I just got back from a very successful show at Adobe MAX. Plenty of cool stuff going on but two things really stood out to me. One, of course, was Adobe’s announcement that the forthcoming Flash Pro CS5 will enable Flash Apps (and therefore Flash content) to be delivered to the iPhone. (I’ll blog about that in a different post later.) The second was the demonstration of the ‘new’ XFL format in Flash. I call it new because while it’s been announced for awhile, and some Adobe products like InDesign and After Effects have output XFL, Flash CS5 will mark the first time that Flash has been able to both ingest and output XFL.

Why does this matter? There are a number of benefits, but the key one from my POV is that it removes a critical barrier to collaborative content creation. That barrier is the proprietary FLA format Flash currently uses. It’s a black box. Only Flash can read and write it. But XFL will change that completely. This week at Adobe MAX we demonstrated using Flypaper to create a Flash XFL file which could be opened in Flash. It was a simple example, and we didn’t demonstrate the other half of the round trip – editing the Flash project, outputting the XFL, and reopening it in Flypaper – because that piece is still to be developed.

But what all this means is this: not only will people be able to use Flypaper to create true Flash content – just as they can now – but they’ll be able to pull that content into Flash to add the stuff that ONLY Flash can do. Stuff that hasn’t been packaged into Flypaper components. And then take it BACK into Flypaper to do the stuff that Flypaper excels in.

Take for example a designer and developer working together. We’ll assume a designer who doesn’t have much Flash experience. In the past the designer’s contribution would be pretty much limited to layout and design, handing off to the developer to do all the animation, interactivity and so on in Flash. But Flypaper excels in the hands of the designer, because it enables designers to do so much more than just design and layout. Its page orientation and project map let the designer do the initial construction of the project, including sophisticated navigation. Simple-to-moderate animation is easy. And Flypaper components (created by Flash ActionScript 3 developers using the Flypaper SDK, by the way) give the designer the ‘steering wheel’ to cool Flash widgets created by Flash programmers. Drop on the page, adjust a few settings and go!

Then, to add that sizzle and ultimate power that only Flash provides, the designer outputs the project to Flash via XML. The developer’s now free to work in the Flash IDE without limitation. And because all the mundane work has been taken care of in Flypaper (‘oh no, not yet ANOTHER menu!’ ‘how many times are they going to change this text!’) they’re free to focus on the truly creative work that brought them to Flash in the first place. But best of all, since Flash is no longer a one-way street, the project can go BACK again to the designer for final polishing. And so on until it’s finished, with each person focusing on their strengths and areas of expertise without the FLA format providing a roadblock.

It’s really cool stuff and it shows how Adobe is working hard to remove artificial boundaries to the creative process. That’s been what Flypaper has been about all along. That’s why when Adobe asked if we’d be interested in being the first third-party application to support it we jumped at the chance. It should be really fun to see what happens as everyone discovers the advantages of working together this way.