Macromedia’s new flash product, Macromedia Central was announced today. It appears to be a front-end for downloading, buying and running Flash “applications”. Downloaded applicationss have access to persistant storage in Central’s protected “sandbox” environment. There appears to be a payment process built-in to the application, but I couldn’t find any details.Marc Canter says Macromedia will be taking 20%.
My first thoughts were “I thought this breed of application died off with Pointcast and Castanet”, and “This looks just like ShockMachine!”, which it sort of is. And isn’t.
“You tried this with ShockMachine!” Two points to you for remembering history. ;-) ShockMachine was also a client-side host, which could store and play Shockwave or Flash files. Six years ago the ShockMachine shell focused on games rather than tools – there was no economic model for individual developers – there was no such thing as web services, and even XML was a strange concept, so the only live data feeds could conceivably have come from HTML scrapes. Many members of the Macromedia Central team had also worked on the ShockMachine project, and are well aware of things to do different this time around. The business model for content developers alone is a radical difference. The ShockMachine experience definitely helps, but this is a distinctly different case.
(From JD’s Forum)