// Commented Out

So I don’t think I need to tell you that some unbe­liev­ably sexy demos of incred­i­ble new ver­sions of our favorite pro­grams were shown off at MAX. Most peo­ple were beyond blown away by the Flash CS5 pub­lish­ing to iPhone work­flow announce­ment, myself included. This is an absolutely bril­liant move by Adobe and it is sig­nif­i­cant for 2 reasons.

1. Adobe is now offi­cially in the the App Store. The num­ber of iPhone devel­op­ers just mul­ti­plied expo­nen­tially. You can imag­ine the impli­ca­tions here (besides Flash being on almost every sin­gle mobile device manufacturer’s fea­ture list from now on.)

2. Flash Pro got it’s groove back. It’s once again a niche prod­uct, and delib­er­ately the only prod­uct in Adobe’s line that can pub­lish to the .ipa iPhone for­mats. Bra-VO Adobe! More impor­tantly, peo­ple who were jaded by Flash CS4’s short­com­ings [Ed. note: *Ahem*] now have a rea­son to fall in love all over again, not to men­tion all of the slick new fea­tures men­tioned for Flash CS5 [Ed.note: I will cover this at some point. You can believe that.]

So, Flash to native iPhone apps: that’s cool, right? The cor­rect answer is ‘yes… very.’ Again, sim­ply bril­liant. What you may have missed was the MAX Sneaks demos. Now, before I go any far­ther, you should watch this dis­claimer. Demos shown dur­ing the MAX Sneaks may never see the light of day. This is all exper­i­men­ta­tion by Adobe, and is sub­ject to go all ‘ninja smoke bomb’ on us.

One of the demos involved Illus­tra­tor CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, and Flash CS5. The work­flow was unthink­able, but a work of absolute genius. Con­sider my mind blown. The pre­sen­ter shows 3 work­flows, all using FXG as a vehi­cle for graph­ics data.

1. An Illus­tra­tor CS5 document’s con­tents are copied to the clip­board, and “Smart-pasted” into Dreamweaver CS5 via FXG with the option of ‘Vec­tor Graph­ics’ selected. Ok. Seri­ously. It’s like 8 lines of code, liberally-formatted. Are you kid­ding me?! It is con­verted by a JavaScript file to a <can­vas> tag. Hold on, let me get a band-aid for my chin because it just hit my desk. You can even dou­ble click to make it fit the browser win­dow. Sick.

2. An Illus­tra­tor CS5 chart graphic is “Smart-pasted” into into Dreamweaver CS5 via FXG with the option of  ‘Chart’ selected, and an XML file is selected as it’s data source. Same thing. 8 lines of loosely-formatted code, a <can­vas> tag ren­dered by JavaScript. The browser is refreshed, the data in the chart updates, and my face is melted by awe­some. The only dif­fer­ence this time is the JavaScript func­tion name.

As a Flash Plat­form devel­oper, it’s the last one that put me over the edge of excite­ment, and I assume Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft as well. Not!

3. A set of Flash CS5 time­line ani­ma­tion frames is copied to the clip­board using the ‘Copy to HTML Can­vas’ Com­mand. The clip­board con­tains doc­u­ment meta­data and ani­ma­tion XML, and is “Smart-pasted” into in Dreamweaver CS5 via FXG with the option of  ‘Ani­ma­tion’ selected. The browser is launched, and Voilà,  an HTML5 can­vas ani­ma­tion that looks iden­ti­cal to the Flash time­line it orig­i­nated from!  The speaker did note how­ever, that right now Action­Script can’t be used in this way. I, for one, think that’s a a more than rea­son­able com­pro­mise. An inter­est­ing side effect of this is, ani­ma­tors, who Flash was orig­i­nally designed for, are now a much more valu­able com­mod­ity. Many times, these are the same peo­ple who make Flash games, which is a per­fect fit given the Flash to iPhone announcement.

For a brief sec­ond though, I didn’t get it. But then it hit me. The Flash Plat­form is beyond future-proofed now. Think about it. Flash’s two biggest “road­blocks”, the iPhone (though I want to reit­er­ate, it’s still native device code and NOT Flash run­ning) and HTML5 (which won’t be an offi­cial spec for years to come), now have an oppor­tu­nity to be made non-issues for Adobe. These may be work-arounds, or hacks to some peo­ple, but Adobe is a multi-billion dol­lar com­pany because of moves like this. They know when to strate­gize and join the com­pe­ti­tion if they can’t beat them. Now though, with all of the unbe­liev­able prod­ucts and fea­tures shown at MAX, the com­pe­ti­tion has some seri­ous catch-up to do.

It’s funny, I look back at two of my pre­vi­ous posts, and think about what I saw in this video. It’s funny how things work out.

I said it recently, and I’ll say it again: It’s the best time ever to be a Flash developer.