What is the GDS? “It’s a new branch of the cabinet office which exists to deliver public services, public sector information in-house, rather than the traditional out-sourcing model,” they explained, though it turned out to be rather more than that.

Wall described his experience of talking to government workers about their IT needs.

A common thing you see from very small to very large is someone in government who wants to get something done, who has a business problem or a user need that they want to serve, surrounded by a complex array of integrators, vendors, contractors, suppliers, and all of that, kind-of locked into that, their ability to manoeuvre or deliver services [is limited].

he explained. The only solution is to reform the way software is procured. They described their boss Mike Bracken’s goal:

We want to move from government procuring systems to government commissioning them, whether we build them ourselves, or just that we know what it is we’re asking for. We need that knowledge.

This is also about breaking the hold of the large vendors and finding ways to work on a smaller scale.

If you want to buy something in government, traditionally, some software or some system, the amount of momentum that you have to get up, the amount of people you can easily engage with, they tend to be from companies that are absolutely vast and they tend to take projects that are absolutely vast, the whole mechanism of working is stultifying for everyone involved. It is not just us, a small group of developers sitting in an office able to write some stuff, because that’s not scalable, you can’t do that for everyone. It’s finding small to medium sized companies, partners, out there in the market and finding ways to engage them … why should five very large companies get all the work?

Mike Bracken and the Cabinet Office minister Frances Maude are currently on the West Coast of the USA, they said.

They were invited to meet the usual suspects, Oracle, the major systems integrators. They cancelled it. They’re visiting Joyent, they’re visiting 10Gen, they’re visiting Twilio [applause]. It’s a wholesale change. We’re looking at how great web services are built.

There is also a commitment to open source. “All of the code that we’re producing is open source and out on the Internet,” they said.

What tools do they use?

Most of the core apps are in Ruby, with a mixture of Sinatra and Rails, and some Scala. We’re using a mixture of MySQL and Mongo for the database,

they told us.

The GDS is currently only about 30 people, 10 of whom are developers. How much impact can such a small team have?

We’ve just started and we’re very small. We’re already having a significant impact in some quite large and some quite small projects. The incoming demand that we face across central government and local government is absolutely astronomical, and one of the things that’s important to resolve over the coming years is how to manage that demand and provide services, abilities and communities for people . . . we never want to parachute into somewhere, rewrite all the systems and then go off somewhere else., that’s not sustainable.

Can this small group really change government IT so profoundly? That is an open question, and perhaps in the long term they will fail. There is no doubting though that this particular team is doing inspiring work. This blog post from GDS yesterday describes how open source participation was used to fix a government web site; it may seem a small thing, but as a new and different approach it is significant.

For more information see Mike Bracken’s post This is why we are here, and take a look at the team’s early work on GOV.UK, which is in beta.

Related posts:

1. UK government’s open source commitment words not deeds says Ingres VP
2. Adobe: no new features for open source BlazeDS data services
3. UK lagging rest of Europe in open source adoption

This was not only a developer event, with the likes of Andre Charland and Dave Johnson from the PhoneGap team at Adobe, Mike Milinkovich the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, and Jason Hoffman with Bryan Cantrill from cloud services (and Node.js sponsors) Joyent. It was also a serious beer event, complete with a range of craft beers, a beer tasting competition with nine brews to try, and a talk plus a free book from  beer expert Melissa Cole. An unusual blend of flavours.

In charge of the proceedings was RedMonk co-founder and all round impressario James Governor. I am a big fan of RedMonk and its developer-focused approach; it has been a fresh and heady brew in the dry world of IT analysts.

The Monki Gras did seem like an attempt by a regular IT conference sufferer to fix problems often encountered. The Wi-Fi worked, the food was fresh, unusual and delicious, the coffee was superb; though brewing good coffee takes time so the queues were long. Not everything scales. Fortunately this was a small event, and a rare treat for the couple of hundred or so who attended.

That said, there were frustrations. The sessions were short, which in general is a good thing, but left me wanting more depth and more details in some cases; we did not learn much about PhoneGap other than a brief overview, for example.

