Macromedia hopes to make its Flash animation player a "first-class citizen" on PCs with a new addition that allows the software to operate outside of a Web browser. The company is scheduled to announce the planned Flash enhancement and associated services, dubbed Macromedia Central, Thursday morning at its FlashForward developer conference in San Francisco. Tools for developers will be available next month, but consumers won't be able to download the Central software until this summer.
Macromedia last year began a wide-reaching campaign to expand the role of Flash in Web design, promoting the software as a broad platform for designing Web applications and building user interfaces. Macromedia has made noticeable inroads with the push, with many sites rebuilt around Flash, but the Flash experience still has to happen inside a browser window. That's a growing limitation, said Kevin Lynch, Macromedia's chief software architect, particularly when it comes to saving and reusing Web information in an offline environment. "Right now, you have a very black-and-white model, where you're either fully online or you don't have access to data," he said.
Macromedia Central will create an environment where Flash applications can run independent of the browser. Along with providing the client software--a free addition to the free Flash player--Macromedia plans to sell a wealth of downloadable Flash applications created by third-party developers. Macromedia will take 20 percent of any software sales, with the rest going to developers.
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News source: c|net
