The Adobe Future of the Web

I spent all day yesterday at an Adobe conference listening to the evangelists speak the praise that is CS3 Web Premium. Now, from a marketing standpoint I think they sold everyone in the crowd into buying an update from CS2. Why? Because you can do some things you never thought possible...

Face it, we're all sort of imprisoned by Adobe but it's nice to know that they care about us.

The one thing that really came across, if you haven't heard of this already, is that Adobe is going big time into internet applications and multi-media. As well as bringing it all to your desktop and tying it all together. What does this mean? It means the internet as we know it will become something quite amazing over the next year. We're not just talking Flash here, we're talking Flash to the umpteenth power backed up by the likes of Flex and AIR. And, if you're skeptical at just hearing the word Flash, believe me this stuff doesn't look at all like the Flash of yore - it actually looks good.

AIR is Adobe's combatant to the likes of Dashboard and Yahoo! Widgets, it let's you run web applications on your desktop. Free from the restraints of a browser and fully interactive with your home files etc. Unlike "widgets" however AIR brings full-fledged large scale programs (web related or not) to the table. This means that anything you can do with Flash on the web you can now bring into a desktop application. (It's kind of frightening really.) To truly comprehend what all this means go and have a look at the information page and examples at Adobe Labs "AIR". eBay as a desktop application? Yeah, it's crazy.

Flex is another one of Adobe's future forging exploits that will be unleashed on the world in the coming months. And when it comes out everyone is going to be jumping on board. Many have already, and the thing is still in Beta. Once we all balked at seeing a Flash built website, well no longer. Just take a look at some of the examples of what people are doing with this. When everyone said Flash sucks, Adobe listened.

Oh, and then there's Adobe's upcoming Media Player...

It's all pretty exciting, if you care about this stuff. Will it change everything? Probably not. But, it certainly presents a lot of new options and an amazing amount of potential.