Macromedia's Renaissance man
Published: 25 Nov 2003 14:45 GMT
Is there any issue with it taking up disk space though?
Hard disks are pretty large but we start with 20MB allocated to Central for all the data your applications store. If you the user goes over that amount they get a little prompt asking for permission to use more disk space and they can decide to say yes or no. But disk space is pretty cheap now -- people have multi-gigabyte hard disks so it's OK.
Have you got any internal projections on how many people are going to download Central?
The Flash player is really widely distributed and I don't think Central is going to be downloaded at the same rate. Just to get some idea, the Flash player is less than a megabyte to download; Central is 1.8MB so it's a little bit larger than Flash player and that has some factor in terms of download success. The Flash player is downloaded over three million times every day right now; that's an incredible rate. So being optimistic I'd say we will get somewhere up there eventually but I think it will take a long time. It took years to get to that point with the Flash player. We don't have any solid projections for what is going to happen -- it is going to be very driven by the applications that people create and those applications will pull the installation of Central. We don't think people will just go and install Central; we think they'll see an application they like and install it and if they don't have Central it will come along with the application.
Central is available on Windows and Mac at the moment -- do you see desktop Linux as potential platform too?
It's certainly showing some energy especially in Europe and Asia. We already produce some software for Linux -- a player -- and our servers, like ColdFusion and JRun work on Linux. With our authoring tools we are waiting for there to be a big enough market -- we're watching it and when it gets big enough we will go there.
How do you decide the tipping point?
It's much like how we do our localisations of software. We look at how big the returns will be and if it's significant enough then we'll do it.
You're a bit of a user-interface guru -- are you experimenting much with 3D?
I think that in the long term 3D is going to be a very interesting technology for interfaces and a person who has been experimenting a lot with that is Alan Kay. He was a fellow at Apple for a long time, the he moved to Disney. He keeps get sponsored by different places so he moves around a lot. He's a brilliant guy, he worked at Xerox Parc and was part of the team that invented copy and paste and a lot of the user interface stuff we see today.
He's got a project at the moment -- a 3D immersive environment and you have avatars in the space that represent people who are online and you can see their spaces through little window portals and they are like floating in space and you can see into their space through this window. It's really cool. And then you can walk up to the window and jump through it and then you are in their space -- you can also turn around and look back through the window into your space. It's very cool stuff but totally experimental.
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