Nevertheless there was serious content. Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady made the point succinctly: IT decision makers are ignorant about what developers actually use and what they want to use, which is one reason why there is so much dysfunction in this industry. Part of the answer is to pay more attention, and several sessions covered different aspects of analytics: Matt LeMay from bitly on what users click on the Web; Matt Biddulph (ex BBC, Dopplr, Nokia) gave a mind-stretching talk on social network analysis which, contrary to what some think, was not invented by Facebook but predates the Internet; and O’Grady shared some insights from developer analytics at RedMonk.

I had not noticed before that github now gets nearly double the number of commits than does Google Code. That is partly because developers like git, but may also say something about Google’s loss of kudos in the open source developer community.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, lead for Jenkins Continuous Integration and an architect at CloudBees, spoke on building a developer community. His context was how Jenkins attracted developers, but his main point has almost limitless application:  “Make everything easy, relentlessly.”

Something I see frequently is how big companies (the bigger the worse) place obstacles in front of developers or users who have an interest in their products or services. Examples are enforced registration, multiple clicks through several complex pages to get to the download you want, complex installs, and confusing information. It all adds friction. If the target is sufficiently compelling, like apps on Apple’s app store, developers will get there anyway; but it all adds friction, and if you are not Apple that can be fatal.

The Joyent guys did not speak about Node.js, sadly, but rather on the distinction between a VP of engineering and a Chief Technology Officer. Sounds dry and abstruse? I thought so too, but the delivery was so energetic that they were soon forgiven. Hoffman and Cantrill moved on to talk about management antipatterns in the software industry, prompting many wry nods of recognition from the audience. “It is very hard for middle management to add value,” said Cantrill.

Milinkovich made the point that the most valued open source projects generally make their way to a software foundation; PhoneGap to Apache is a recent example. He then gave the talk he really wanted to give, noting that as new software stacks emerge they have a tendency to re-implement CORBA, a middleware specification from the Nineties that tackled problems including remote objects, language independence, and transactions across the Internet. CORBA is remembered for drowning in complexity, but Milinkovich’s point is that the creators of exciting new stacks like Node.js should at least research and learn from past experience.

Milinkovich also found time to proclaim that “Flash is dead, Silverlight is dead, browser plugins are dead.” Perhaps premature; but I did not hear many dissenting voices.

I tweeted the conference extensively yesterday (losing at least one follower but gaining several more). Look out also for a couple of follow-up posts on topics of particular importance.

Related posts:

1. PhoneGap likely to move to Apache Software Foundation
2. Software architects cautious about SOA; London Underground makes it work
3. QCon London kicks off with call to rediscover Agile, use open source

I took a hands-on look at Storage Spaces back in October.

The feature lets you add and remove physical drives from a pool of storage, create virtual disks in that pool with RAID-like resiliency if you have more than one physical drive available. There is also “thin provisioning”, which lets you create a virtual disk bigger than the available space. It sounds daft at first, but makes sense if you think of it as a resource to which you add media as needed rather than paying for it all up-front. It

The server version includes data deduplication so that similar or identical files occupy less physical space. Another feature which is long overdue is the ability to allocate space to a virtual folder rather than to a drive letter.

I do not know if all these features will come to the Windows 8 client version, but as data deduplication is not mentioned in Sinofsky’s post, and the dialog he shows does not include a folder option, it may well be that these are server-only. This is the new Windows 8 dialog:

Storage Spaces occupies a kind of middle ground in that enterprises will typically have more grown-up storage systems such as a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN (Storage Area Network). At the other end of the scale, individual business users do not want to bother with multiple drives at all. Nevertheless, for individuals with projects like storing large amounts of video, or small businesses looking for good value but reliable storage based on cheap SATA drives, Storage Spaces look like a great feature.

Most computer professionals will recall seeing users struggling with space issues on their laptop, not realising that the vendor (Toshiba was one example) had partitioned the drive and that they had a capacious D drive that was completely empty. It really is time that Microsoft figured out how to make storage management seamless and transparent for the user, and this seems to me a big step in that direction.

