It was a very hectic week last week and even though it was short because I was on vacation, I was jetlagged most of the rest of it. I’m finding out my body can’t handle huge time change swings. As a result, there was no blog activity. I have a couple of big posts coming up starting tomorrow, so I wanted to stretch a little bit before they go out.

Though not Flash related, Richard McManus has a good roundup of Web Office tools. Ever since Christian’s post on Living Digitally I’ve been hyper-aware of good tools out there.

I’ve also started a love affair with Flickr. I got a pro account a bit ago and have been in the process of uploading all of our old pictures. It’s a lot of fun going back and looking at past trips. It also makes me realize that I need to do more hiking/backpacking. I think the intersection of technology and the outdoors is so cool, but I’ve been too busy to make time for the outdoors part. Hopefully I can change that this weekend.

If you want to check out the pictures, they’re here.

Smilebox is the one flash application that I’ve noticed (Zillow also uses Flash if you can get in) while looking at the list of companies presenting at Demo 2006. I was intrigued obviously because it uses Flash, but then I noticed that both Rob Burgess and Jonathan Gay are Angel investors in the project.

I hate the flash intro (Please stop doing those. Use them on an “About Us” page instead of as a landing.), and part of me feels like the online greeting card “thing” has been done, but if done correctly it may take off.

It gets back to Flash’s roots in animation and presentation and if you look at the demos, they make it seem fun. Will this be a good way to share photos or albums with my parents? Perhaps. The beta opens sometime in March and it’s interesting enough that I want to try it.

If you missed Part 1 of my interview with Wes Carr, Co-Founder of Gtalkr yesterday, it’s located here. Today Wes and I talk about the new features of Gtalkr and where he sees Flash and Flex going in the future

6) How do you see Flash in terms of the wider Web 2.0 community, and the web platform?

I really didn’t know how the Web 2.0 community would view Gtalkr, since it was all Flash based. Then I took a look at the tags we’re getting on Del.icio.us. “web2.0″ is the second most popular tag next to “google” for Gtalkr. So I would say they are definitely embracing Flash as being apart of the Web 2.0 movement.

I think you’ll start to see greater use of Flash in the near future. Applications like Yahoo Maps, Goowy, and Gtalkr show that Flash is the future of building on the web platform. And now with Flex2 and Flash 8.5, hardcore developers can really sink their teeth into Flash as a serious application platform. The stuff is just amazing

In may ways I think you’ll start to see a bit more innovation from upcoming Flash based applications. AJAX is being pushed too some great limits for what should be relatively simple features. By the time the W3C makes new additions and all the browsers decide to implement them, with their own little quirks of course, Flash will be way ahead again.

It should be interesting to see how it evolves!

7) One of the cool things about Gtalkr is that it works seamlessly with YouTube, which uses Flash Video and the Flash version of the Flickr slideshow. What other kinds of Flash apps would you like to see?

I’d like to see Flash apps that bring you more desktop like functionality to the web, just like Gtalkr does with IM. One application in particular that I would like to see is an awesome web-based Calendar. It’s a pretty though nut to crack as you can tell by the recent and unimpressive AJAX attempts. Flash is already being used to do some cool things with web-services like you mentioned. That’s a real area of interest for us, lots of possibilities!

Now you recently announced a Gtalkr extension API that will allow people to write and embed Flash and Flex applications into Gtalkr. What kinds of things are you hoping to see people create?

Hehe, I would like to see developers creating all the enhancements we get asked for That’s one of the main reasons we developed the Gtalkr API, so you could make it do what you want, without having to wait for us to catch up

But we also hope people will start experimenting with the network aspects of the API. I think there are some really cool extensions that can leverage your contacts and presence. One extension I’m hoping to build pretty soon is an addition to the Yahoo Maps extension that shows you where all your online contacts are at the moment.

9) What would you like to see from the next generation of Flash, and have you checked out the Flex 2 beta?

I have a long list, but the most important thing I would like to see is better text-interaction and HTML support. Content is king and Flash isn’t catering very well to it right now. You can’t tell when users are moused over a link for example and it’s difficult to integrate things like buttons and images with text. Inline image and movieclip support in textfields would be huge! I would also like to see some of the browser integration issues get resolved. Things like key events, scrolling, and focusing are still a bit clunky. One thing most Flash developers probably don’t use very much is LocalConnection. We use it to communicate with the Gtalkr Notifier and while it works pretty well. LC is still pretty clunky though and we would love to see a boost there, like synchronous and bi-directional support. LC can do some cool stuff, I would encourage developers to play around with it more if you haven’t already.

