We advocate the need of openness at Adobe especially for their Flash runtimes. Adobe has some great development tools like Flash Builder, Flash CS5 which target the runtimes – Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Although Adobe has a range of open-source projects they haven’t yet fully “opened” both the Flash runtimes.

Adobe has released SWF specifications till its version 10. And that kicked off some of open-source Flash player implementations like Lightspark and Gnash. The pace of development, however, is really very slow. Lightspark, which has just released its latest version few days back, looks promising with its OpenGL based rendering. Also there are implementations like Frash and Smokescreen that are attempting to run Flash content on unsupported devices like iPhones and iPads.

Last month Adobe also announced next release of open-source Flex SDK, code named Hero. Among others, the main targeted feature is the support for multi-screen development, which is in line with their ongoing open-screen initiative. However, the development is tightly coupled with the unreleased Flash runtimes, and hence builds would not be available to open-source community till the latest runtimes are officially released.

In my opinion, by making the runtime development open-source, Adobe can concentrate on development tools as well as can focus on drafting innovative features to be supported by runtimes. The open-source community on the other hand can try and tackle the ways to implement runtimes to be supported on various computing devices and architectures.

The eLearning developer community will anyways benefit from open-source developments around Flash. Traditionally eLearning courses are one of major consumers of Flash platform, mainly because of ubiquitous Flash runtimes. But the community has been in major chaos as Apple denied deploying apps developed using Flash IDE. The developers have been checking other ways to offer/deploy learning content on the devices not supporting Flash. I think that would change if Flash runtimes were open-source and available for such devices, at least partially implemented.

The post Future Of Flash Is Open Source first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Those of you have heard of HTML 5 will know it’s a new version of HTML and XHTML being promoted by Google and Apple in a bid to move the web away from proprietary technologies like Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX. It makes HTML more powerful by adding new elements like video and audio. A list of new elements in HTML 5 can be found here at IBM’s site and the draft specification is available here at W3C’s site.

So what’s the big deal?
Well, let’s take a quick look at some of the new elements included and you’ll know.

Canvas – Web developers can now create 2D drawings controlled by JavaScript. This would help in creating interactive graphs, games, and presentations easily. Key benefit is that web developers can do this using JavaScript directly in HTML 5 without relying on technologies like Flash or Silverlight. Here is a quick tip. While you are considering to design your website, always seek professional help from agencies who extend such srevices. You can avail the affordable web design perth for instance.

Video & Audio – You can play video or audio in HTML 5 WITHOUT any plug-in required (like Flash or Silverlight], simply by using the new audio and video markup tags.

The working draft of HTML 5 indicates a need to find suitable open source code which works on all browsers without licensing or patent fee. The Mozilla Foundation has already implemented the open source Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs for video in the beta of Firefox 3.5 and Opera is also working on similar lines. To add to this Dailymotion has launched a new R&D platform, dedicated to open source video format and has announced that it would be re-encoding 300,000 videos to Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats. We believe this could well be the ultimate threat to Flash which currently has monopolistic control in delivering videos online.

Interactive Elements – details, datagrid, command & menu
These are interactive elements included for development of web applications. The plan is to include more such elements in the future. This would help the web developers display data in structured formats and make it easier to implement. This could ultimately prove a big threat to the open source Flex Framework [while it uses proprietary Flash technology] – one of the preferred platforms for developing RIAs these days.

How does HTML 5 affect eLearning Development?
HTML and Flash are most commonly used today for developing elearning content. HTML is used for simple ‘page-turner’ type of courses while Flash is used for interactive courses that contain animations and/or audio. Like most other eLearning developers, we prefer developing content using Flash over HTML because HTML can’t support rich vector graphics with animations essential for delivering an engaging learning experience.

However HTML 5 has the potential to change all that. If developers can create animations, play audio and video without having to depend on Flash or Silverlight that would excellent. HTML 5 is particularly useful for organizations with ‘no plug-in’ policy because it will render natively in HTML 5 capable browsers. Also HTML 5 would help create more platform independent applications which can run across browsers eliminating the need for testing on multiple browsers.

So is Flash Dead?
No, not just yet! Flash (or perhaps Silverlight in near future) would still be useful for developing high-end interactive courses and games based learning. Flash Professional has a very good designer developer workflow which is important in eLearning development. It remains to be seen what workflows emerge for development in HTML 5 and if they can be adapted for eLearning development.

Most importantly – it’s a dampener – HTML 5 is not going to be around anytime soon. The final draft of HTML 5 specifications will be ready by 2012! According to Ian Hickson (a Google employee and a co-editor of HTML 5 specification) the proposed date of release would be in 2022 – which is 13 VERY LONG years from now. Since browser developers have committed support and started working on including essential HTML 5 tags, we could realistically start seeing some eLearning development in HTML 5 by the end of 2010, of-course with some constraints. A serious push for eLearning development in HTML 5 is still some years away. Till then Flash and Silverlight can breathe easy. However, they must quite rest; they must try making more progress on their products to force HTML 5 to do additional catching up. You can bet Adobe will not let one of its acquired cash cows (Flash) die easily.

Ryan Stewart [a platform evangelist for Adobe] has made an interesting comparison between HTML 5 and Flash in this blog post which shows that there is a lot of work required before HTML could actually reach to the level of Flash Player 10.

Here is a video Ian explaining how HTML 5 works for the techie folk who may like to see it in action:

The post HTML 5 and eLearning Development first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.