Related posts:

1. Hands On with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 8
2. SQL Server 2011 Denali publishes tables as Windows network folders
3. Windows gets thinner – a comeback for the thin client?

Power is now the limiter of every computing platform, from cellphones to PCs and even datacenters.

CPUs are optimized for single-threaded computing and are relatively inefficient. According to Huang a CPU spends 50 times as much power scheduling instructions as it does executing them. A GPU by contrast is formed of many simple processors and is optimized for parallel processing, making it more efficient when measured in FLOP/s (Floating Point Operations per Second), a way of benchmarking computer performance. Therefore it is inevitable that computers make use of GPU computing in order to achieve best performance. Note that this does not mean dispensing with the CPU, but rather handing off processing to the GPU when appropriate.

This point is now accepted in the world of supercomputers. The computer at Chinese National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin has 14,336 Intel CPUs, 7168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs, and 2048 custom-designed 8-core CPUs called Galaxy FT-1000, and can achieve 4.7 Petaflop/s for a power consumption of 4.04 MegaWatts (million watts), as presented this morning by the center’s Vice Director Xiaoquian Zhu. This is currently the 2nd fastest supercomputer in the world.

Huang says that without GPUs the world would wait until 2035 for the first Exascale (1 Exaflop/s) supercomputer, presuming a power constraint of 20MW and current levels of performance improvement year by year, whereas by combining CPUs with GPUs this can be achieved in 2019.

Supercomputing is only half of the GPU computing story. More interesting for most users is the way this technology trickles down to the kind of computers we actually use. For example, today Lenovo announced several workstations which use NVIDIA’s Maximus technology to combine a GPU designed primarily for driving a display (Quadro) with a GPU designed primarily for GPU computing (Tesla). These workstations are aimed at design professionals, for whom the ability to render detailed designs quickly is important. The image below shows a Lenovo S20 on display here. Maybe these are not quite everyday computers, but they are still PCs. Approximate price to follow soon when I have had a chance to ask Lenovo. Update: prices start at around $4500 for an S20, with most of the cost being for the Tesla board.

Related posts:

1. GPU computing with NVIDIA in Beijing
2. NVIDIA talks up GPU computing, presents roadmap
3. GPU programming coming to low-power and mobile devices – from EU Mont Blanc supercomputer to smartphones

There is a description of what’s new here. The most notable features are the Hybrid Configuration Wizard for setting up co-existence between on-premise Exchange and Office 365, and Outlook Mini for low-end phones with basic browsers.

A hybrid setup lets you include on-Premise Exchange and Office 365 Exchange in a single organisation. You can move mailboxes back and forth, archive messages online (even from on-Premise mailboxes), and synchronize Active Directory information. The feature is not new, but the wizard is.

This looks similar to the Exchange migration tools for BPOS and Office 365 so this is mainly a matter of baking them into the product.

Outlook Mini is very retro; I like it. It is also called Outlook Mobile Access and is similar to a feature of Exchange 2003 though it is new code; it is actually built using Outlook Web Access forms and accessed at the url yourexchange/owa/oma. There is no automatic redirection so users will have to be shown where to find it.

Finally, this note amused me as evidence of how far litigation issues have permeated into Microsoft’s products. But what is the point of a “litigation hold” if it is so easily bypassed?

In Exchange 2010 SP2, you can’t disable or remove a mailbox that has been placed on litigation hold. To bypass this restriction, you must either remove litigation hold from the mailbox, or use the new IgnoreLegalHold switch parameter when removing or disabling the mailbox.

Related posts:

1. 450 fixes in Office 2007 service pack 1
2. Microsoft Exchange 2010 annoyance: certificate wizard incompatible with certificate services
3. Exchange 2007: ESEUTIL beats the wizard

Twilio is not in competition with Skype or Google Voice; rather it offers an API so that you can incorporate voice calls and SMS messaging into web or mobile applications. The REST API lets you provision numbers with various options for what happens to incoming calls (conferencing, forwarding to another number or voice over IP, recording, transcriptions), as well as notifications so that you can get email or SMS alerts.

CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson came from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has a similar business model in that twilio targets developers and offers infrastructure as a service, rather than selling complete applications to its customers. Twilio does not own any datacenters, but uses mainly AWS and some RackSpace virtual servers to provide a resilient and scalable service.

The launch partner for the UK is Zendesk, a cloud-based helpdesk provider, which is using twilio to add voice to what was previously an email-based product. Zendesk forms an excellent case study. Using the service, you can provision a support number and have calls redirected to agents, or have a voicemail recorded, using a simple setup procedure. Calls can be recorded and you can have alerts sent when they are received.

What this means is that even the smallest businesses can offer helpdesk support using a pay-as-you-go model.

Lawson observes that twilio is the 6th and 13th most popular API on ProgrammableWeb (he says it is 5th if you combine voice and SMS) and claims very rapid growth in traffic using the API, though he will not talk about revenue. The company has around 60 employees in San Francisco and just one in the UK initially.

The service is also launching in beta for 5 other European countries: Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark. 11 other countries will be added by the end of 2011, though there are prominent omissions – no Germany or Spain, for example.

I was impressed by the demo and presentation at the press launch. Lawson provisioned a conferencing number and had us dial in during the briefing. He says twilio is engaged in disrupting on-premise telephony applications with a cloud service, in the same way Salesforce.com has done for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The service is inexpensive to set up; Lawson said that this commodity pay-as-you-go pricing is essential for disruptive technology to succeed, another strategy borrowed from AWS.

There are server libraries for web platforms including Ruby, PHP, Java and C#, and client SDKs for JavaScript, Android and iOS.

Related posts:

1. Telcos have a dying business model – APIs and cloud services are the future says Alcatel-Lucent’s Laura Merling
2. Peter Gabriel at Dreamforce Europe
3. BT brings Ribbit to the UK via Salesforce.com

I tried this early on and was broadly impressed – my app worked and ran on all three platforms.

However it is an exceedingly simple app, pretty much Hello World, and there are some worrying aspects to this Delphi release. FireMonkey is based on technology from KSDev, which was acquired by Embarcadero in January this year. To go from acquisition to full Delphi integration and release in a few months is extraordinary, and makes you wonder what corners were cut.

It seems that corners were cut: you only have to read this post by developer and Delphi enthusiast Chris Rolliston:

To put it bluntly, FireMonkey in its current state isn’t good enough even for writing a Notepad clone (I know, because I’ve been trying). You can check out Herbert Sauro’s blog for various details (here, also a follow up post here). For my part, here’s a highish-level list of missing features and dubious coding practices, written from the POV of FireMonkey being a VCL substitute on the Mac (since on OS X, that is what it is).

Fortunately I did not write a Notepad clone, I wrote a Calculator clone, which explains why I did not run into as many problems.

Update: See also A look at the 3D side of FireMonkey by Eric Grange:

…if you want to achieve anything beyond a few poorly texture objects, you’ll need to design and write a lot of custom code rather than rely on the framework… with obvious implications of obsolescence and compatibility issues whenever FMX finally gets the features in standard.

There has already been an update for Delphi XE2 which is said to fix over 120 bugs as well as an open source licensing issue. I also noticed better performance for my simple iOS calculator after the update.

Still, FireMonkey early adopters face some significant issues if they are trying to make VCL-like applications, which I am guessing is a common scenario. There is a mismatch here, in that FireMonkey is based on VGScene and DXScene from KSDev, and the focus of those libraries was rich 2D and 3D graphics. Some Delphi developers undoubtedly develop rich graphical applications, but a great many do not, and I would judge that if Embarcadero had been able to deliver something more like a cross-platform VCL that just worked, the average Delphi developer would have been happier.

The company must be aware of this, and one reading of the journey from VSCene/DXScene to FireMonkey is that Embarcadero has been madly stuffing bits of VCL into the framework. Eventually, once the bugs are shaken out and missing features implemented, we may have something close to the ideal.