I’ve definitely checked out Flex2 beta and it rocks. My list was significantly shortened when that came out Things like being able to dynamically re-parent movieclips are going to result in much cooler interfaces and I’m sure we are all happy with addition of method closers. Building Flex Builder on top of Eclipse was also a great move for Macromedia and is very welcome by this developer!

10) 2 years from now. Where’s the web? Where’s Gtalkr? Where’s Flash?

Well I’m sure whatever I say, I’ll probably be way off I’ll tackle these one at a time.

The Web: I think you’re going to see people relying less and less on their desktop and getting more things done through a browser. You’re going to see a large concentration on user centric application, by which I mean applications that strive to personalized to your needs and provide new functionality around your social network. Social networking is in the midst of a resurgence, but it’s going to much more useful and interesting this time around. You’ll also see the term “Web 2.0″ swapped out for “Next Gen Web”

Gtalkr: Gtalkr is all about making it easier for you to interact with your friends and the wide variety services you belong to. We want Gtalkr to be your hub for sharing what you find interesting and giving your friends access to your complete web persona. We have a lot of ideas around features that involve your interaction with your friends and different web services which I unfortunately can’t comment on with any detail right now. Of course we will also continue to expand the number of services with which Gtalkr integrates and in the near term, you’re going to see AIM support, file transfer, and VoIP functionality.

Flash: I think Flex2 beta is setting the stage for what Flash will be like in the next 2 years. Flash is really starting to mature, so I doubt you’ll see a leap like you saw between Flash 5 and 6 for example. But while Flash itself may not change too much, how people use it definitely will. I think you’ll start to see other big players experiment heavily with Flex and hopefully we’ll see a critical mass of Flex developers within 2 years.

This interview was blast to do, so a big thank you to Wes for taking the time to answer my questions. Wes is usually posting something on the Gtalkr Blog and I know he has some very cool stuff planned in the next year, so keep an eye on it.

If you haven’t heard of Gtalkr by now, I want you to click on the link and check it out. They provide a web based Google Talk client that utilizes the Flash platform and has some great features including Flickr and YouTube integration along with the ability to read RSS feeds. They’ve been profiled by TechCrunch, Om Malik, Lifehacker and many others.

Wes Carr, the co-founder of Gtalkr is the guy behind all of their Flash development. He graduated with a Computer Science degree from Washington University in St. Louis and at 24 is on the forefront of Flash and Web 2.0 development. He agreed to do an interview with me and talk about his experiences and his thoughts on the Flash platform. It’s a great read for anyone doing Flash development and especially anyone interested in how Web 2.0 and Flash fit together. Part one covers a bit about his personal experience with Flash and creating Web 2.0 applications using it. I’ll have part two of the interview tomorrow.

1) What gave you guys the idea for Gtalkr?

To give you just a bit of background, before Gtalkr we built an all-flash desktop IM client called Gush. It was geared towards more hardcore Jabber IM users. When we saw Google Talk announced, we had already made plans to bring Gush to the web and thought we would take advantage of integrating with an already established network.

We found it interesting that with the whole AJAX and web 2.0 phenomenon, many traditional desktop applications were being “ported” to the web, except for IM. Why? mainly because it’s tough . Sure you’ve always had some type of chat functionality on the web but nothing full featured. We decided IM should be on the web too, and integrating with the Google network made it just so much more interesting because it gave us a platform to build new things.

With our latest release, I think it’s becoming clear that we want to enable our users to be able to easily and quickly share what they find interesting with their friends. You shouldn’t have to copy links and email things around. Phew, I think that covers it

2) So what made you decide to go with Flash? And Wes, how did you originally get started in Flash development?

I got started with Flash back in college, 2001 I think. My little sister introduced me too it actually. She was using it, Flash 4 at the time, for some presentation instead of power point and did some cool animations. When I saw what she came up with, I was blown away and just got hooked experimenting with animations and fun little interface projects.

As I worked more and more with Flash, I realized that it could be a powerful presentation layer for heavier applications, resulting in a much better experience for the user. When developing something of this scale for the web, I can’t tell you how happy I am that we’re using Flash. You write it once and it just works, regardless of the operating system or browser. That’s a huge savings in development and debugging time. We also wanted to show that Flash can be a useful tool for building real applications, instead of the flashy banners and skip intros everyone always bashes it for. I hope we’re giving it a good name

3) What do you use to do your Flash development?

