Macromedia Central: Burning Slowly
News.com has some coverage on Central and the problems that it is encountering as it tries to morph from its Developer Beta to Consumer Product:
A year after Macromedia revealed ambitious plans to expand the reach of its Flash format, the software maker appears to have trouble building support for the effort among developers and information technology planners.
So far, only a handful of applications have been released for Central, a framework for allowing Flash applications to run outside a Web browser. Downloads of the Central player, available in a "developer beta" version since last fall, appear to be minimal, and Flash developers that CNET News.com spoke to showed little interest in Central.
"There's not exactly a stampede for this," said John Dalton, an analyst for Forrester Research. "Technically, it's a great idea. But I think it's going to be a very hard sell for them to get developers on board."
This article pretty much summarizes all of the points I made in "Casually Connected" and later in "Casually vs. Occassionally Connected". One interesting angle that is raised, however, is the potential threat that Longhorn's Avalon Rendering system will have in the long run on Macromedia Central's viability.