In the meantime, you can make a good case for Adobe Flash and Flex if what you really want is cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics; while VCL-style developers may be best off using the current FireMonkey more for trying out ideas and learning the new Framework than for real work, pending further improvements.

On the positive side, even though FireMonkey is a bit rough, Embarcadero has delivered a development environment for Windows and Mac that works. You can work in the familiar Delphi IDE and code around any problems. The Delphi community is not short of able developers who will share their workarounds.

I have some other questions about Delphi. Why are there so many editions, and who uses the middleware framework DataSnap, or other enterprisey features like UML modeling?

There appear to be five editions of Delphi XE2: Starter, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate and Architect, where Architect has features missing in Ultimate – should the Ultimate be called the Penultimate? It breaks down like this:

• Starter: low cost, restrictive license that is mainly non-commercial (you are allowed revenue up to $1000 per year). No 64-bit, no Mac or iOS. $199.00
• Professional: The basic Delphi product. Missing a few features like UML diagramming, no DataSnap. Limited IntraWeb. $899.00.
• Enterprise: For more than double the price, you get DataSnap and dbExpress server drivers. $1,999.00
• Ultimate: Adds a developer edition of Embarcadero’s DBPowerStudio. $2999.00
• Architect: Adds more UML modeling, and a developer edition of Embarcadero’s ER/Studio database modeling tool. $3499.00

The RAD Studio range is similar, but adds C++ Builder, PHP and .NET development. No Starter version. Prices from $1399.00 for Professional to $4299.00 for Architect. The non-Ultimate Ultimate is $3799.00.

All prices discounted by around 40% for upgraders.

The problem for Embarcadero is that Delphi is such a great and flexible tool that you can easily use it for database or multi-tier applications with just the Professional edition. See here, for example, for REST client and server suggestions. Third parties like devart do a good job of providing alternative data access components and dbExpress drivers. I would be interested to know, therefore, what proportion of Delphi developers buy into the official middleware options.

As an aside, I wondered about DataSnap licensing. I looked at the DataSnap page which says for licensing information look here – which is a MIDAS article from 2000, yes Embarcadero, that is 11 years ago. Which proves if nothing else what a ramshackle web site has evolved over the years.

Personally I would prefer to see Embarcadero focus on the Professional edition and improve humdrum things like FireMonkey documentation and bugs, and go easy on enterprise middleware which is a market that is well served elsewhere.

I have seen huge interest in Delphi as a productive, flexible, high-performance tool for Windows, Mac and mobile, but the momentum is endangered by quality issues.

Related posts:

1. What’s coming in Delphi RAD Studio XE2: more details of 64-bit and Mac announced, introducing FireMonkey
2. Delphi team focusing on FireMonkey, VCL winding down?
3. Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 are available to order

I upgraded my TortoiseSVN, which is already updated to 1.7, and tried upgrading one of my own projects. Here is the .svn folder before the upgrade:

and after

Those pesky .svn folders can be a nuisance so this is a welcome change, although there is a downside as the release notes warn:

It is not safe to copy an SQLite file while it’s being accessed via the SQLite libraries. Consequently, duplicating a working copy (using tar, cp, or rsync) that is being accessed by a Subversion process is not supported for Subversion 1.7 working copies, and may cause the duplicate (new) working copy to be created corrupted.

Subversion is less fashionable since the advent of distributed version control systems like git and mercurial; though for corporate development Subversion remains popular because a centralised system is easier to control.

WANdisco’s Jessica Thornsby has a helpful post on the new 1.7 features more details on the benefits of the new working copy metadata managements system.

Related posts:

1. What’s new in Subversion 1.5
2. Rumblings in the Subversion community as WANdisco claims to be “shaking it up”
3. ThoughtWorks Mingle is released

This time we also got commentary from Rainn Wilson, an actor in the US version of The Office. His best moment came during the MAX Awards just before the sneaks, when he put a little ad lib into one of the award intros:

Customers demand … that the little Adobe Acrobat update pop-up window just go away for a while, go the way of the Microsoft paper clip Clippy, the customer is demanding right now. I’m tired of clicking No No No No No.

