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Macromedia Central

Macromedia Central is a new software/service/Flash application from Macromedia that is currently in Public Beta. It’s basically like Sherlock or Watson on the Mac. You use one centralized application and one standard interface to access a wide range of information from many different web sites. Central only has two sections right now, the Weather and a movie finder, but there are supposed to be quite a few more when it launches later this fall. The big difference between Central and say, Watson, is that Central is just made out of Flash (and perhaps some other technologies as well, I don’t know all of the technical details). Anyway you just click on a button on the Macromedia site and it downloads and installs itself right in your browser with Flash.

Once you launch the program, you can enter your zip code, and receive the current weather info for our area, as well as a forecast. You can set alerts so that Central will automatically let you know when it is about to rain, or snow, etc.

For the movie finder, you can browse movies by theatre, search for a movie, sort by ranking on RottenTomatoes, etc. You can see still shots from scenes in the movie, click links to go to the official site of the movie, watch a trailer, add a movie to your favorites, etc.

Overall I think it is pretty cool, and could really be useful when they get some more services ready for it. Hopefully it will be free, but I don’t really understand exactly what they are planning to do with it. Sometimes it just seems like they are using it as an example of what Flash can do, others they act like it is going to be some new product.

Update, someone from Macromedia has already found my post and answered my question… Central will be free for end users, and will be a platform of sorts for developers to use to sell their own specific applications. Central has built-in transaction capabilities. Sounds pretty cool to me!

One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that this seems especiallly cool to me since it is all in Flash. I’m normally not a fan of most Flash sites out there, but this seems like something that Flash is really useful for, and something it can do better than HTML. I hope to see more Flash applications in the future.

Either way, by the time it comes out officially I will probably already have Mac, and will be enjoying Watson, and won’t have to worry about this at all.

>Hopefully it will be free, but I don’t really understand exactly what they are planning to do with it.

Hi. Central will be free for end users. The idea is that developers will be able to create and sell apps themselves (Central has built in transaction support).

Hope that helps…

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com