YOU CAN CITE several reasons that the developer community loves Flash but most people look no farther than YouTube where Shockwave powers the biggest boat of spontaneous content ever produced. Infomaniacs I know have hurdled the podcasting channel and they spend hours of meandering through user-generated Flash-powered videos. This is a powerful testimony to the ubiquity of Flash and it's accompanying by a "stunning growth of Adobe love among developers", as Scoble has seen. Everywhere I go I hear “Flash, Flash, Flash.”
Adobe offers a sneak peek to power users next week. If you believe the cross-talk on developers' mailing lists, the world will shift resources from .NET to Flex and Apollo, the architecture that lets developers build standalone applications with Flash, XHTML, and AJAX technology. You can see one running in the right gutter of podcasting.ie and if you visit and want an invitation into one of our Flash-powered discussions there, let me know. All you need is a mic on your computer and an interest in reviewing the skillsets you believe a new multimedia developer needs in the work force.
FACT: The developers of the really cool stuff--the things that give YouTube its viral juice--are migrating from Java and .NET to Flash, Flex and Apollo. (Sign up for Apollo beta.). Microsoft has WPF/E, a .NET 3.0 runtime on the boil, but it's not as sexy as Flash and Flex. If you want Flex, you'll drop EUR 600 into the Adobe software resellers pocket this month. For the money, you get the Flex application framework, consisting of MXML, ActionScript 3.0, and the Flex class library. Developers use MXML to declaratively define the application user interface elements and use ActionScript for client logic and procedural control. Developers write MXML and ActionScript source code using the Adobe Flex Builder IDE or a standard text editor.