Flash is going to take over the world
Mar 8, 02:23
I’m done with iChat. It used to be a great alternative to the atrocity that is the official AIM client, but in the last six months or so it has become increasingly unreliable. I am unable to send any files to anyone. I get cryptic AOL error messages fairly frequently (nothing helps me solve a problem quite like an ‘error 00xx00xx07’). Plus it seems to change my state back to “Available” without asking. I have been using Skype as a backup file transfer solution, but it is nice to be able to drop a graphic in a conversation and then discuss it directly underneath.
(As an aside I’d like to mention I’ve since been using the excellent Adium for my AIM chatting needs, and it works well, except for the WebKit message view breaking with certain incoming messages. File transfers work once in a while, and there isn’t an interface so you don’t actually know if they do or don’t. It’s the best way to put the suspense you’ve been missing back into instant messaging.)
There really is nothing keeping me in AIM’s pocket other than tradiition. So in my search for a solution I decided to look into other IM services. I read up on Jabber, mostly because it wasn’t AIM, Yahoo, or MSN. I liked what I saw so I downloaded the recommended Mac application: Gush.
Gush is an interesting piece of software that sports a non-standard windowing interface (a rather nice one though), that is confined to running inside a window Windows-style. I thought this was odd, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would go to the trouble of writing their own windowing system for an instant messaging application. A quick trip to the about box and I arrived the website of a product called mProjector. It appears to be a tool that creates executable applications out of Flash movies.
Wow.
I thought at first that the programs were restricted to running inside a window like Gush, which seemed like a great way for the product to suck. But it is possible to break out of the box, as the cool EarthShaker example on the ScreenTime site does.
Flash-to-application converters have existed for a while on the PC side, but they’re new to the Mac from what I can tell. What does it mean if it’s possible to use a web animation/interaction tool to create a full fledged cross platform application? I’m not sure. Mac OS X 10.4’s Dashboard uses WebKit to render widgets; I don’t see this as being all that much different from a technology standpoint. My guess is this widget-realm will be home to the majority of applications that use mProjector and it’s brethren, at least in the near future.
Perhaps this sort of development will help put an end to the everything-runs-through-a-browser mentality that has developed in the last few years. Althought I sort of doubt it.