This one might surprise you, I use the standard Flash IDE. I know I know, I must be crazy. To tell you the truth, before the updates in the Flash 8 IDE, I was suffering a bit, but I have this nervous twitch and like to hit Control+T (compile) all the time to make sure I’m not making any careless syntax errors. I did try using some other editors, and SciTe was pretty decent, but again the whole Control+T thing. I also use Grant Skinner’s gProject to manage the 360 class monstrosity that is Gtalkr. It’s been a nice addition to my work flow.

You might ask why I don’t use MTASC or some of the other 3rd party compilers. Well pretty simply, Gtalkr won’t compile Unfortunately those compilers still aren’t 100% compatible with Macromedia’s or are missing some features and I don’t think all time I would save on shorter compile times would out weight how much code I would have to change to be compatible with those compilers

4) A lot of big companies use Flash for many, many different things, but there aren’t a lot of Flash examples in the smaller, Web 2.0 companies. As one of those smaller, Web 2.0 companies, what advantages does Flash give you compared to other companies using AJAX?

That’s a great question. First of all, I think AJAX and Flash are actually fairly comparable solutions, we even use a bit of AJAX, which I’ll get to later, but where I think Flash has the advantage is again in it’s presentation abilities. Admittedly the Gtalkr interface certainly doesn’t push Flash’s graphics abilities to the edge, but everyone knows what a pain it is to do dropshadows, alpha-blends, and drag and drop in AJAX, and then you have to get it work in multiple browsers as well!

But those are just client side advantages. The way Gtalkr is setup, it makes the development process much simpler, because you can achieve a nearly complete separation between presentation and logic. That’s much more difficult to do with an AJAX application where the server side still has to do all the heavy lifting and be aware of the presentation on the client.

One area where Flash has tremendous advantage over AJAX is crossdomain.xml. XMLHTTPRequest is bound by the security policy of the browser which is pretty damn limiting. How would you achieve Gtalkr’s Flickr and YouTube widgets with AJAX? You would need a server side proxy to act as a go between. That sucks! With crossdomain.xml you get the freedom to interact with other web services easily and most importantly, on the client side!

5) What have been the challenges when using Flash to create a Web 2.0 application?

I’ve definitely almost broken my keyboard a few times when Flash and I weren’t getting along One of the biggest challenges we had with Flash, ironically, was achieving a look and feel similar to that of more traditional Web 2.0 applications. We didn’t want Gtalkr to scream Flash and actually a good number of people still think it’s AJAX.
Sshhh, don’t tell

The Flash-browser interaction was another source of pain. Doing things like scrolling the html page when you’re not scrolling something within Gtalkr took some imagination. Simple things like that you don’t have to worry about when you’re using DHTML. External Interface in Flash 8 is a big help though and one of the reasons we decided to require Flash 8 for Gtalkr. I’m very happy with that decision especially given the recent penetration statistics. I’d also like to thank Geoff Stearns over at deconcept for FlashObject, it just works!

You remembered I mentioned we use a bit of AJAX? Well we actually use XMLHTTPRequest for almost all the communication between the client and the server! We tried really hard to use Flash’s XML Object but in the end it was too unreliable for the amount of traffic we pump through it.

In part 2, Wes talks about some of the new Gtalkr features as well as what he thinks of the new versions of Flash and what the future holds for the platform.

The Web 2.0 logo map has been floating around, so I decided to do a little bit of modification. I highlighted the four companies on the list that I know are using Flash.

Flash and Web 2.0

Who did I miss? Let me know and I’ll update the list.

A post by Om Malik titled Turn Old Phone Into A Smart Phone got me thinking about one way FlashLite could very easily make a splash (if only the adoption was higher).

Right now, phones become outdated almost as soon as you buy them. It seems like there’s always a newer phone that can do more “cool stuff”. Of course, this is like everything, but the problem with phones is that the “cool stuff” adds functionality that really makes a difference to users. Being able to use RSS, check e-mail and view webpages are becoming standards but the speed at which that happens and the variability in offerings presents a challenge smart phone buyers.

Om says that by getting a phone that supports Java, users can install applications that will make their phones “smarter” and more like the cutting edge phones. There’s no reason at all that “Java” can’t be replaced by “Flash” and the applications could be much cooler.

FlashLite penetration is pitiful right now, but if it weren’t, then being able to download new Flash applications would be a great way to make your phone smarter. Of course the real benefit is for companies who are already developing using Flash. In theory, they can offer their products to mobile users without much in the way of extra cost and mobile users have a slick, easy update process.