I have a contact who works for Adobe, and I asked him once why LiveMotion (Adobe's SWF-authoring tool) sucks so bad (actually, it's got some good features, like the ability to import layered PhotoShop graphics, but its support for Actionscript is horrible).
He said that Adobe is only half-heartedly investing time in the SWF format, because they believe it's life-span will be limited to a couple more years. When it dies (IF it dies), they will be ready with a SVG authoring tool, and their plan in to pounce and take over the animated vector market while Macromedia is floundering with their outdated product.
Of course, my contact has his own biases and agendas. I'm not sure I buy SVG as the future vector format of choice, but I do think it's likely that the current Flash boom won't last.
The problem is that internally the SWF format is a mess. It's very difficult for Macromedia to upgrade it. So whatever we'll be doing on the web in two or three years will be, most likely, incompatible with Flash.
You can already see this happening with Quicktime. Macromedia has TRIED to allow authors to embed QT videos inside SWF files, without much success. As it stands, you can import QT, but then you then have to export the whole project as a QT video. Which means you lose most of your Actionscripting ability, because the QT player can only deal with a few Actionscript commands.
Compare this with the success Macromedia has had with embedding QT pretty seamlessly into Director, their bitmap animation tool. Director can import almost any media -- even SWF.
The other factor in the future of web animation is the decimation of broadband connections. If (when) everyone (or the majority) gets broadband, everything will change.
Right now, we like vector animation because it's fast over slow connections. But if everyone's surfing with DSLs or Cable, bitmap tools (or hybrid vector/bitmap tools) may give Flash and SVG a run for their money. Which will be a boost for Quicktime, Shockwave, Realmeadia, etc.
We'll still use both bitmap and vector tools to author media, but we may very well export them in a bitmap format.
Marcus Geduld
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