Flashforward2006

I’m at the Flashforward2006 conference in Austin today, tomorrow, and Thursday.  I honestly don’t know how many people are here, but it’s a lot.  I heard somebody say 300, but I think there were at least 500 in the audience at the keynote.

It’s impossible to get an unbiased view of a product or technology when you’re at a conference that’s specifically about that product or technology.  Almost everybody here has a vested interest in the success of Flash and wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think there was a very bright future for it.  Still, there are many things to indicate that Flash will only grow in popularity.

At the keynote, Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe and formerly a major player in the development of Flash for Macromedia, gave us some interesting statistics on the adoption of Flash.  Version 7, according to Lynch’s numbers, was adopted at the 70% level in about 12 months.  Flash 8 reached 80% adoption within 9 months of its release.  For Flash 9, which was released less than two months ago, Adobe is projecting a 50% adoption rate in three months, with 80% adoption in six months or less.  With major sites like MySpace and YouTube already including Flash 9 content (YouTube has standardized on Flash 9), those projections are probably realistic.

From my perspective, the key new features in Flash 9 are the new runtime and the JIT compiler that converts Flash bytecode to native code.  The result is that Flash 9 applications have much better performance than previous versions.  During the keynote today they demonstrated a particle animation effect in Flash 8 that was trying to run at 33 frames per second.  Computing the particle effect took a little more than 100 milliseconds per frame, so their real frame rate was something less than 10 fps.  The same application compiled for Flash 9 takes about 15 ms per frame, giving them plenty of time for other things while still maintaining 33 fps.  Flash 9 doesn’t have the performance of .NET, but it probably could.  Right now, there’s probably a 10x performace hit running Flash (that is, for CPU-intensive applications, a native application will run 10 times as fast as a Flash application), but that’s still plenty fast.  Flash 9 applications run faster today than native applications ran in 2000.  One can only assume that Adobe is working to improve the ActionScript compiler and Flash player’s performance.

With Flash 9 we have a cross-platform (they demonstrated the Linux version at the keynote) virtual machine that can play video and audio, and perform animations.  With the new Flex 2 framework, it’s possible to create real interactive user interface applications that are richer and perform better than equivalent Ajax applications.  And the best thing is that, for all practical purposes, every Internet user has the Flash player or can get it painlessly with a simple download.  Microsoft even ships an early version of Flash with Windows XP, and the Express Install feature will upgrade the Flash player seamlessly.

About the business of Flash, I’m less sure.  The people here do seem to be excited about the future, and almost all of the presenters have mentioned that their companies are hiring Flash developers (artists as well as ActionScript programmers).  It’s possible that this is all a lot of hype reminiscent of the late ’90s Internet boom, but it doesn’t feel like that.  I honestly believe that there is a lot of room for innovation in Flash and a lot of opportunity for small developers.  It will be interesting to see, three or four years from now, whether I’m right.