At its Max conference in San Francisco on Monday, Adobe is planning to show AIR and Flash technology that bridges the gap between Microsoft's PC-based approach to computing, and Google's efforts in the cloud.
Microsoft's power with programmers is tethered to desktops and laptops, the vast majority of which run Windows. Google is trying to dominate what it believes is the new frontier, cloud computing, where applications run on the web. Adobe, however, is trying to run down the middle, with a strategy that touches on both domains.
"It's a balance of the client and cloud together that makes for the most effective applications and the best development," said Adobe chief technology officer Kevin Lynch, who's planning to speak on the subject in a keynote speech on Monday at the company's Max conference in San Francisco.
Since Adobe's $3.4bn (£2.3bn) Macromedia acquisition in 2005, programming technology has been rising in importance within a company that started with publishing software such as Photoshop. The technology that brought the two companies together, Flash, will hog the spotlight at the conference.
Flash started out as a way to give web pages animations and basic applications such as games, but it has 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 is plugged into the vast majority of web browsers has given Adobe's technology incumbent status. Take, for example, the popularity of YouTube.
Adobe is still working on Flash, releasing Flash Player 10, aka Astro, in October. At Max, a Flash cousin called AIR — the Adobe Integrated Runtime — will share the stage with the release of version 1.5.
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, Lynch said.
"Our operational costs for hosting that application are much lower than if we had server-side processing [and users get better performance]," Lynch said.
However, Flash still lives largely within the browser. Adobe hopes to uproot it with AIR, a 'runtime' foundation for housing applications. AIR runs Flash programs but also has a built-in engine for showing web pages and for running programs written in JavaScript, which is widely used for web-based applications. And AIR is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and programmers who write AIR applications don't have to worry about which operating system is on a person's computer.
There's a risk to choosing a hybrid strategy: gains in flexibility often come at the expense of specialisation, and specialised applications often work better. Sun tried for years to get Java to catch on as a cross-platform runtime but, 13 years after its launch, it has yet to catch on with mainstream computing applications.
Google's cloud computing is limited by the comparatively feeble abilities of JavaScript running in web browsers, but extensions such as Gears are bringing some advanced features. However, Google gets the advantage of software that's available from all sorts of computing devices — your own, a friend's, a kiosk in an airport, your iPhone — as long as the user has a network connection. There's also a natural collaboration component that comes with online applications, which matches well with business needs.
Microsoft is moving slowly cloud-ward, but its cash cows remain Windows and Office. Its software is more powerful and responsive than any web-based application, as long as you have your PC with you.
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.
In the same vein, AIR 1.5 also comes with a higher-performance JavaScript engine: Squirrelfish from the WebKit open-source web browser technology project.
Chicken-and-egg problem
Another challenge for AIR is ensuring it's installed. Programmers aren't eager to write applications for a foundation that's not installed, and people aren't eager to install a foundation for which there are no applications — the classic chicken-and-egg problem.
But AIR applications are starting to spread. An eBay auction management application has been downloaded a million times, and media players from Adobe, Fox and Atlantic Records also are top downloads, said Michele Turner, vice president of product marketing and management for Adobe's platform business unit. Also popular are…
