Macromedia's Renaissance man
Published: 25 Nov 2003 14:45 GMT
Despite the beating most Internet businesses have taken over the last few years, Web design and development tool company Macromedia has escaped relatively unscathed with products such as its Flash Web application and animation software attaining an unprecedented following among designers and developers.
But not everything has gone the company's way. Recent sales of its Studio MX 2004, the package that combines new versions of major Macromedia Web design and development tools, such as Flash and Dreamweaver, were considerably slower than expected, which resulted in the company having to lower revenue forecasts.
Rather than cutting costs on R&D in the face of smaller IT budgets, the company is continuing to innovate, and has announced several new products over the last six months. The latest to be unleashed on the developer community is Central -- a set of design tools and a user interface for aggregating and viewing Web content on- and offline.
ZDNet UKcaught up with Macromedia's chief software architect Kevin Lynch, the creative force behind Central and other products including the Dreamweaver Web page and application tool, at the company's annual MAX user event in Salt Lake City.
During the launch event for Central you claimed it would lead to "a renaissance in application development", what did you mean by that?
Ok -- applications are in the dark ages right now. They are a total throwback -- it's like everyone has forgotten what a good application is like. They are using a technology to do user interfaces on the Web -- HTML -- that was designed for documents not applications so it's archaic and the user experience is bad. We tried hard at Macromedia.com but it's still not perfect.
There was some criticism of the redesigned site when it launched -- not being compatible with some Mac browsers, for instance?
Yeah but change is always hard. What I mean about a renaissance in applications is that right now there is a confluence of factors that could enable this renaissance to happen. People now have Web services and XML, they have rich client technologies like Flash and an environment that they can run in like Central so you can keep them on your machine and use them when you are online or off; all these things come together to provide an environment where lots of innovation can occur. Very much like during the Renaissance when there was lots of innovation, lots of new creation, both in terms of art and technology. I think that is true of applications right now; there are artists who are designing great user interfaces and technically there's a lot of groundwork for innovation going on.
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