(1888PressRelease)
May 17, 2007 - So what effect does all this have on the Flash community and in particular upon Adobe’s recently launched Apollo and its supposed nemesis MDM Zinc? Well in a nut shell I don’t think it has any baring upon either of them what so ever. Flash has a very strong foothold on the market, up until these announcements it hasn’t had any real competition and I doubt that it will have for sometime, if ever.
It appears that Adobe have been waiting for the move for quite some time, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said in an interview just a couple of weeks ago, "Fortunately, they are so late – (Microsoft) they have been talking about WPF/E (a technology used in Silverlight) forever.” It seems to me to have been an awful long time coming.
Silverlight, (reminds me of a speaking horse from some children’s book about ponies.) is said to be Microsoft’s answer to Flash. This is their attempt to steal a market share from Adobe, and eventually they will do it to. Silverlight does have one distinct vantage over Flash, which Microsoft has been trumpeting all over the place, and that is in its video streaming capabilities. This will be the gentle tap from Microsoft that will start to ebb away at Adobe’s dominance.
Sun Inc. also took it upon themselves this week, to announce their new ‘Java FX’ at an event of their own creation ingeniously named ‘Java One’ Oh the originality of it all! Java FX is basically a ‘We’re still here’ shout to the industry; no one doubts that Java will be around for a long time to come. ‘Java FX’ is really the old grandmasters rejuvenation serum.
Simplicity has become the name of the game and to their credit, Adobe created Flash as an alternative version to Java and succeeded. As a senior software engineer told me the other day, “Java has always been targeted more at developers than designers.”
Adobe, I feel are possibly more rattled by the ever presence of the Flash Application Software MDM Zinc. Though to be fair it isn’t MDM or Apollo who are laying down the duelling glove, it’s the developers, designers and the forum users. The difference between the two is quite simple; it’s the stand alone facility. MDM Zinc has been designed specifically to create a stand alone executable from Flash that can then be distributed to others, via CD Roms, DVD’s etc. Apollo is not stand alone. For the Apollo Apps to run, the end user system needs to be installed with the Apollo runtime.
Looking at the posts from forum users who have commented on the Zinc – Apollo subject, the general agreement is that Zinc’s cross platform usage is exceptional and that the software as a whole is very user friendly. Apollo is still in its ‘Alpha’ stage and consequently the community can only comment on subjective theories and rumour. Surely a more useful exercise would be to highlight the factual differences between Apollo and Zinc. Looking for comparisons at this stage is rather like a broken pencil. Pointless.
