Macworld: News: Macromedia unveils Flash Platform:

San Francisco-based Macromedia Inc. on Monday unveiled the Flash Platform, a complete system that includes everything you need to deliver rich content, according to the company. Macromedia is also previewing the next generation Flash Player, which the company says will dramatically improve Flash’s performance.

Blah blah blah Flash works on 98% of internet-enabled devices blah blah blah…

In addition to improving Flash’s performance the new Flash player, code-named Maelstrom, will include a new video codec provided by On2 and will be embedded in Flash, according to Whatcott. A beta will be released to the public later this year.

Wow, that’s a really bad name. It reminds me of those fruity-ass retail boxes you used to see for 3dfx cards. They’d have some kid with a flight stick in his hand with his hair getting blown back like in the old Memorex ads, with lots of purple and green lighting. In some crazy jagged fonts it would say “TAKE YOUR PC TO THE RADICAL EXTREME!!!!!!!!!oneoneone,” and the kid’s eyes would be shooting fire or lightning or whatever. Just looking at them made me really embarassed. I couldn’t find a good picture of one in Google Image Search, though, so I’ll show you the picture of the Legendary Axe cover art that showed up instead. Now on to the only thing that’s actually interesting:

Macromedia also said it planned to join the Eclipse Foundation to develop a new industry-leading IDE based on Eclipse for building rich Internet applications that run on the Flash Platform. ‘We intend to ship a rich Internet authoring tool that we believe will be the way to build rich Internet media in the future. We believe building on Eclipse is the way to go.’

Last time around, Macromedia put out “Flash Professional” and claimed it was an IDE for developing “rich” web apps. Sorry, no — it still felt like it wanted me to make an episode of Strongbad. What I wanted was something like OS X’s Interface Builder or RealBasic’s IDE. Flash Pro was a far cry from either. The announcement of what sounds like an entirely new IDE for app dev makes me think that Macromedia has finally realized that creating gay-ass animations and creating rich web apps require an entirely different development approach. I don’t really recall Eclipse having much in terms of visual tools for interface building, but presumably Macromedia can just write that shit and let the Eclipse platform handle the code side of things.