Adobe talks Flash and the Future

Mark Anders and Richard Galvin of Adobe meet the Toronto tech press at FITCAdobe executives were in town to present in the recently concluded FITC   event with Toronto’s digital design and interactive community.

We were invited to a special lunch meeting with the media featuring insights from Mark Anders, Senior Principal Scientist co-creator of Flash Catalyst, Richard Galvin, Technical Product Manager for Flash at Adobe Systems and keynote speaker and Tom Barclay, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Flash Professional.

The dialogue was generally non-technical but focused on the “here-and-now” of Adobe CS5 specifically Flash. Currently the de facto standard for pushing web-ready video, Flash has been in the news because Apple has pretty much excluded it from its iPhone, iPod and iPad mobile devices while pushing content creators to work with HTML5 or its own Quicktime player.

 Mark Anders: Co-creator of Flash Catalyst for Adobe

“The goal is to make the Adobe Flash player runtime work everywhere. Not just the browser or Adobe Air player. Not just on the PC, Mac and Linux but on all mobile devices, smarthones, tablets and digital home devices,” said Tom Barclay who is Flash professional’s product manager.

“The Open Screen project will make it much easier for developers to create that content and deliver it to people wherever they are,” he added.

According to Barclay, Adobe has been focused on bringing the capabilities of Flash to mobile devices and they are close to shipping a mobile version of Flash that will be debuted on Google’s Android OS.

“The way people interact with information has been changed dramatically,” explained Mark Anders who is co creator of Adobe’s Flash Catalyst which enables the creation of Flash interfaces from files authored in Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks and is geared towards designers rather than motion graphics animators.

“We want to reach the widest audience possible, that is what Adobe is all about,” Anders stressed.

Adobe is also busy developing support for HTML5. Many have pitted Flash vs. HTML5 as competing tools for interactive web and video on the Internet.

A big release for Adobe is a proper mobile version of Flash which will be released shortly on Google’s Android and is expected to be made available once Android OS 2.2 (FroYo) is released. This will bring the full functionality of Flash to the smartphone space.