Why the InterAKT Acquisition is a MUCH Bigger Deal than People Seem to Realize
If you haven’t heard (which seems impossible), Adobe acquired InterAKT, a firm that has been a part of the Adobe/Macromedia community for a very long time and has made a name for itself developing extensions for Dreamweaver. In fact, many of the blog posts I read about the acquisition focused on that fact, but after talking with Michael Haynie, I think they’re all missing the big part of this news.
If you read between the lines, for instance the first part of the FAQ, and Matt Chotin’s post, you’ll see Flex mentioned. What do Flex and a company building extensions for Dreamweaver have in common? Absolutely nothing. But take a look at this product: KTML. It is a fantastic online, rich-text, HTML editor. If Flex has one glaring Flaw, it would have to be its handling of text.
The web is still mostly text, and what I hear over and over from people is that Flex is great, but it handles text very poorly. This is because Flash was never really intended for text in the beginning, and the attempts to enhance text support in Flash have fallen somewhat short. That’s not to say it is impossible to create great rich text editing in Flash, I’ve seen some very good examples, but for most people it is out of reach.
Matt’s blog says that “Some of the engineers there (at InterAKT) will begin working on Flex-related projects very soon. We haven’t figured out all of what those are yet, but they’re bound to be exciting!” I hope he’s being coy here, because there is a big need in Flex and a lot of rich text experience over at InterAKT 
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[tags]Interakt, Adobe, Flex, Rich Text[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
September 7th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Another thing to keep in mind is that Adobe joined the Eclipse foundation in June with the intention of using Eclipse as an editor for Flex. InterAKT has a lot of experience with Eclipse thanks to their JavaScript editor plugin, JSEclipse. I bet Adobe’s trying to capitalize on InterAKT’s experience, if not their code, for creating a really good Flex editor.
September 7th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
You may not have realized it but this acquisition and the way it was carried out has many of InterAKT customer’s worried and left feeling cheated. Before you comment on this you should check out InterAKT’s customer forum and see what their customers are saying. As well, you should pass this on to someone at Adobe.
September 7th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Dave,
You’re right about JSEclipse, and I think that played a role. They’ll put JSEclipse on Labs, which is great, and I think it could make a nice compliment to the Spry Framework.
Gary, thanks for the tip. I’m busy reading the responses right now, but you’re right, they don’t seem happy.
September 15th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
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