Its time for flash paper 3.0
With flash player based document editors starting to come out of the woodwork, AKA Buzzword, Live documents etc, I start to wonder whats Adobes strategy here. They bought Virtual Ubiquity (creators of Buzzword) which would suggest some sort on invested interest in the direction of these sorts of applications.
But what happened to my favorite bastard offshoot Flash paper? – you know basically the printer driver from Macromedia that allowed you to print off swf's of a word document that were wrapped in a nice viewer, tiny in size compared to PDF's and didn't lock up the browser when viewed inline with html web pages.
I know the future is supposed to be PDF, but I wonder if extending the the Flash Paper document API and getting it ready for this new breed of apps would be a good step. All we don't need is another closed proprietary format on the web you say. Open source it along with Flex 3's framework I say. Adobe now has the experience as they have the Buzzword crew. Wouldn't it be nice?
Have to agree – currently Adobe are missing a real trick. Flashpaper wasn’t a replacement for .pdf, but rather a great extension. Being able to view documents inline, quickly and effectively was brilliant – such a shame Adobe have killed it off.
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Have you seen SHARE? Its flash previewer basically does everything FlashPaper’s viewer did, and more:
http://share.adobe.com
Hey Andrew, Yep and I think its actually really good! except the viewer isnt open to us to use on our own systems, and only with PDF’s (although more formats coming soon it says).
Its very early days so I hope to see it open up to some sort of API.
But as it stands it not really “for this new breed of app” I mention above, unless Adobe will lock this down and only use it for buzzword?
Well, what I kind of speculate will happen is that MARS will end up being a form of FlashPaper 3. So in essence you will print to a mars document, which will be readable in the Acrobat reader, but if they add an AS3 API for reading MARS documents, they could easily parse the XML, use it to load the images, fonts, etc, and create the document from it within the viewer “shell” of your choice within your Flash/Flex/AIR application.