I was mucking about on about 4 or 5 different things at once and ended up back at
this post. I was really curious about what the "Godfathers" of Flash were up to when I read that post over a year ago, and it seems like the question has been answered and I apparently missed it.
So
here's what they've been up to..
"The Greenbox™ Home Energy Manager empowers homeowners to understand and manage their energy consumption. With knowledge of their energy use, consumers can take proactive steps to conserve energy, understand their impact on the environment, and save money.
Conveniently monitoring electricity, water, and/or gas usage in real-time, the Greenbox provides direct feedback to consumers about their homes performance. Studies have shown that households can reduce their utility bills by 10-20%, just by being aware of their ongoing usage.
The Greenbox presents easy to understand graphs, charts, historical data, and community comparisons to empower people to understand and make informed decisions about their energy and water usage. A personalized recommendation engine takes the mystery out of making your home more efficient by forecasting usage, cost, and emissions savings that can be created by implementing various efficiency improvements."
That's something that just might come in handy as a barrel of oil topped $123 today and other types of energy are slowly creeping up in cost.
Now I'm curious if they're using Flash for that device and if consumer devices like this are the reason Adobe moved to open (free) the licensing for the Flash Player recently. I figured it was for flashy fun things like set top boxes, handheld games (leapster), etc. and not necessarily for utilitarian devices like an energy management system. I guess I figured wrong.
wow.....
the announcement today from Adobe about opening the Flash Player up to the market to be placed on any imaginable device is just stunning. This is going to place even more demand on people with Flash skills as these companies begin to produce handheld devices using the Flash Player.
The only thing in the press release that set off my BS detector was this.. "“The Open Screen Project will make it simple for Verizon and our partners to deliver rich mobile experiences to more devices,”" .. yeah, and how big of a fee will they charge developers before they can develop for the Verizon network?
I also noticed that there was no mention of Apple in that press release.
Check out The Online Community Grid.. a grid computing system using Flash Player instances as people browse around the web. I’ve heard rumblings of other projects that ran along these lines, but can’t recall one that was up and running.
The code is up on the Google code thing so you can dig around in it and see what it’s doing.
Some interesting stuff there.. it’s something to keep in mind for later projects and it’s fun to see people continuing to push the boundaries of what Flash is supposed to be.
Over the years I’ve seen a lot of ways to produce SWFs. Some options were commercial (Generator, Kinetic Fusion, Turbine, Flex, etc..) and some not (Ming, Jzox, etc). I even did a little hack where I used the command line to fire up the Flash IDE and pop out a customized SWF at will. I was just experimenting and didn’t use that in a production environment of course and it was all legal like since I was using my one copy of Flash on my own system, etc.. but it was sort of fun in a Frankenstein way to hit the web server on my pc and watch the Flash IDE go through crazy gyrations and spit out a SWF. It was a poor mans Generator (and not legal so don’t get any ideas.. especially since there are better legal options out now).
Now there’s something around the bend that just brought back those memories and made that hacker inside me cackle a bit in remembrance of those days long ago.
I was reading some stuff and found my way to posts from about a month ago by Colin Moock and John Nack and Chad Udell.
You can already create SWFs on a server with Flex, but for most animation and graphic oriented things you really have to do it in the Flash IDE. If Flash CS4 is indeed going to use XFL as the “source” then it opens the possibility for those cool things the others mentioned (go read their posts if you haven’t already) and changes the Flash production model. Take a look at what Adobe did with Photoshop Express and Buzzword and.. well.. you run with it. This could open up some interesting new avenues for Flash production.
