Despite the beating most Internet businesses have taken over the last few years, Web design and development tool company Macromedia has escaped relatively unscathed with products such as its Flash Web application and animation software attaining an unprecedented following among designers and developers.
But not everything has gone the company's way. Recent sales of its Studio MX 2004, the package that combines new versions of major Macromedia Web design and development tools, such as Flash and Dreamweaver, were considerably slower than expected, which resulted in the company having to lower revenue forecasts.
Rather than cutting costs on R&D in the face of smaller IT budgets, the company is continuing to innovate, and has announced several new products over the last six months. The latest to be unleashed on the developer community is Central -- a set of design tools and a user interface for aggregating and viewing Web content on- and offline.
ZDNet caught up with Macromedia's chief software architect Kevin Lynch, the creative force behind Central and other products including the Dreamweaver Web page and application tool, at the company's annual MAX user event in Salt Lake City.
During the launch event for Central you claimed it would lead to "a renaissance in application development", what did you mean by that?
Ok -- applications are in the dark ages right now. They are a total throwback -- it's like everyone has forgotten what a good application is like. They are using a technology to do user interfaces on the Web -- HTML -- that was designed for documents not applications so it's archaic and the user experience is bad. We tried hard at Macromedia.com but it's still not perfect.
There was some criticism of the redesigned site when it launched -- not being compatible with some Mac browsers, for instance?
Yeah but change is always hard. What I mean about a renaissance in applications is that right now there is a confluence of factors that could enable this renaissance to happen. People now have Web services and XML, they have rich client technologies like Flash and an environment that they can run in like Central so you can keep them on your machine and use them when you are online or off; all these things come together to provide an environment where lots of innovation can occur. Very much like during the Renaissance when there was lots of innovation, lots of new creation, both in terms of art and technology. I think that is true of applications right now; there are artists who are designing great user interfaces and technically there's a lot of groundwork for innovation going on.
But how fast can you progress with site design -- isn't there a gap between what developers can create and what consumers can intuitively navigate around?
I think the average person is smarter than they are given credit for. The application user interface on the Web right now is really constrained by the HTML component so you can't make it very clean. I think richness in design can make for much more understandable user interfaces.
One of the things we have seen on the Web is high degree of inconsistency across sites: you go to one Web site and it works one way, go to another and it works a completely different way. I think one way we could make things easier for consumers is by providing a consistent experience across applications. One of the things we are trying to do with Central is provide standard metaphors: standard components of course like buttons and scroll bars but also higher level patterns for design like when you use tabs, and how you display search controls. The more we all use the same patterns the easier it will get for people.
Central is a very different approach to interacting with the Web -- are you guys secretly plotting the death of the browser?
Not at all but it's a good question. I think the browser is going to live for the foreseeable future. For writing documents for the Internet, HTML and the browser are awesome and I don't think that is going to go away. Central we see as complimentary to the browser; it will work alongside it; you can link from Central to the browser. They will coexist, very much so.
Is it strange to create an offline application at a time when more and more people are continuously connected to the Web via Wi-Fi?
For folks who have lots of Internet connectivity it's not as obvious but the reality is that most people don't have very good connectivity. In the US the broadband reach is not quite 30 percent yet; a lot of people are still using modems and so they are not always dialled-up and connected. Also people who are travelling -- I travel a lot, and occasionally you get wireless access. There's supposed to be some here but I can't get it right now (the lobby of the downtown Marriott, Salt Lake City, Utah) -- I am now offline even though I am a pretty connected guy. If I wanted to read current blogs or look at the news I couldn't do that but I have Central and I am able to turn on my computer and look at current blogs because they are all captured on my machine.
It even makes things faster when you are connected to the Internet because your application is already on your machine, so when you visit that application you already have it; whereas if you visit a Web site it is downloading again onto your machine so you have to wait for it to arrive; the information you want is all on servers on the Internet and you have to wait for it to download. The revolution here is that even if you are online it's local so it launches instantly, the data is there instantly and the updates can come in over time.
Is there any issue with it taking up disk space though?
Hard disks are pretty large but we start with 20MB allocated to Central for all the data your applications store. If you the user goes over that amount they get a little prompt asking for permission to use more disk space and they can decide to say yes or no. But disk space is pretty cheap now -- people have multi-gigabyte hard disks so it's OK.
Have you got any internal projections on how many people are going to download Central?
The Flash player is really widely distributed and I don't think Central is going to be downloaded at the same rate. Just to get some idea, the Flash player is less than a megabyte to download; Central is 1.8MB so it's a little bit larger than Flash player and that has some factor in terms of download success. The Flash player is downloaded over three million times every day right now; that's an incredible rate. So being optimistic I'd say we will get somewhere up there eventually but I think it will take a long time. It took years to get to that point with the Flash player. We don't have any solid projections for what is going to happen -- it is going to be very driven by the applications that people create and those applications will pull the installation of Central. We don't think people will just go and install Central; we think they'll see an application they like and install it and if they don't have Central it will come along with the application.
Central is available on Windows and Mac at the moment -- do you see desktop Linux as potential platform too?
It's certainly showing some energy especially in Europe and Asia. We already produce some software for Linux -- a player -- and our servers, like ColdFusion and JRun work on Linux. With our authoring tools we are waiting for there to be a big enough market -- we're watching it and when it gets big enough we will go there.
How do you decide the tipping point?
It's much like how we do our localisations of software. We look at how big the returns will be and if it's significant enough then we'll do it.
You're a bit of a user-interface guru -- are you experimenting much with 3D?
I think that in the long term 3D is going to be a very interesting technology for interfaces and a person who has been experimenting a lot with that is Alan Kay. He was a fellow at Apple for a long time, the he moved to Disney. He keeps get sponsored by different places so he moves around a lot. He's a brilliant guy, he worked at Xerox Parc and was part of the team that invented copy and paste and a lot of the user interface stuff we see today.
He's got a project at the moment -- a 3D immersive environment and you have avatars in the space that represent people who are online and you can see their spaces through little window portals and they are like floating in space and you can see into their space through this window. It's really cool. And then you can walk up to the window and jump through it and then you are in their space -- you can also turn around and look back through the window into your space. It's very cool stuff but totally experimental.
