Future developments

Adobe Labs (Previously Macromedia labs) is a source for early looks at emerging products and technologies from Adobe-Macromedia, including downloads of the latest software and plugins. Flash 9, Flex 2, and ActionScript 3.0 are discussed.

The important new development in Flash is its increasing use in providing the presentation layer in handheld devices. Adobe is aggressively courting cell phone and PDA vendors, and partnering to deploy Flash Lite as the user interface.

The code name for the next release of the Flash authoring tool, ver 9.0, is "BLAZE" as explained in this post in Flash Product Manager Mike Downey's weblog. This next release is expected to focus on designer/developer workflow and integration with other Adobe Systems creative suite products.

A project currently in development at Adobe Labs is the Apollo Project[2] which is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to reuse their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). While features of Apollo are still being fully defined, the project aims to be made available in public beta form in early 2007, with final release planned for later that year.

The next version of Flash will have 2 additional components designed for large scale implementation. Adobe is adding in the option to require an ad to be played in full before the main video piece is played. This would be most useful for large scale video sites. Also, Adobe has announced plans to add DRM into the new version of Flash. This way Adobe can give companies the option to link an advertisement with content and make sure that both are played and that they are not changed. ^[4]