NEW YORK-Even without next-generation wireless networks, Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are at work on myriad ways to improve delivery and presentation of Internet content to end users, as demonstrated at last week’s Flashforward2001 conference.
San Francisco-based Macromedia Inc. convened the meeting here to update the software development community on new techniques, innovations and design elements enabled by its SWF file format. Macromedia said SWF works with Macromedia Flash technology to enhance software developer control over type fonts, animation, multimedia, sound and interactivity.
In the online world, Damion Michael, director of Web site development for celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, said that incorporating Macromedia Flash reduced the number of mouse clicks required to access main areas of interest to as little as one or zero. Not only did sales rise by 8 percent within the first two weeks of launching the upgraded site, but site maintenance costs also plummeted by 85 percent, he said.
NetXposure Inc. was able to reduce bandwidth demand by 95 percent and page load time by 20 percent when it replaced an HTML menu system with a Macromedia Flash application interface for its client, Salomon North America, said John Black, a NetXposure executive. Salomon, a sporting goods manufacturer, is using this system in its new Extranet, which its employees can manage from any location for functions like accessing up-to-date inventory information and ordering products.
These kinds of improvements in the speed, convenience and presentation of Internet content are moving into the wireless world, according to several announcements at the Flashforward2001 show.
AlterEgo, a Redwood City, Calif., provider of enterprise software and services for e-business, said its new Designer Extension for Macromedia Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver UltraDev are now commercially available.
Macromedia and AlterEgo said they began collaborating last fall to develop a best-of-breed solution that enables developers to create content once for delivery to any device, regardless of carrier or protocol.
“By combining the AlterEgo Designer Extension with the Dreamweaver platform, Web teams will be able to seamlessly add mobile support into their existing content workflow,” said Tony Campitelli, vice president of product marketing for Macromedia.
Without any knowledge of WML, DHML, Palm HTML, cHTML or any other mobile markup language, the more than 1 million software developers worldwide using Macromedia will be able to develop applications for all wireless devices, “regardless of their individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies,” AlterEgo said.
Macromedia and Intel Corp. also announced a collaboration to make available to device manufacturers later this year a software development kit with optimized code for enabling delivery to handheld computers of MP3 files that are highly compressed and provide improved sound quality.
Macromedia is working to optimize its Flash Player for the Intel Xscale microarchitecture using Intel Integrated Performance Primitives.
“With this collaboration, device manufacturers supporting the Intel Xscale microarchitecture and the Intel StrongARM processor will benefit from the large community of Macromedia Flash developers authoring compelling multimedia content for their handheld products,” said Mike Ianniti, director of marketing of Intel’s Handheld Computing Division.
