San Francisco — Web developers should now rejoice as Adobe Systems Inc has taken a step forward in announcing two of Adobe’s latest open-source initiatives on Tuesday: both the technologies are related to the Flash platform — Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), and another one is, Text Layout Framework (TLF), designed to help media companies and other publishers build richer Flash applications.
Although Adobe’s Flash still remains a closed-source technology, but that does not mean that other technologies surrounding and supporting Flash cannot be open. The moves is intended to promote open source innovation around Flash, and are in step with Adobe’s strategy of being open, though not always open source.
“Adobe is dedicated to delivering core Flash Platform technologies to the community as open source,” says Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source at Adobe. “By releasing OSMF and TLF as open source, we are helping facilitate the creation and sharing of best practices for media players and rich text-based Web application development. We believe these efforts will strengthen the industry and lead to the next generation of Web applications, content and video experiences.”
The first project, OSMF was formerly part of the Strobe initiative announced back in May, which was intended to commence an open standard for custom Flash-based media players, which would allows designers to create more sophisticated Adobe Flash presentations. This includes a plug-ins API that enables for third-party advertising and reporting metrics to work next to the standard video player features such as buffering, dynamic streaming, and video navigation.
Using OSMF, developers can create “pluggable components to create high-quality, full-featured playback experiences,” and enables “collaborative development for web video monetization.” Flash players advanced playback and navigation controls allows for advertising and tracking, a key benefit for media companies. It consists of a three-tiered architecture: user interface, monetization workflows, and media delivery. OSMF can also work with any kind of Flash content, including video, audio, and images.
According to McAllister explaining, for example, OSMF could not be used to create a Flash Player that would play the open source Ogg Theora video codec instead of the proprietary codecs that Adobe uses.
“OSMF is still based on the Flash platform,” McAllister said. “We are investigating ways for making it easier for people to add the codecs, but it is non-trivial when you get into the video place.”
Considering its flexibility, OSMF might open up new powers to interact with media, Adobe said.
“Imagine taking the current Flash player in a gaming environment and being able to extend it so you can also tap into other info and put it all together,” McAllister said. “So it is no longer a single environment but it also bringing in the ability to manipulate that media environment in ways that might not be apparent today.”
Developers can discover more information about OSMF and download the source code and related components at the OSMF Web site.
The second, TLF is an extensible ActionScript library that runs on top of Flash Player 10 and Adobe Air that lets developers add sleeker and higher-quality typographic layouts and effects to Flash presentations than what is available in HTML and CSS. These text layout features are the same that were shown of when Flash 10 premiered, TLF can be employed for world languages, linked containers, formatting, columns, figures, ligatures, inline images, and expressive effects.
A vivid specimen of what can be done by incorporating these rich text library can be found in the NYTimes.com Reader 2.0 or Boston GlobeReader applications, or on Web-book service makebook.
Adobe offers a tour of TFL here:
TLF supports:
- Bidirectional text, vertical text and over 30 writing systems including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, the major writing systems of India, and others.
- Selection, editing and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, and around inline images.
- Vertical text, Tate-Chu-Yoko (horizontal within vertical text) and justifier for East Asian typography.
- Rich typographical controls, including kerning, ligatures, typographic case, digit case, digit width and discretionary hyphens.
- Cut, copy, paste, undo and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing.
- Rich developer APIs to manipulate text content, layout, markup and create custom text components.
Both of these open-source frameworks are designed to give developers tools to enhance the value of their products, and let them create something monetizable.
“We believe these efforts will strengthen the industry and lead to the next generation of Web applications, content and video experiences,” McAllister, said.
More information on OSMF and TLF can be found here and here respectively.