The Coming Flash Desktop

I have become a huge fan of Flash. I never liked websites that were built in Flash. They took too long to load. I never understood what was wrong with html. It's still true that a website that is entirely built in Flash is not attractive to me. But delivering certain services in Flash, the way Etsy does with the shop by color or shop by geography, is a smart approach.

But to me what is happening with Flash players and widgets is even more interesting. Flash players/widgets are becoming a new paradigm for content distribution and consumption. I can imagine a time when my desktop is covered with Flash applications that look like Apple's dashboard.

It's already happening. When I go to the Hype Machine, I do a search for something I like, and then click listen. The cool brazilian open source Flash player pops up in a new browser window and plays music for me. I often keep that Flash player open for hours on my desktop.

The other music widget I really like is the Streampad widget that I run on the left sidebar of my blog. I gave that Streampad widget my blog's feed. It picks out all the mp3s I post on the blog and puts them into a single flash player widget.

But the best thing is that you can click on the lower right of the Streampad widget and it will pop off the page and play the music for you for as long as you want. You get to keep surfing and the music stays with you.

That's the magic move I want from all the Flash players/widgets I come across on the web. And it's one of my few beefs with the YouTube flash player.

You can popout the flash player from YouTube by clicking the box at the lower right, but the new browser window takes over the whole screen when you do that. You have to fuss around with the browser to get it to shrink to a more manageable size. But once you do that you can move on and still watch the video.

It would be great if the YouTube flash player that  pops out from the web page had a few more controls on it so you could use it to continue to play videos from YouTube from it instead of having to go back to YouTube.

In fact, if you click on any of the two suggested videos that come up at the end of a YouTube video and you have the flash player open in a browser window on your desktop, it will take you back to YouTube. That doesn't work for me. I end up just shutting the widget down.

Google video works the same way as YouTube. You can pop out the flash player into its own browser, but it takes over the whole screen and you have to fuss with it to get it to be a widget on your desktop.

The Google video widget doesn't even give you more videos to look at after the video you watch is over. It runs a post roll thing like Revver does. They gotta turn these widgets into a persistent video app that you can keep on your desktop all day long.

The other flash widget that I love on my blog is the Oddcast avatar. There is no way to make it popout of the page and onto my desktop. But there should be.

Take a look at this screenshot. This is what happens when you are in Sitepal previewing an avatar you created. That exact same popout should be available on the lower right of the avatar on my blog and it should have community functions on it so people can leave me messages and I should even be able to IM through it. I know that Oddcast is working on stuff like that. I hope they plan to let my avatar live on my desktop instead of on a page if I so choose.

I love the idea of using Flash to create a persistent set of apps that I can keep on my desktop all day long. As I've been writing this post, I've been building that desktop. Here's what it looks like. It doesn't work exactly the way I am imaging it should. But we aren't far from the day when it will.

Comments

[Matt]

Flash has come a long way. Since it was originally used to make a lot of those annoying website intros, most people associate Flash with waiting (long load times) and overdesign (animation where it's not needed).

Have you seen web applications done in Adobe's Flex 2? Basically, Flex 2 is a The Flex 2 development kit comes with great pre-packaged controls that have the look and feel of a well designed desktop app.

I've seen some really cool programs (media players that connect to online storage, youtube viewers, online catalogs, groupware, etc.) that utilize Flex 2 to deliver a really simple user experience all through a flash player .

It will also be interesting to see where Apollo can take flash apps.

[HLMorgan]

Adobe's recently announced (at Web2.0) Flex will allow flash to easily play outside of the browser - it basically let's you create flash runtimes outside the browser window, but with internet access. Should give you just what you need. Several of our companies are also experimenting with replacing Ajax with Flash, giving us much prettier and richer interfaces.

[steve]

sounds like (the concept, if not ultimate reality of) Pointcast

[Ben Miller]

As much as Adobe wants to colonize your desktop with widgets, I think the real game is colonizing the mobile handset with a user interface.

The computer desktop is a Microsoft preserve upon which Adobe and Google are placing widgets, and to which Google and other companies (e.g. Zoho, Ajax13, gOffice) are attempting to connect to "office2.0" applications resident on their servers.