I only read a PDF occasionally, he said.

We all know the reasons for that updater (and the one for Flash), but he is right: it is a frequent annoyance. What is the fix? There would be some improvement if Adobe were to make a deal with Microsoft and Apple to include Flash and Adobe Reader servicing in system update mechanisms like Windows Update, but beyond that it takes a different model of computing, where the operating system is better protected. It is another reason why users like Apple iOS and why Microsoft is building a locked-down Windows client for ARM.

Now, on to the sneaks.

1. Local Layer Ordering

We are used to the idea of layer ordering, but what about a tool that lets you interleave layers, with a pointer to put this part on top, this part underneath? You can do this with pieces of paper, but less easily with graphics software, at least until Local Layer Ordering makes it into an Adobe product.

2. Project rub-a-dub

The use case: you have a video with some speech, but want to re-record the speech to fix some problem. In this case it is hard to do it perfectly so that the lip synch is right. Project rub-a-dub automatically modifies the newly recorded speech to align it correctly.

3. Liquid Layout

This one is for the InDesign publishing software: it is about intelligent layout modification to deliver the same content on different screen sizes and orientation. I was reminded of the way Times Reader works, creating different numbers of columns on the fly, but this is InDesign.

4. Synchronizing crowd-sourced multi-camera video

This one struck me as a kind of video version of PhotoSynth, where multiple views of the same image are combined to make a composite. This is for video and is a bit different, in that it does not attempt to make a single video image, but does play synchronize multiple videos with a merged soundtrack. We saw a concert example, but it could be fascinating if applied to a moment of revolution, say, if many individuals capture the event on their mobiles.

5. Smart debugging – how did my code get here?

This is a debugging tool based on a recorded trace, letting you step backwards as well as forwards through code. We have seen similar tools before, such as in Visual Studio 2010. Another facet of this one though is an English-like analysis of “how did my code get here”, which you can see if you squint at my blurry snap above.

6. Near-field communications for AIR

This demo showed near-field communications for Adobe AIR for mobile. We are most familiar with this for applications like payments, where you wave your mobile at a sensor, but it has plenty of potential for other scenarios, such as looking up product details without having to scan a barcode.

7. Pixel Nuggets: find commonality in your digital photos

The idea of this one is to identify “like” images by searching and analysing a collection. For example, you could perhaps point it at a folder with thousands of images and find all the ones which show flowers.

8. Monocle: telemetry data for Flex applications

In this demo, Deepa Subramaniam showed what I guess is a kind of profiler, showing a visualization of where your code is spending its time.

9. Video Mesh – amazing video editing

My snap does not capture this well, but it was amazing to watch. As I understand it, this is software than analyses a video to get intelligent understanding of its objects and perspective. In the example, we saw how a person walking across the front of the screen image could be made to walk more towards the rear, or behind a pillar, with correct size and perspective.

10. GPU Parallelism in Flash

This demo used a native extension to perform intensive calculations using GPU parallelism. We saw how an explosion of particles was rendered much more quickly, which of course I cannot capture in a static image, so I am showing Adam Welc’s lighthearted intro slide instead. I am a fan of general purpose computing on the GPU and would love to see this in Flash.

11. Re-focus an image

This is a feature that I’d guess will almost certainly show up in Photoshop or perhaps in a future tablet app: take an out of focus image and make it an in-focus image. The demo we saw was an image suffering from camera shake. The analysis worked out the movement path of the camera, which you can see in the small wiggly line in the right panel above, and used it to move parts of the image back so they are properly superimposed. I would guess this really only works for images out of focus because of camera shake; it will not fix incorrect lens settings. I have also seen a similar feature built into the firmware of a camera, though I am sure Photoshop can do a much better job if only because of the greater processing power available.

This was a big hit with the MAX crowd though. Perhaps most of us were thinking of photos we have taken that could do with this kind of processing.

Related posts:

1. Sneak peeks at Adobe Max 2010
2. The Sneak Peeks at Adobe MAX 09
3. Adobe MAX 2011 and the future of Flash

There are significant changes in this release.

