Alex Wright

Macromedia Central beta

September 25, 2003

Macromedia has just released the first public beta of Central, a new browser-less environment for Flash-based applications.

I spent the better part of this year working with Macromedia on Central, consulting on the overall UI framework and a series of sample applications, including the two included in the current beta, movies and weather (although I must say the movies app has, ahem, evolved quite a bit since I worked on it ... but so it goes).

There are still some performance issues and quite a few UI nuances that need work. But overall, I think they're off to a solid start - although I think there's still some hard thinking to do about the business model, and the question of how Central-ized applications work (or don't work) with the user's local OS environment. Still, this should be an interesting ride.

And kudos to Kevin Lynch and co for having the organizational moxie to pursue a new vision of how Internet applications could work.

> Try it out

also, I posted a few thoughts on Central earlier this year.

File under: User Experience

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