Adobe Director

Allen Partridge – Product Evangelist for Adobe Director

Interestingly, even though Flash was never far from anyone's lips at Casual Connect, Adobe wasn't pushing Flash directly. Adobe's show-floor booth showed off Adobe's new Director 11, and the only Adobe-backed presentation at the event was all about Flash Lite.

That being said, it was interesting to talk to Mr. Partridge to find out both what's been going on with Director as well as where Adobe's placing it in the market. It's a foregone conclusion that 2D animated content on the web is owned by Flash, but Director still has a place.

Director still has two strong technological advantages over Flash.

1. 3D. Director has a well-established built-in 3D engine, and long-overdue update was included in version 11 that updates Director's 3D support to DirectX 9. In addition, Director contains a new physics engine based on AGEIA PhysX.

2. Extensibility. Director has an extensibility model called an Xtra, which is a bit like a DLL. Using an Xtra, you can extend Director's capabilities with native code without losing its streaming nature.

From a marketing standpoint, Director is concentrating its focus on two fronts.

1. MMO content. Since Director-built content streams into browsers, is extensible, and supports 3D, Director is in a unique position to offer rich 3D massively-multiplayer environments. From SocioTown (which we covered here) to Sherwood Dungeon to Spine World, Director can make streaming content that rivals standalone offerings.

2. ILS (formerly called Serious Games). Director's always existed in the interactive learning space, and it's still there. The 3D engine and ability to interface with custom hardware through the Xtra interface makes Director a good candidate for interactive learning apps.

So the upshot is that Director is still around, it's no longer horribly out of date technology-wise, and it still has a place in the market that's useful for game developers.

The Drive for Gaming in 2008

John Agger – Senior Marketing Manager, Adobe Systems, Inc.

Flash Lite – Adobe's goal is to give content creators a method to move content across multiple devices. It happened with Postscript and PDF and Flash, and it's about to happen with AIR. They can't officially say that AIR is moving into the mobile space, but he strongly hinted that AIR for mobile devices is on the drawing board. New development is being done with the mobile device in mind from the start and as a priority rather than an afterthought.

Mobile device sales well outpace PC sales. Nokia boasts selling a million handsets per day.

Flash Lite exists as a standalone player, a browser plug-in, and as a “channel” that gives a mobile web-like experience (Verizon Dashboard).

Flash Lite was formerly a licensed product for handsets, but it's now free with the caveat that the handset OS's be opened up for downloadable player updates.

Qualcomm is now supporting Flash Lite's built-in UI.

Flash Lite version 3 is out now and compares with Flash 8 on the desktop. FLV support was the biggie for Flash Lite 3, thus allowing YouTube support as well as support for video on several popular sites.

Why Flash Lite? It's a very rich environment. Developers have found that they can't get content as rich as Flash Lite via any other mobile display technology. There are currently over 500 million Flash Lite licenses, and they're shooting for a billion by 2009, helped by the new free license model. And, of course, it's ubiquitous on the desktop with 98% browser penetration.

Verizon supports downloadable Flash Lite players for their phones. If someone buys Flash Lite content for a Verizon phone, the player downloads automatically if it's needed. Samsung and LG use Flash Lite for their user interface.

The workflow is Adobe-centric. Draw up your prototypes in Photoshop or Fireworks. Develop in Flash professional. Test in Device Central. Device Central ships with most Adobe CS3 products now and connects with them. It contains profiles of Flash-enabled mobile devices and simulates Flash as it would operate on the device, including degrading the performance so that the game on the desktop PC will match that of the device.

Device Central also can compare device capabilities so you can figure out the balance between capability and audience-size for your game. It can also simulate hardware events (battery level, signal strength) so you can test how your app reacts to those.

Flash for the iPhone is currently contingent on support from Apple. The iPhone is capable of running Flash, and Flash is currently running on devices with much lower performance than an iPhone.

Distribution – Keep it in mind up front. Getting real-estate on a small handset is the biggest pain, especially in an online store that runs on the phone itself. Adobe is signed up with a number of content aggregators around the world if your phone and service are capable of working with those.

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