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The Maelstrom in Your Future

Over the past year, we have rededicated ourselves to getting broad community feedback on our future development plans and efforts. Some of that is done privately through beta lists, customer advisory boards, and customer visits. Increasingly, some of it will be done publicly.

To this end, we have recently begun showing what we are working on for the next version of the Flash client, code-named "Maelstrom." The effort on Maelstrom roughly falls into three main themes: performance, expressiveness, and standardization.

Performance

Flash has evolved beyond its animation roots to become the leading rich client for complex business applications, an expressive medium for content, and a versatile communications endpoint. This evolution has increasingly put new types of performance demands on the Flash client.

To address this situation, a big part of our development focus for Maelstrom is aimed at improving performance. Accelerated graphics and code execution are all areas that show a lot of promise. For example, with enhanced bitmap image support, you can animate graphics as bitmaps instead of rendering them as vectors in each frame. This dramatically increases the number of objects that can be animated smoothly and preserves processing cycles for other tasks.

Expressiveness

You have told that you would like more expressiveness—a richer palette of options to create powerful effects. We have taken that to heart and are working on a number of new features:

• Video: We plan to include an exceptional, new video codec that's comparable to some of the best codecs on the market today. This new codec allows you to deliver exceptional video quality at reasonable broadband rates and at larger sizes. We also plan to support a real-time transparent alpha channel that will enable live composition of non-rectangular video, allowing for the layering of video with text, graphics, and even other video.
• Text: We plan to deliver a new text rendering solution that produces text as clear and readable as we have seen. It offers sharp, anti-aliased text and will support precision typographic features such as hinting and kerning. Furthermore, Flash text becomes much more readable, regardless of monitor type, resolution, or character set.
• Real-time graphic effects: We're working on a set of killer real-time graphics effects like glows, blurs, drop-shadows, color matrix, and others. You can apply them live to any objects in Flash, including graphics, text, and even video. Because these are applied live, they can react interactively. Because they are dynamic, they reduce author time and file size by eliminating several post-processing steps in Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks that are required to achieve these effects today.
• Blend modes and gradients: Professional designers can now create high-quality effects by composing graphics using a variety of blending modes—overlays, lighten and darken, multiply, screen, and more. In addition to more precise control over radial gradients and gradient stops, the possibilities for runtime creative expression with graphic elements are endless.
• Powerful new APIs: Lower-level runtime access to graphic objects provides new options for visually tweaking your content, allowing developers to get high-performance, low-level control over graphics objects. By taking advantage of the performance improvements I mentioned previously, developers can create never-before-seen graphics effects and visual experiences in real time. This fine-grained access also enables dramatic performance optimizations and control over runtime performance.

Standardization

As you probably already know, ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, the open standard scripting language. As an ECMA member, Macromedia continues to participate in the evolution of ECMAScript through the standards process. This will bring new power to ActionScript.

Those of you who have seen the demos at Macromedia MAX and other conferences will likely agree with me that Maelstrom has many exciting features to offer and is consistent with where developers and designers using Flash need us to take it.

Showing technology while it is still under development is risky, however, so please keep these key thoughts in mind as you think about Maelstrom or any other technology we show before it is shipping:

• When we show you stuff that is still in the lab, that means it's still cooking. There is no guarantee that any of the features we show you or talk about will actually make it into the final shipping product.
• The whole point of showing things early is to get your feedback and have that feedback impact our future direction. We maintain a feature request form where you can send us suggestions and thoughts about features you like and don't like. Even though we typically do not respond directly to individual requests, we do read, catalog, and prioritize your suggestions as part of our development cycle.
• Please avoid the tendency to jump to dramatic conclusions about how the technology will impact your present efforts. Again, this stuff is still in the lab and could change course by 180 degrees before it ships.
• Just because we are starting to show things, no implication should be drawn on the timing of the shipping products.

Maelstrom will be integrated into all of our products that rely on the Flash client. As has always been the case, existing content—regardless of when it was created or for which client version—will continue to be rendered exactly the same as the author intended.

There are many features in Maelstrom that are completely new and will require new code to be written if you want to take advantage of them in existing projects. We will offer more information on how to take advantage of these new features when we're closer to release. We plan to document extensively all the ways customers can take full advantage of what Maelstrom has to offer. We are committed to making this as easy as possible.

Finally, we have conducted download testing for different-sized clients and have concluded that the expected footprint of Maelstrom will not materially impact the historical adoption rate of new Flash client versions. We attribute this to many factors, including the rapid adoption of broadband worldwide.

We think that Maelstrom will be the most significant release of the Flash client ever. Much of it is credited to all the great feedback and commentary that you have given us. Keep that feedback coming!

Those of you who are interested in joining Macromedia beta programs can review our requirements and complete an application.

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