Macromedia – DevNet : What is Macromedia Central?
“…Macromedia Central is a brand new way to develop, sell, and deploy applications using Macromedia Flash MX…run outside the browser environment, but detect when the user is online and connect directly to a web service or other source of dynamic data. The application can then run offline with the most up-to-date data…”
Interesting. Web enabled, offline flash application environment. Of course, offline, updating stuff isn’t new, the company I work for does a dedicated e-learning application that manages rich content and syncs offline. But this creates a whole new framewrok for cheap development of updateable content – perhaps overnight syncing/downloading of video a la Radio RSS implementation.
I think this will be ‘push’ (remember all that Marimba etc. fluff a few years back?) doen correctly. Few ideas:
1) e-learning courseware that pulls in latest data on the fly – no need for tedious updates
2) Rich media and video interspersed with live/just-in-time web content for low bandwidht users.
3) Smart product manuals that pull in updates and so on.
Possibilities are endless.