Adobe Wants to Bridge Gap between PCs and Cloud
Microsoft's power with programmers is tied to desktops and laptops, the vast majority of which run Windows. Google is trying to dominate the cloud computing, where applications run on the Web. Adobe, though, is trying to run down the middle with a strategy that touches on both domains.
Since Adobe's $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition in 2005, programming technology has been rising in importance within a company that got its start with publishing software such as Photoshop.
Flash got its start as a way to give Web pages animations and basic applications such as games, but it's grown up since then. The Flex technology has given developers a more mature programming model, and the addition of video-streaming abilities to the Flash Player that's plugged into the vast majority of Web browsers has given Adobe's technology incumbent status.
Flash and AIR are key to bridging the cloud-PC gap. For example, Adobe has launched an online Photoshop.com service, where members can upload, edit, and share photos. The site uses Flash to run the processing-intensive editing software on people's own computers, not Adobe's servers.
AIR applications can take advantage of local computing power, though--and the big new feature of AIR 1.5 is that it uses Flash Player 10, which brings 3D graphics, better text handling, the ability to mix different audio signals, and other abilities that make it a more reasonable competitor to Windows.
AIR 1.5 also comes with a higher-performance JavaScript engine, Squirrelfish from the WebKit open-source Web browser technology project.
The new iPhone era of mobile devices that are appreciably more powerful and equipped with a mature Web browser has led Adobe to merge its formerly separate mobile Flash development team with the desktop Flash team.
But for now, there's no Flash available on Apple's iPhone. Adobe clearly wishes this were otherwise, though, and for example has completed a software development kit that lets people create Flash applications for the iPhone.
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