Once the most hated technology online, Flash has become one of the most loved. Meet the scientist taking it to the next level

On meeting Mark Anders, the temptation to say, "Let's skip the introductions" is almost irresistible - for he's the senior principal scientist at Adobe Systems, where he's in charge of making Flash "a great platform for building the next generation of rich internet applications".

Yes, Flash - that technology that only a few years ago was regularly hated, principally because of corporate websites that would blow half the budget on a fancy animation on the opening page - with an apologetic link saying "Skip Intro" - that would take you to the useful stuff. It's the product that led usability expert Jakob Nielsen to dub it "99% Bad" in an October 2000 article: "It makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value."

Anders responds: "Developers loved it, though. It was always very effective for advertising, and over time people used it for new and unique experiences."

And everyone has now joined the developers in loving Flash - even if they don't know it. YouTube uses Flash. The photo site Flickr uses Flash. Google's finance pages generate stock graphs built in Flash. Newspaper websites use Flash to illustrate complex timelines or subjects. It's everywhere.

So is the difference simply that the spread of broadband made Flash more acceptable, by cutting the delays while files load? Or have people worked out how to do more with it, and so enhance the web in ways they didn't before?

Incredibly compact

"Flash always had some acceptability," says Anders. "It's incredibly compact for what it does. But if you compare something like Flash with, say, Java - which is a very robust technology - how often do you see Java being used?"

Flash has the advantage for the developer that the file created is self contained, and doesn't rely on the browser it's viewed in. As the software designer Jacek Artymiak puts it, Flash "is, in a way, the PDF of interactive multimedia. Both formats are so popular because, for the end user, the efforts that go into achieving the desired results are minimal."

How has Flash thrived? "It's a combination of broadband and in the number of people being comfortable with it," says Anders. Flash is the new publishing tool of the century, he argues: "We have let more people publish - whether it's blogging or having a MySpace page, or uploading to YouTube."

The Flash Player browser plugin may be the single most widely installed piece of software - and it's cross-platform. The reasons are historical: during the browser wars, Netscape hurried to include the plugin; Microsoft caught up, and Flash was included with Internet Explorer 5 and onwards. Now it has become the standard for streaming video. As Tom Green, professor of interactive multimedia at Humber College in Toronto, notes, the development of video in Flash has been rapid - almost from a standing start in 2000 - to dominance. "Adobe can claim that the Flash Player is on 97.3% of all of the internet-enabled computers in use today. Microsoft's Windows Media Player is on 83% of computers, QuickTime is on about 66%, and Real is hovering at 56%."

Part of the reason is ubiquity; but Flash also offers advantages to the end user, and to the content provider. To the first, it offers security: there have barely been any security flaws in the Flash player; the only one outstanding at Secunia is rated "less critical" and has been patched. To content providers, meanwhile, Flash is a one-way medium: you don't find file-sharing networks full of videos or songs ripped from Flash files.

Anders see his task as making it easier for people to create and integrate Flash into everything - not just web pages, but also desktop applications or mixtures of the two. To that end, he is trying to improve the quality of the tools available to develop Flash output.

He knows why tools matter. In 2004 he joined Macromedia, which had made Flash a known name, having spent nearly 10 years at Microsoft, where he had been the lead designer on the ASP.NET platform. (Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005.) He had noticed that "one of the things that contributed to development for Windows was Visual Basic [the simple programming language]. Even people who weren't developers, just business people with a problem, could do Visual Basic."

What Flash needed was an equivalent. That was hard, because it was initially designed as an animation tool, not for programming. "We added behaviours, then a scripting engine, and then it became a full-blown application. Flash didn't really have a developer focus. It always had a creative focus. But I joined to help develop the messaging and tools." Or, as he put it on his blog: "My prime motivation for joining Macromedia was that I saw a tremendous opportunity to help make building these rich internet apps easier for people like me."

Beyond the browser

Winning developer confidence matters right now. Microsoft has its eyes on squashing or at least dulling Flash through its Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E) technology, which uses a form of XML and can be scripted with Javascript: it is cross-platform and works through browser plugins, theoretically creating Flash-like applications that can show video, vector graphics and animations. It's a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation that Microsoft wants to be used to build applications that sit as easily on the web as the desktop - or both.

Macromedia's, and now Adobe's, response has been Flex, an XML-based system that makes writing Flash applications similar to writing in a programming language. The next step beyond that is a project called Apollo: "The Apollo project is a cross-platform environment that allows developers to build applications that run outside the browser, using HTML, Flash and PDF to build a desktop app." Who wants to do that? "Well, take Google Finance: it gives you a rich interactive chart which is done in Flash. We can imagine using the desktop for things you could take offline."

But again, who wants that? "A lot of government agencies use PDF for filling applications - or, say, a mortgage application. We can gather data through a Flash application, and then 'print' to a PDF that you can print or send out. A lot of our customers are telling us that sometimes they want to go beyond the browser, and offline. So with YouTube, you might want to be able to download the video."

The fact is, says Anders, that times are changing. "It used to be that everyone wrote Windows applications. Then they moved to the web. People want to write desktop apps which are easy to deploy."

But not necessarily in a computer. In December, Anders said: "If you look at what Microsoft is doing with WPF, they say it's really about rich internet applications but actually, I don't think it is, because I think rich internet applications are not about Windows only. I think the internet is about a multitude of machines and you do not always know what they are." For, as he points out to me, "We're on 100m mobile phones. In Japan, DoCoMo has a huge business using Flash."

As if 98% of the world's personal computers weren't enough. If you're Mark Anders, that's not enough.

Curriculum vitae

Age: 47

Education: BA in computer science, New York University

Career: 1995 Joined Microsoft, where he mainly worked with ASP.NET 2004 Joined Macromedia, which was later bought by Adobe. Led the Flex builder team

Family: Married, to Rosemary; they have two parrots

Blog: andersblog.com