Adobe launched a new community development project on Thursday aimed at using its Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technologies to create a consistent application interface across all devices -- whether they are smartphones, PCs or set-top boxes.

The Open Screen Project is aimed at bringing digital content providers, device manufacturers, service providers and developers together to provide a user experience for both Web-based content, using Flash, and client-side applications, using AIR, across the myriad devices people use to connect to the Web, said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

Flash is Adobe's runtime and player for delivering rich media on Web sites, while AIR is a desktop runtime that allows people to bring applications coded for the Web to the desktop to run locally.

Lynch noted that because of the complexities of developing applications for different hardware form factors, neither Web-based applications nor ones that are downloaded to a device and run locally are guaranteed to have the same look and feel or render in the same way -- or even run at all.

"If you look at the current experience, content doesn't work reliably; you can't easily install applications, you can't get applications on a device," he said.

Indeed, while both the Java and Flash runtimes have allowed Web applications to run on myriad handheld devices, neither has so far allowed for a seamless transfer between formats of applications. Smartphones, which are increasingly becoming the norm for mobile-phone users, in particular are a largely untapped territory for Flash, Lynch said.

Adobe's Flash technology, for example, is currently not able to run on Apple's iPhone; Web sites running Flash will not render on the iPhone's Safari browser. Adobe is working to bring Flash to the iPhone, Lynch said, and the Open Screen Project should help with this effort.

Flash is currently on 500 million mobile devices via the Flash Lite technology and should be on 1 billion devices by 2009, Lynch said, but the Open Screen Project wants to take that one step further. The company wants to create one Flash and one AIR runtime that can run across PCs and other smaller form-factor devices that are beginning to replace PCs as people's primary way to access the Web.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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