"Web 4.0": all things tangible

Currently some neat stuff is developed moving the web into the real world. I mention:

• The reactable, offering a playful way with objects to show and manipulate information on a table using real objects
  
• Several open source Multi Touch table concepts allowing you to drag, rotate and drop objects presented on the table top using your fingers
  
• The Roomware Project, enabling enclosed spaces to recognize and acknowledge the presence of people and offering the right data to help you connect to online sources like Flickr, Hyves and Myspace

The combination of elements makes it possible to make intelligent objects in real space showing your personal data connected to your personal profiles.

Data cloud
From another angle: your data cloud is moving with you and picked up by any space that has roomware running. Using the objects in that space (like tables and walls) you can then use, show, share and manipulate that data to your own liking.

Flash to the People
Flash to The People will include and offer some basic interfaces and interface concepts to these technologies, allowing you to rapidly build fun applications for these technologies.

Features of Flash To The People

The Framework of Flash to the People is comprised of several "components":

1. The DataConnector, enabling you to connect to, to map and to present XML data and data offered via Flash Media Servers like Red5
2. The DataStreamer, enabling you to create and implement several different streaming data concepts like Audio / Video conferencing, Audio/Video capturing and Flash Object Sharing
3. The PseudoHTML-parser, that understand CSS settings and parses the XHTML offered by the user into gorgeous Flash User Interfaces

Basic interface concepts
The Flash To The People Framework offers the basic GUI concepts like: tabs and tabshets, text fields, dropdown boxes, popup windows, buttons, checkboxes, radiobuttons and scroll-lists.

Advanced (organic) interface concepts
The more advances interface concepts includes: the appledock concept, scrollbar-less scrolling (using the mouse x/y position within the bounding box of the list to determine position), canvas-based interfaces (where all objects are placed and organized on a large canvas you can move around instead of using "pages" on a limited space).

Connectivity
Bottom line: 90% of all data-connections are Copy & Paste clones of a standard approach: including the ones used for (video) conferencing and chat clients in Flash. So we standardize them into simple components with their own PseudoHTML tag.

Multiple user interactivity
Using Shared Objects in Flash, you can move balls around on the screens of your friends, but also share workspaces and work together or share and watch a presentation online.

Flash to the people

Compared to HTML, Flash has been a relatively closed environment until now. Why? You need the Adobe Flash editor to build and publish/compile Flash sites.

Origin
In 2003 / 2004 I was using flash to create the front ends for webshops. Each screen was literally drawn and built in Flash, using the drawing tools available.
The backlash was that:

1. Each change in size, color or style resulted in redrawing each main component or component part and .
   
2. Each Flash file had at least a weight of 200 KB's and took at least 10 seconds to download and start (we are speaking of "low bandwith" times where 50Kbit per second was "fast!"

Tired of this, I created a "pseudo-HTML parser" that weigthed only 34KB, loaded in seconds and is capable to build an entire site with sub-pages based on "pseudo-HTML"

Flex
Flex came, did the same thing and seemed to render the engine useless. Also my focus changed. However:

1. Flex is heavy weight
2. You need to compile the files before you can see the result
3. It uses it's own "markup language" language that differs from a more common one like HTML

Flash to the people
Flash to the People opens Flash up, using a Markup Language that is using HTML as a basis and does not need to be compiled at all.

Benefits?

1. Use XHTML to build solid gorgeous Flash sites
2. With XHTML an easy to learn and open standard to everyone to build complex Flash websites
3. No compiling required to produce results
   
4. A light weight core engine that starts almost instantly
   
5. An entire re-usable library of several Graphic User Interface concepts
6. Easy to implement and ready made connections to XML-data and Open Source Flash Media Servers like Red5
   
7. Many easy to implement Flash-specific benefits like: streaming video, object sharing, audio/video capturing and audio/video conferencing