I’m not sure why I haven’t seen much buzz about this, but cnet has a short clip of Norm Meyrowitz, President of Macromedia Products showing a new product called Flashcast running on mobile phones. This seems to be somewhat like Central in that it is a shell for the flash player that also caches some of the content and assets. I think this is a great idea for mobile phone content and am looking forward to see what content emerges for such a platform.

What is more confusing and maybe why I have missed any news about this announcement before is that another product on the market bares the same name “Flashcast”. I also searched Macromedia’s website and only found one entry on JD’s blog about this product.

We ran into a Flash problem today with our largest client. The client brought up our site which requires flash, it gave them a page that explained our site uses Flash and they need to go to Macromedia’s site to download an install it. Then they click on the link to take them to Macromedia’s Flash Download page.

This is where the problems begin. The client is using Netscape 4. Our site is fully Netscape 4 compatible. Flash itself is fully Netscape 4 compatible, right? Well, the Macromedia web site doesn’t work in Netscape 4, so they can’t download Flash to install it.

With the release of Flash MX 2004, IÂ’ve been giving a lot of thought to the importance of Components in application development. It seems like we keep moving more and more towards building applications around components. Now with the addition of Form based applications, and data components, components are even more important. I canÂ’t really imagine building a good application that uses forms without having everything (almost) as a component.
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