‘Flash is the new publishing tool of the century’

4Apr/070

‘Flash is the new publishing tool of the century’

I just finished reading this nice little article in the Technology section of Guardian Unlimited. In the article, Charles Arthur talks about Flash with Mark Anders from Adobe. They discuss where Flash has been, how it got where it is today, and where it is headed with technologies like Flex and Apollo. Following are a few snippets, but go read the full article when you get a minute. Nice work Mr. Arthur.

And everyone has now joined the developers in loving Flash – even if they don’t know it. YouTube uses Flash. The photo site Flickr uses Flash. Google’s finance pages generate stock graphs built in Flash. Newspaper websites use Flash to illustrate complex timelines or subjects. It’s everywhere.

“Flash always had some acceptability,” says Anders. “It’s incredibly compact for what it does. But if you compare something like Flash with, say, Java – which is a very robust technology – how often do you see Java being used?”

“Adobe can claim that the Flash Player is on 97.3% of all of the internet-enabled computers in use today. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player is on 83% of computers, QuickTime is on about 66%, and Real is hovering at 56%.”

For, as he points out to me, “We’re on 100m mobile phones. In Japan, DoCoMo has a huge business using Flash.”
As if 98% of the world’s personal computers weren’t enough. If you’re Mark Anders, that’s not enough.