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July 26, 2006
Zaphod emulates Tin Can?
Zaphod emulates Tin Can? Idle thought, prediction here. "Zaphod" was the codename for Adobe Flash Player 9, featuring a vastly more efficient logic engine. "Tin Can" was a project led by Jon Gay to bring video to Flash, delivered in March 2002, with the inclusion of a single tiny video codec in Flash Player 6, and a matching communications server. What I recall of the spread of buzz on Flash video was that savvy Flash developers were excited in 2002, but general awareness was low... maybe it was 2004 when the regular webdev mailing lists started recommending "hey you should check out this new Flash Video" to each other. And it wasn't until 2006 when Flash Video really got mainstream recognition, on sites like TechMeme and Slashdot, and largely as a result of Flash's adoption by large commercial video sites. Rephrased, Flash Video was sort of a hidden-in-plain-sight kind of secret until the audience expanded, and until large endeavors crunched the numbers and chose Flash. Only then did the general public see this reality. Relevance? The Adobe Flash Player 9 has an extremely fast ECMAScript-based engine, optimized for handling large data sets, and intimately connected to the world's most popular media-handling engine. It's a virtual machine, a logic engine, a set of local data-handling abilities for general audiences. Lots of us in the biz know this today, just as we knew in 2002 that Flash Player 6 could handle video. I think that Zaphod's logic will be as disruptive as Tin Can's video was -- strong possibilities of Zaphod being a complete game-changer. But it's hidden in plain sight... I think it will take awhile for the world to recognize this. Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about this lately, about how Flash Video was eventually recognized for what it was, and how not everyone yet sees the power of Zaphod, spreading across millions of new machines every day... exciting stuff, if we can wait until everyone else realizes it too.... ;-)
Posted by JohnDowdell at July 26, 2006 2:34 PM