The game is wide open with regard to mobile handsets, and a future in which Adobe and Google play a relatively greater role, and Microsoft a lesser one is very much a possibility.

The link below is to a video clip of a Samsung phone with an Adobe user interface.
http://uk.gizmodo.com/2006/11/07/samsung_black_carbon_handson.html

I think the recent moves by Adobe to contribute code to Mozilla (Tamarin) and Sun to make Java ME open source suggest your next mobile handset's screen will be be pretty widgety too.

[leafar]

yous should try that one
http://api.u-lik.com/utubeinter.php?o=42566&c=4
Clic on the box on the top left to generate the pop-up.

This widget is the music Hall of Fame of flyintiger.com (with video from Youtube)

[David]

Hi,

Sounds like you would be interested also on:

www.yourminis.com A Flash based web and desktop widget system. Very nice. Mark Cuban writes it up here: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/11/15/check-out-my-mini/

Also, keep an eye on Apollo, our upcoming runtime for taking web apps (Flash, AJAX, PDF) out of the browser to the desktop: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo

Regards,
David
Adobe

[bertram]

I'm trying to convince the video sites to support the XSPF Playlist format for continuos video playback. Without much success so far (perhaps the german sites will listen).
What you could do with such a player you can see in my proof of concept: http://video.gugelproductions.de/breitband2.html. Video playback from all the video sites in one place without the need to visit the sites.

[AlFromChicago]

Fred --

Yourminis is from www.goowy.com -- not sure if you know but two of the founders are Alex Bard and Gary Benitt -- who were at eShare with me back in the day -- Alex is now the CEO and they are doing really really cool stuff. Goowy is a complete flash based personal productivity suite very very cool. I just reconnected w Alex last week at web 2.0

[Greg Clayman]

I love YourMinis as well - and Ben is right on with his comment on the coming Flash mobile UI. Already exists in Korea and Japan and coming to the US faster than we think. My take on your post and on mobile Flash here: http://twofones.typepad.com/twofones/2006/11/minis_and_widge.html

[Alex]

Fred,

Its alex from goowy. We met when I was at eShare...we launched yourminis 2 weeks ago and are getting a lot of positive feedback for it. We are launching a community around sharing tabs / dashboards this week. Think youtube with searching, sorting, ratings, comments etc but for tabs that you can interact with and add to your dashboards.

We are also working with Adobe to get the widgets onto the desktop using Appollo. Currently we give you the ability to access the widgets as as start page or as a browser plugin (you should try it out - it calls up the widgets in heads up mode over any page you are on and gives you a series of 1 click options for the content from the page below including add rss, add video, photos, play mp3, add friends from social networks and more).

Would love you to know what you think. Thanks.

[DAR]

Huh! What you describe, Fred, is what Java applets were supposed to be when they first came out. Little bits of software applications added into web pages. (And which can pop out of the pages on demand.) Sucks that a) it's taken till now for that vision to come to fruition, and b) that it's Flash, not Java, that's making it happen. (I'm a Java developer, so I've got a bit of wistfulness about this.)

[Luke Archer]

Our team has focused exclusively on new development in FLEX (while little Adobe documentation exists). This combination of FLASH and XML greatly extends the limits of what the web can be. For instance, we have just completed code that allows users to drag pics, photos, music directly from their desktops into social networking applications.

Powerful stuff. We love it.

[Matt]

A lot of great stuff happening with Flex. We're going with Flex for our development of Convos (www.convos.com) and we've been very pleased with the initial results on how it handles large amounts of information such as lists, grids, and accordians.

Flex also makes customization of color schemes very easy with good old CSS.

[Shanti Braford]

Fred - are you familiar with Flektor?

They are doing some really interesting stuff in the Flash space. (they're still in stealthmode, I believe)

[cibertrix]

All this fuss just to listen to music? Why don't you just use your stereo radio - want to have videos while working, just attach a second monitor to a second video card and let your video playlist operate on the second monitor - way easier and better quality all round - all this fuss just to listen to low quality sound and watch small low quality videos cluttering up the desktop just seems such a waste of time...