Category Archives: adobe

adobe

Adobe financials: little change in segment breakdown

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Adobe has released its Q3 2009 results [pdf], which show a decline in both revenue and profits compared to Q3 2008. I’m not a financial analyst, but the general view seems to be that the figures are reasonable considering the economic downturn, and that Adobe has done well to trim its costs accordingly.

What interests me most is the breakdown [pdf] in Adobe’s revenue between tools and other services. Here’s what it was last time I looked:

Revenue by segment ($millions) FY2008 YTD August 2008 – representing 3 quarters

  • Creative Solutions $1564.3 [58.7%]
  • Business Productivity Solutions $786 [29.5%]
  • Mobile and Device solutions $64.9 [2.4%]
  • Other $249.4 [9.4%]

and now:

Revenue by segment ($millions) FY2008 YTD August 2009 – representing 3 quarters

  • Creative Solutions $1272.8 [58%]
  • Business Productivity Solutions $646.7 [30%]
  • Platform Revenue $134 [6%]
  • Print and Publishing 135.1 [6%]

It’s unfortunate that the last two categories have changed, but the general picture seems to be much as before.

Creative Solutions means mainly Creative Suite.

Business productivity is Acrobat and LiveCycle, including Acrobat.com.

Platform is Flash Player, AIR, Cold Fusion, Flex and the developer tools.

Print and Publishing is the stuff you might have forgotten about: FrameMaker and PageMaker, Director, PostScript, Robohelp, and a few other bits and pieces. It’s interesting that these older products generated more revenue than the trendy new platform, Flex and AIR.

A couple of observations. First, Adobe is making little progress in reducing its dependence on sales of tools – I don’t know if this is even its aim, though it strikes me that it should be, since the tools business is a precarious one and prone to commoditization. As I understand it, Adobe has considerable ambitions for building Acrobat.com as a cloud service but this looks like mostly future hope.

Second, the huge success of Flash media on the web does not seem to be showing up as increased revenue. Maybe Microsoft’s efforts with Silverlight streaming are exerting a downward pressure on prices?

Adobe may say it is well positioned to benefit from economic recovery, which actually seems plausible.

Disclosure: I deliberately avoid investing in companies about which I write.

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adobe, microsoft, silverlight, sony, xbox

Sony’s Flash advantage for PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360

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Sony’s PlayStation 3 includes a web browser and for some time it has been possible to view BBC iPlayer content there. The iPlayer is based on Adobe Flash. The attraction of this approach is that the console is already plugged into the home TV, so it is a relatively seamless shift from conventional broadcasting, provided you can figure out how to operate it using a game controller.

According to the BBC’s Anthony Rose, people are figuring this out big time, now that Sony has both enhanced Flash with h.264 support and full-screen hardware acceleration, and added an iPlayer icon to the PS3 menu (I should think the latter counted for more than the former). He’s revealed on the BBC Internet blog that:

… iPlayer on PS3 now accounts for a massive ~10% of all iPlayer viewing, overtaking Mac (8.5%) to be our 2nd most popular platform for IP-delivered content.

I find that impressive given that the PS3 is still marketed primarily as a games console.

The obvious question: what about Xbox 360, which is inherently more than capable of the same feat? The problem is that Flash is not supported on the 360, nor does it have a web browser. You can watch TV via a 360, by using it as a Media Center Extender, but that means getting quite a few other pieces in place in your digital home, including a Media Center PC with a TV aerial plugged into it – and even then, you are not getting iPlayer, just digital TV.

There are a couple of solutions that come to mind. One is that Microsoft could get together with Adobe and support Flash on the 360. The other is that Microsoft could get a move on with its Silverlight support on 360 and persuade the BBC to serve up iPlayer content for Silverlight as well as Flash. Both are technically feasible; the first would be easier for the BBC but embarrassing for Microsoft, which is promoting its own video streaming technology, while the second would be expensive for the BBC.

Another party which is likely to be watching with interest is ITV, which has its own catch-up service. This used to be based on Silverlight but now seems to be pretty much all Flash, perhaps because of quality problems or simply to take advantage of the wider deployment of the Flash runtime. Even though it does not have its own icon on a PS3, you could watch ITV Player via the browser.

Catch-up viewing is popular, and this sensible Flash-based development alongside existing Blu-ray support gives Sony’s machine a substantial advantage over the 360 when considered as a home entertainment device, rather than merely a games console. I’d expect this to be a significant factor as buyers make their choices in the coming Christmas season.

Finally, I wonder what other interesting potential there is for runtimes like Flash or Silverlight on a game console that is wired directly into the family home? Could there be a PS3 app store in the console’s future?

