Adobe Positions Flash For Multiple DevicesAdobe Positions Flash For Multiple Devices

Adobe is going to great lengths to show how its software can adapt to displays of all shapes and sizes.

The company's MAX 2008 conference opened in San Francisco on Monday with a brief performance by DJ Mike Relm. His turntable scratching spun video loops forward and back on the Moscone West auditorium wall in time with the music.

"This is the 'wow' moment," one person in the projected montage explained in an attempt to convey the communicative might of video technology.

It was more of a "why" moment: Why would Adobe want to subject anyone to looped amateur videos without the alcohol necessary to appreciate onscreen people repeating sentences over and over to a mechanical beat?

But Adobe was aiming for a "how" moment: How the company's software can help designers and developers create content for a world with many screens.

"We're in a time of great change around the world," said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, pointing to shifts in demographics, technology, economics, and climate. "...Consumers are demanding a consistent experience across multiple devices, at work and at home."

The PC, in other words, is no longer the only game in town. Mobile phones and mobile Internet devices became more numerous than computers last year, said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. And Adobe expects them to become even more important in the future, as people in developing countries opt for smartphones rather than more expensive PCs.

"We need to start thinking about mobile first," he said.

Adobe sees its technology as the interface layer that can take content and format it for use on screens of all sizes. Toward that end, it introduced Adobe Flash Catalyst, a design tool for creating application interfaces without coding, a preview build of Flex Builder 4 called "Gumbo," AIR 1.5, and Flash Media Server 3.5.

It also said that it's working with chipmaker ARM to optimize Flash 10 and AIR for mobile devices, set-top boxes, and automotive platforms.

Adobe had planned to have Flash on 1 billion mobile phones by 2010, but Lynch said the company will reach that goal by the end of 2009.

He demonstrated Adobe's ongoing effort to bring Flash 10 to mobile phones by showing several phones that were "hot out of the oven." An assistant brought out several sample phones in a metal container as if they were actually hot to the touch. There was a Nokia N85 running Symbian with a Flash-based graphic from The Wall Street Journal, an HTC phone running Windows Mobile with LastFM in an Opera browser, and another Windows Mobile phone running YouTube. When Lynch pulled an iPhone from the container, the crowd cheered -- seriously. "This one actually needs a little bit more baking," said Lynch. "We do need, however, to pass the taste test of Apple's head chef to bring Flash 10 to the iPhone."

Lynch also demonstrated the T-Mobile G1, built on Google's Android mobile platform, running a Star Dudes video in Flash 10. Google's senior director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, stepped on stage briefly to congratulate Lynch on Adobe's efforts. "Everything Adobe is doing on top of Android is awesome," he said.

Beyond addressing the shift toward a multitrend world, one of three major trends affecting the computing landscape, Lynch also touched on the emerging social component of software and the codependence of client and cloud.

One tool Adobe is providing to bring a social component to its software is Adobe Cocomo, a platform service that allows Flex developers to add social interaction to rich Internet applications. Using Cocomo, Flex developers can, for example, build chat rooms for real-time multiuser streaming and sharing atop Adobe's online infrastructure.

Nigel Pegg, senior engineering manager at Adobe, demonstrated how a medical peer review application built by Acesis could allow doctors to collaborate without exposing patient data.

And Lynch demonstrated an Adobe AIR application called Adobe Wave that can be used to aggregate social network notifications into a single window.

Perhaps the best line of the morning came from Saleforce.com senior VP Steve Fisher, who sees Adobe's technology as a way to present cloud computing services in visually compelling way. "For the last 20 years, enterprise software is where innovation has done to die," he observed.

Now, instead of huge up-front fees, difficult integration, and onerous maintenance fees, Fisher sees the emerging client and cloud model as a way to "pay for what you use, not what the vendor wants you to use."

And speaking of payment, Adobe Flash CS4 Professional starts at $699.