Flash promotion expert Andrew Shorten

Flash has attracted a lot of attention since its launch. I still remember the shock that the Eye4U website created with Flash brought to everyone at the end of last century. After more than a decade of development, it has changed from an animation-making tool to a complex platform technology. The first user group was mainly a designer, and now it has covered the developer group, with the continuous complexity and improvement of Flash and ActionScript, users began to develop towards two poles. Creative design and program development kept their own fields, and many problems occurred in project cooperation, the balance between the left and right sides of the brain has become a huge challenge. Every learner is choosing. With the Flash version updated, the learning curve has become steep. At the same time, the end users of Flash files, especially those commercial decision makers, have not yet figured out the real value of rich media applications in China, so they have seen the bottleneck of Flash development in China, at least at present, it lags behind the development of foreign countries. What development strategies does Adobe have to improve the Flash technology platform and its applications? How to promote education in China so that such technology can have a larger development space and a faster development speed? With these questions, I had a face-to-face interview with Adobe Flash Platform Promotion expert Andrew Shorten.

Andrew Shorten is mainly responsible for meeting designers, developers and partners and customers across Europe to discuss opportunities for Flex, Flash and AIR technologies in rich network applications and desktop experience. I have always liked the title "promotion experts" and the way they work. They are enthusiastic and willing to share the title. It is the best communication bridge between software developers and users, they use their own knowledge and experience to spread new knowledge everywhere, or "insider news". It is indeed the Evangelist of the new technology platform. This time Andrew went to China, I represent a very active domestic network designer and the developer community-the blue ideal to communicate with him.

On the afternoon of June 14, in the China office of Adobe, I met Andrew Shorten with the CSDN editor. He was much younger than I thought, his schedule was tight and he seemed to have not fully adapted to the travel time difference. He was a little reluctant, but once he started the interview, his face immediately showed that kind of evangelist enthusiasm.Andrew proactively introduced Adobe's development ideas and ideas on the Flash technology platform before asking questions.First of all, in terms of the Player, the market acceptance and update rate of Flash Player 10 have exceeded expectations. It is currently the best and most common cross-platform rich media Player, not only on computer terminals, rich media content can be played even on mobile devices and other color screen devices. In addition, to meet the needs of users' desktop applications, such as storing more and more interactive content or data locally, it has become Adobe's new technology "AIR". In terms of content creation, Adobe provides the Flash professional tool and the Flex open-source framework. The combination of the two makes the front-end interactive experience and background data processing an effective whole to provide very creative applications. Typical examples include Buzzword-online version of word, SlideRocket-online version of PowerPoint, and Picnik-online version of Photoshop. adobe also realizes that its original target user group is a designer-oriented creative designer, and now it must strive to attract network development engineers represented by programmers, at the same time, they are provided with a complete collaborative workflow in the project, that is, the Flash Catalyst tool to be released. Flash Catalyst is a key product of the next generation of Adobe in the RIA field. It is actually designed to reduce redundant operations in their work processes and improve work efficiency. Designers and developers can improve their work efficiency, either by creating the entire prototype or by creating the UI of the entire RIA project.

This is indeed an exciting news,Although the Flash Catalyst name appeared on Adobe Lab at the end of last year, it also attracted the attention of some Flash developers, but after all this tool is about to be released, I am worried about whether it will make general users feel that they will face a new migration and familiarity, increasing their learning costs..Andrew replied:: Workflow optimization is to make professional workers in all aspects of the project more effective (take what you know and do more than tively), it can: directly import Photoshop, Illustrator, or a Fireworks file. Directly convert the design element into a UI component. Create and edit action behaviors without writing any code. Finally, you can hand over the created prototype to developers for in-depth development. This is not only an improvement in the workflow, but also a collaboration in the project, so that professional people can do professional things, focus on their respective areas of expertise, and reduce redundancy. This makes me very much look forward to its release in China.

My second question is how Adobe helps Chinese users and designers and the developer community better learn and understand these new technologies and tools.Andrew told usAdobe is willing to help these designers and the developer community to continuously improve and enrich their best practices. Adobe's Chinese team is committed to translating technical articles on Adobe DevNet at the same time, in addition, Adobe TV also shares a large amount of video teaching materials. More importantly, it also includes the work of "promotion experts" who want to influence these communities through more sharing, collection, and aggregation, do a good job in dissemination and explanation. If I am not away from specific technical work, I am very interested in trying this kind of Evangelist work.

For end users, an unavoidable problem with Adobe flash technology is the friendliness of search. I want to know about the cooperation between Adobe and Google and what progress has been made? What is Chinese support? After all, this affects some judgment and concerns of commercial decision makers when using Flash technology.

Andrew told us frankly that the cooperation between Adobe and google is actually to let Google's search engine understand what data is loaded in Flash content during the data loading process, including which user interactions have occurred to the data, such as click operations, which means that the loaded data can be indexed by google's search engine in the Flash content, the progress is still good. Adobe and Google have already started cooperation at a certain level, so that Google's search engine can be caught by Google's search engine in loading data in Flash from the data level and learn where the data is, at the same time, you can also use Google's search engine to guide users to go deep into the data Flash location, which means that the Flash generated by Flex can be printed or deep linking, no matter how many layers it is, and the data location can be bookmark, these are some of the progress of Google's cooperation with Adobe. Currently, there is no technology available to support search for dynamic text for Chinese culture. However, the search for static Chinese text is already included in the ongoing work. This work will continue for a considerable period of time and will be constantly optimized to make the content released on the Flash platform more search-friendly.

I believe that since Adobe PDF can achieve good search friendliness, the search friendliness of Flash files is very optimistic.

The CSDN editor also asked some developers who are very concerned about the issue, such as the possibility of 3D engines in the future development plan of flash player. Andrew answered his questions, we decided to leave him some time to rest and prepare for the next training because we had an arranged training right after the interview, we ended the interview with Adobe's forthcoming Flash Catalyst and other new technologies.