JD on EP

I first picked up on Flash when Futurewave Software attended MacWorld Expo in San Francisco to show its SmartSketch drawing software. This was before FutureWave CelAnimator, FutureSplash, and anything with a timeline. I think it was January 1995, around the time that Altsys joined Macromedia with FreeHand, and so I was prowling the back alleys of the convention hall, looking at Lari Lightning Draw, the skeletal strokes technology which later became Creature House Expression, other vector innovations. Off in the last row, in the smallest size booth, three people were drawing rough circles and squares on a tablet, and I saw these snap into perfectly smooth shapes on the screen. It must have been Jonathan Gay, Robert Tatsumi and Michelle Welsh doing that demo... maybe Charlie Jackson was in the booth that day too, but I didn't know any of these folks back then. They told me that this drawing technology was originally developed for early handheld devices, maybe from GO Corporation, but they were bringing it to the desktop computer and expanding the feature set. I was excited, and started talking it up around the shop.

The next real contact I had with Futurewave's technology was after Netscape 2.0 shipped, and Shockwave shipped, and Futurewave released a Netscape Plugin and ActiveX Control and had their animations featured on the Microsoft site. I had been in some discussions on mailing lists comparing bitmap-centric and vector-centric animation, and was asked by staff to write up a technology comparison. I got sorta snookered on this, because I approached it as a competitive analysis, and it was only later that I realized that Macromedia was in discussions to acquire Futurewave. I remember arguing "hey they say vectors are always smaller and that's not true!!" That naive email is probably on some old hard drive in some storage box somewhere.... ;-)

Another anecdote? The naming was always a problem... Futurewave, SmartSketch, FutureSplash, CelAnimator... compound names, intercaps, hard to remember... when Futurewave joined Macromedia there were long meetings about possible names. (Names are hard, lots of implications... the data-enhanced version of Dreamweaver called UltraDev apparently translated to "fat man" in Japan... I try to avoid naming meetings myself.) Marketing exec Miles Walsh first uttered the name "Flash" to me, and I argued back that it was a horrible name, generic, cartoonlike. Maybe I was right in some ways -- people don't always capitalize it now, and subsequent other names like "flash memeory" can make conversations difficult -- but the name "Flash" did prove to be very popular with very many people, and it's hard to imagine it with a different name today.

For the first few versions, I really didn't like Flash... the timeline model was different from Director, the scripting was wacky, it was less capable and more strange than the media interactivity I was used to. "Why do you call them 'movie clips' instead of the term 'film loops' or 'sprites', which people already know? why reinvent the wheel?" -- stuff like that. The scripting model has improved greatly since then, but watching ActionScript flipflop around for its first few versions made me wonder how far it would go. I was wrong again. ;-)

One other pre-millenial anecdote... towards December 1998 there were the early discussions about the XML way of structuring data, and on the DIRECT-L mailing list a bunch of us were talking about ways to describe interactive media files in a text-based XML format. Kurt Cagle is one of the people I recall talking about XML formats for Director... it's hard to find web archives now of those conversations, or I'd link. We figured there were multiple ways to abstract an experience into an XML-formatted description, so that there could be multiple multimedia markup languages, depending on exactly which aspects of the experience you wished to emphasize. Today we're finally seeing this applied to an authoring tool... the MXML format used by Adobe Flex abstracts a media experience as user-interface components and layout... I've got a feeling we'll see more examples in the future of text XML as a human-readable intermediary file format to describe various types of experiences, but Flex actually brought this dream to deployment.

... hmm, maybe one other early Flash snapshot, it was probably around 2000 or so, when FlashForward was held on Nob Hill in San Francisco. I had never seen so many lime-haired, tattoo'd & pierced folks in one room before in my life. That was the point when I knew the technology would have a big impact... when you can get the weirdos and the suits working together, then you know you're onto something good..... ;-)

Like I said, no big insights here from me... these are just some of the pictures I have in my own mind, now that we're all looking back at the past decade of Flash work. Things'll be even cooler next decade, I'm betting, yup.