• Flash gets Stage 3D (previously codenamed Molehill), a set of low-level 3D APIs, GPU accelerated where hardware allows, which will make console-like 3D graphics and games possible in Flash. Stage 3D wraps DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on desktop and mobile platforms.
• 64-bit Flash is here at last, supporting 64-bit Internet Explorer and other browses on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• AIR, which uses Flash as a runtime for desktop and mobile applications, now supports native extensions for better device support, operating system integration, and the ability to speed performance-critical code or use open source libraries.
• In addition, the AIR packager for iOS, which lets you wrap your application as a native executable, is now a feature called Captive Runtime which is available for Windows, Mac and Android as well as iOS. Users who install a packaged application will not know it uses AIR, and will not need to install or update the AIR runtime as it is packaged with the application, though it is not actually a single file (on Windows at least).

These new options make the Flash and AIR combination an interesting comparison with other cross-platform development tools, such as Embarcadero’s new Delphi XE2, which targets Windows, Mac and iOS with a new framework called FireMonkey; or Appcelerator’s Titanium tool for cross-platform desktop and mobile development. Note though that Adobe is not promising any performance improvement. This is just another way to package the same runtime.

Adobe’s advantage is its high quality design and development tools and the maturity of the Flash runtime. For application size and performance, it will likely fall short of true native development tools. The ActionScript language could do with updating, and I would not be surprised if Adobe addresses this in the next major Flash release.

But do we still need Flash? Flash in the browser is in decline, thanks to the influence of Apple and the rise of HTML 5. Adobe’s MAX conference is coming up soon, and I noticed in the schedule [Flash needed] a defensive note in some of the sessions; there is even one called “The Death of Flash” which talks about “the misinformation that’s percolated through the web over the past year”.

That may be so; but even Adobe is re-positioning Flash and recognizing the rise of HTML 5. “Customers see significant advantages for Flash in a few focused areas,” said Adobe’s Danny Winokur, VP and General Manager of Platform , in a press briefing. He identified these areas as gaming, media apps, and “sophisticated data-driven applications” – think data visualisation rather than just forms over data. “For everything else it is very clear that … HTML 5 is a mature enough technology that it is a really good solution.”

Adobe is therefore investing in HTML 5 tools as well as Flash tools, and Winokur mentioned the Edge motion design tool as well as the venerable Dreamweaver.

I asked Winokur, given that HTML 5 is maturing fast, how Adobe sees the picture vs Flash in say two years time. He replied that Adobe is actively working to advance HTML 5, but that “there will continue to be opportunities for innovation in Flash, where we can … enable new possibilities that did not previously exist on the Web.” He makes the case for Flash as a kind of leading edge for HTML, with features that eventually become part of the HTML standard.

It is a fair point, but it is obvious that the niche for Flash is getting smaller rather than larger.

Adobe has never charged for the Flash runtime, and while the Flash vs HTML path is tricky to navigate, Adobe mainly makes its money from design tools, server applications and web analytics, and while Flash plays some client role in many of these products, Adobe can tune them over time to make less use of the runtime. I believe we can see this happening.

More positively, Adobe is benefiting from the demand for rich content across both web and applications, and has just reported decent financial results, showing the company’s resilience.

Finally, everyone is asking what Adobe will do about Microsoft’s WIndows 8 Metro platform for tablets, given that browser plug-ins are not supported. Here is the answer:

… we expect Flash based apps will come to Metro via Adobe AIR, much the way they are on Android, iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS today

though I hope this will be delivered more quickly than the promised Flash runtime for Windows Phone 7, which is not a subject either Adobe or Microsoft seems willing to talk about.

Update: Adobe has also announced the Flex 4.6 SDK and Flash Builder 4.6, which supports these new capabilities including Captive Runtime and Native Extensions, and has new controls specifically aimed at tablet apps.

Related posts:

1. Adobe Flash Professional to get HTML authoring features
2. What next for Adobe Flash? Think runtime not plugin
3. Adobe releases 64-bit Flash Player 11 beta, AIR 3 with packager for Windows, Mac, Android