the Internet via mobile phones without touching a PC. Can take applications that run on pc and play on mobile platform. We need to start designing for small screens as well as large screen, maybe even start with small screen constraints first. Apps will run on many screens, possibly simultaneously. Demo of same music app on PC, Nokia and Wii.
Edit: it’s Kevin Lynch, not Ken. Sorry Kevin.