Small bottles of a fizzy beverage placed on chairs and tables welcomed attendees to Flashforward in Austin this week. Labeled with the Flash logo and bearing the words Flashback. Flash Future, the bottles of sparkling cider (alas, no champagne) were given in commemoration of the 10-year anniversary of Flash. The festive air continued well into the evening when the Flash community—luminaries, developers, and designers—mingled at the Adobe-sponsored Flash birthday party that night at one of Austin’s famous Sixth Street taverns.

Earlier in the day during her opening remarks, conference chair and Lynda.com founder Lynda Weinman noted that Flash as well as Adobe and its recent acquisition Macromedia have undergone many changes in the 10 years since Flash was introduced. To understand where Adobe is going, she encouraged attendees to read interviews with Adobe Chairman Bruce Chizen and Senior Vice President Kevin Lynch on the Wharton School of Business Web site. (Read the Chizen interview here and the Lynch interview here.

Keynote speaker Kevin Lynch underscored the theme of Flash past and future. He showed a Flash page on Adobe.com that allows visitors to experience the history of Flash by navigating a globe embedded with links to places and events.

As I watched the presentation, I felt I had been sucked into the Wayback Machine as I remembered the first time I saw Flash at a Macworld Expo 10 years ago. It was called FutureSplash Animator then, and while I had no idea what the technology would become, I knew even than that it was profoundly cool. Shortly thereafter, FutureSplash was abbreviated to Flash, and the rest is history. (For more about the history of Flash, see this FlashInsider.com article as well as this Adobe.com article written by original developer John Gay.)

But enough about the past. Lynch, who is also Adobe chief software architect, then focused on the future of Flash. Currently Flash Player reaches 98 percent of Web browsers, according to Adobe; Flash Player 8 reached a phenomenal 85 percent adoption rate in just nine months. The adoption rate of Flash Player 9 promises to surpass that of all previous versions, said Lynch, with projections of reaching 50 percent within its first three months of release.

The bulk of the keynote address focused on “sneak peeks” and “technology demonstrations.” Flash Player 9 was shown running on Linux. Flex Builder 2.0 was shown running on a Mac. Apollo, a new delivery platform, was also shown on a Mac as more details were fleshed out about this forthcoming technology (Learn more about Apollo at the Apollo Wiki.

The biggest future splash (pun intended) was the first public presentation of Flash 9, the release of which is sometime next year, according to Lynch. Adobe’s Mike Downey and Justin Everett-Church showcased three top new features of Flash 9:

The ability to import native Photoshop files into Flash with layers and editable text intact and the adoption of the Photoshop compression engine;

The ability to Copy Motion as ActionScript 3, which allows developers and designers to synchronize timelined-based animation with code;

The development of smaller, lightweight components that will enable developers to create Flash files of lower file-size overhead.

The reaction was overwhelmingly positive, with the crowd whistling and applauding in response.

If that’s any indication, the future of Flash will be quite exciting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Flashforward, Adobe, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.