Update: A couple of informative comments below observe that there is a way to get iPlayer on the 360 via WMV download and Media Center; and that Sky Player is Silverlight-based and coming to Xbox. So it is not game over yet.

adobe, eclipse, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

The desktop versus web application debate

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I posted a piece entitled Desktop applications are dead which attracted the following comment:

Web apps have plenty of cons too. You seem to only be looking to the Pros.

There’s something in it; though the article is a little more nuanced than its title. There’s also another debate to be had around the question of what a web application really is. If thousands of lines of JavaScript are executing on the client, is it a web app? If it is running in Flash or Silverlight is it a web app? If it is running out of browser (Adobe AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX) has it crossed the border to become a desktop app? This last case is particularly interesting, since although something like AIR should probably be categorised as desktop, its programming model is normally that of a web application with an offline cache.

The semantic discussion can distract from the real issues. The ascendancy of web applications has a lot to teach software developers. The enforced simplicity, even crudeness, in the user interface of early web applications brought some surprising benefits: users generally liked the minimalist approach and ease of navigation. The page model, intended for documents, turns out to work for applications as well.

Another big lesson: users value zero-install extremely highly. The routine of go to the web page – run the app is easy to understand. Some find it easier than finding an application shortcut in the Windows Start menu, and that is after the potentially painful business of running setup.

Still, I am slipping into reiterating the advantages of web apps. What about their cons? What about the pros of desktop applications?

I still use desktop applications a great deal: Microsoft Office, Live Writer, Foobar, Visual Studio, Eclipse, all the things I listed in 10 Mac alternatives to Windows utilities. Doesn’t that prove that desktop applications are still important?

It does; but there is an important qualification. None of these are line of business applications of the type which occupy so much of the time of corporate software developers and contractors.

The real point: if there is a discussion about whether a particular project should be implemented as a desktop or web application, it is not the web application advocates who need to make their case. Rather, it is the desktop advocates who need to show the particular reasons (which may be good ones) why only a traditional local install will do.

It is also important to follow the curve on the graph. The list of things that can only be done by desktop applications gets shorter with every upgrade to the web platform – whether you think of that as HTML/AJAX, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, or [insert your favourite web technology].

Ten years ago, a web version of Photoshop seemed an unlikely prospect. Today, here it is. Office and email is going the same way, even if it is not quite ready for all of us; Microsoft will have to accept that or lose its business.

I don’t follow Rich Internet Applications with such interest because they are cool, but because they are the future of the client – and increasingly the present as well.

adobe, flash, web authoring

Adobe to announce Flash, Creative Suite roadmaps at MAX 2009

It looks like Adobe has some significant announcements planned for its MAX 2009 [warning: auto-play video] conference on October 4-7. The sessions that intrigue me most are the roadmaps: these include:

  • Roadmap: Flash Platform Runtimes
  • Roadmap: Flash Platform Servers and Services
  • Roadmap: Flash Platform Tooling and Framework – this session is to be given by Greg DeMichillie, now director of product management for Developer Tools. DeMichillie is ex-Microsoft and used to work on Visual Studio in the early days of C# and Visual J++, though he left in 2001.
  • Roadmap: Web Professional Tools and Services in Creative Suite
  • What’s ahead for Flash Catalyst
  • What’s coming in Adobe AIR 2

Looks like a lot to take in; it will be fascinating to see more detail about where Adobe is taking its platform.

adobe, bbc, flash, google, internet, media, multimedia, silverlight, web authoring

BBC trying out HTML 5, video element

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The BBC has an HTML 5 demonstration using the video element. The video itself is encoded in both Ogg and H.264. In the screenshot below I have just clicked on a navigation image to jump to a specific place in the video. The demonstration is meant to work in Firefox, Safari and Chrome, though for me it only ran in Firefox (3.5).

There is a detailed comment from the BBC’s Sam Dutton on why the proof of concept was put together here. There is an interesting remark on why the BBC is interested in this approach, which does not require a plugin like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight:

Flash and other Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide something like this already via timeline scripting, but RIAs are ‘black boxes’, using compilers and obfuscators to hide code and data: great if you want to protect intellectual property, whereas we needed to provide a mechanism whereby data and the code acting on it were open and accessible. HTML 5 and the jQuery JavaScript framework gave us the tools we needed without requiring extra plugins or proprietary software.

From a technical perspective, Dutton remarks that the HTML 5 solution is more efficient if you want to synchronize other elements with the playing video:

The HTML 5 audio and video elements remove the need for player plugins, work like any other HTML element in terms of styling and positioning, and standardise the programming interface for playback control. Less well known is that these elements emit a timeupdate event (at a frequency adjusted to fit available processing and memory) which removes the need to poll a player for the current time position. This makes media scripting far more efficient, since there is no need to run a loop or use setTimeout. In tests run on several machines we found that timeupdate events are emitted regularly and frequently (particularly in Firefox), whereas polling a media player for current video time is unreliable.

Dutton adds:

… it’s early days for us on this and there are a number of serious challenges before this becomes anything near mainstream – if ever.

The BBC is an influential site and its experiments will attract keen interest from those watching the evolution of web video.

adobe, javascript

Where next for Adobe ActionScript?

The Flash community is disturbing the quiet of August by beating up ActionScript, the language of Flash, Flex and AIR. ActionScript is based on JavaScript, and took huge strides in version 3.0, introduced with Flash Player 9. Just-in-time compilation greatly improved performance, while the core language got optional strong typing, namespaces, sealed classes, and other features that brought the language closer to Java or C#. Adobe was endeavouring to implement ECMAScript 4.0, which at the time was also meant to be the future standard for JavaScript in the browser, though ECMAScript has since gone in a different direction.

Nevertheless, a number of influential Flash developers are saying “not good enough”. Sascha Balkau has a good summary and lists some of the requested features, including method overloading, generics, threading, abstract classes, and enums. Nicolas Cannasse talks about the failure of ActionScript 3. Joa Ebert is unhappy with the community process and observes that Google’s V8 is faster than ActionScript which in his view is ridiculous. Jesse Warden also complains about performance and asks for the performance gains from the amazing Alchemy (which compiles C/C++ to ActionScript) to be available to all ActionScript code. Peter Elst asks for ActionScript to be decoupled from the player and replaced with a dynamic language runtime.

Why all the fuss? This is the pace of development in the industry putting pressure on Adobe. There are undoubtedly Flash developers casting envious glances at Silverlight’s .NET Framework, which meets many of the above requests – though let’s not forget the Silverlight developers casting envious glances at Flash in areas like text handling or simply its wider adoption – and the Google factor is also an interesting one.

Miguel de Icaza tweets mischievously about how Adobe should adopt Mono and get C#; and in many ways he’s right. Not that Adobe should necessarily adopt Mono; but that it should be using a language and virtual machine that is shared with a wider community – which I guess is what was intended for Tamarin, though that has not worked out well so far.

In the meantime, I’m guessing that Adobe will be coming up with improvements to meet at least some of these requests – multi-threading, surely, and the next stage in Alchemy. MAX 2009 in October?

adobe, internet, silverlight, software development

UI design patterns for Rich Internet Applications

We are used to the idea of design patterns for software construction, following the great work of the gang of four – Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable object-oriented software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John M Vlissides. But what about patterns for user interface design? What about learning standard UI patterns and how to apply them well, so that you have an immediate head start when sitting down to create a compelling and usable application?

Ryan Stewart’s blog post on up-leveling the Flex User Interface Discussion links to the work of Theresa Neil, who spoke on Designing Rich Application at the DelveUI conference last week. She’s posted her slide show, which I’ve also embedded below:

Designing Rich Applications

View more documents from Theresa Neil.

I found it fascinating, and while I will never be a designer, this kind of methodical, structured approach to building a UI is one that developers can also appreciate.

She also has a matrix of essential controls showing which UI frameworks support them – page 21 above – though the slide only shows controls from A to D; the full set is described here.

While I’m on the subject, there’s also a thought-provoking post from Brandon Walkin on managing UI complexity. It seems Microsoft can still provide plenty of “how not to do it” examples.

adobe, flash, google, internet, web authoring

Google buys On2, plans to integrate video into web platform

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Google is buying On2 Technologies, a video technology company. Although On2 is not a household name, it is well-known to Adobe Flash developers since its codec is used in Flash Player 8; it is also in JavaFX. Flash has since moved to H.264 for high definition though the older codec is still supported.

Why does Google want a video compression company? This is from the press release:

Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google.

That could mean any number of things; but it does imply that Google does not intend to rely on Flash for its video content. The acquisition will re-open the debate about the video element in HTML 5, which has been left without a codec because of lack of consensus about what might be suitable and affordable. See Ian Hickson’s post from June 2009:

After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for <video> and <audio> in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship.

Could Google now establish its own codec as the standard in HTML 5?

I’m guessing Google is also keen to integrate On2 technology with its communication products.

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adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Morgan Stanley: why we didn’t use Silverlight for Matrix

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I attended an online briefing about Morgan Stanley’s Matrix [warning: lots of Flash with sound effects], a tool for financial trading which has been written in Adobe Flex.  Adobe’s Andrew Shorten has more information here, and notes:

Matrix was developed by Morgan Stanley with user experience consultation from Adobe Professional Services and technical delivery by Lab 49 in partnership with Adobe Professional Services and others.

Unfortunately I missed the first part of the briefing thanks to streaming issues (I wasn’t alone), but things settled down after 15 minutes or so. Hishaam Mufti-Bey, Matrix founder and global director at Morgan Stanley, spoke about the application and the technology it uses. He emphasized the value of zero-install:

The technology is out of the way, no-one has a problem with running the application. It’s now about how tight our prices are, how good our content is, which is always what we wanted to have happen … we want to deliver our franchise to the client without taxing their systems, or having to get past firewall issues, or install software and IT security will get in the way and it takes months to deploy.

I couldn’t agree more. The app itself looks great, though details of how it works were sketchy, I guess for commercial reasons. We were also told little about the server side of the application. Performance is said to be good, despite what is apparently 600,000 lines of code (I’m not 100% clear if this is all Flex code running on the client):

We’ve seen up to 40 currency players running on the screen and getting up to about 400 updates a second

claimed Mufti-Bey, though he added later than lack of multi-threading support is an issue. Next, he took a pop at Microsoft’s Silverlight:

Going out to clients and not installing software, that is a major show-stopper for Silverlight. If Silverlight turned around and offered that one day, that I didn’t need to install stuff on the client’s PC, then it would be a head-to-head. Flash is on 97.7% of the world’s browsers. That was a major consideration for us.

It’s an interesting point, though I’d have thought his comments need some qualification. Flash and Silverlight are both browser plug-ins, so the install issue is similar: if the plug-in is already installed, the app will just run in the browser, but if it is not installed in the right version, the user will need to install the plug-in first. According to riastats.com Flash is up to about 74.5% for version 10 and 20.5% for version 9; I’m not sure if Matrix requires version 10, but if it does then Mufti-Bey is exaggerating a little. Matrix currently uses Flash 9 (see comments). Silverlight by contrast is on 30% for version 2 and 1% for the just-released version 3.

Installing a browser plug-in is easy for most of us, but in a locked-down corporate environment may be problematic, and there is always some percentage of installs that will be troublesome. I’ve found installing Silverlight a smooth and quick process; but undoubtedly Flash is a de-facto standard whereas Silverlight is not. Microsoft can only address this by persuading more of us to develop Silverlight apps, and using it more in its own sites and products – like the forthcoming Office 2010 web applications, for example.

Still, the need to install the Silverlight plug-in where necessary is far less burdensome than either a classic Windows setup, or a requirement for the full .Net Framework; and Microsoft has also removed the requirement to run Windows itself by supporting Intel Mac. It sounds as if Microsoft is going in the right direction, even if catching Flash is a tough challenge.

That might not be enough, according to Mufti-Bey. Asked about the importance of designer-developer workflow, he remarked:

You have to look at the people that use that technology. The design community. That’s the biggest problem that Microsoft has. The designers all carry around Apple laptops, they all use the Photosuite [sic] set of software tools. It’s like asking structural engineers to stop using CAD applications. That’s the tool that they use, and if you can’t convince them to switch away from your software suite you are going to get a limited number of designers that will use Microsoft’s toolset … if you can’t get the designers to switch, to learn a new language, then how can you possibly ever get some traction?

Well, it wasn’t the answer to the question posed, but an interesting point nevertheless. Let’s presume that he is right, and nobody will switch from Photoshop. Is it so hard for Mac-wielding designers to work with .NET developers? There must be something in it, bearing in mind the effort Microsoft has made to improve Photoshop import in Expression Blend 3.0.

Overall I would like to have heard more about the process and challenges of developing a large Flex application, and less about why not to use Silverlight, interesting topic though it is.

adobe, google, internet, web authoring

Google names its Chrome OS partners – including Adobe

Google has posted a Chrome OS FAQ, in which it lists its partners for the new operating system. This features the usual suspects in terms of PC and hardware vendors – though no Dell as yet – but with one interesting addition. Adobe:

The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Adobe is the only pure software company listed. What is the significance? My assumption is that Google intends its Chrome OS to work well with Adobe Flash, needed for compatibility with a zillion web sites out there, and to support multimedia such as the BBC iPlayer. Adobe will also want to get its offline, desktop runtime, called AIR, onto the device; and seeing the company named here makes that even more likely. Put this together with Chrome’s fast JavaScript engine and innovations like O3D – hardware-accelerated graphics for the browser – and my guess is that this will make an excellent platform for Rich Internet Applications and multimedia.

If there is a war between HTML 5 and Flash, Google is more aligned with HTML 5; but that won’t get in the way of excellent Flash support in Chrome OS.

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