While it sounds like the name of a bad porno, it's clearly good marketing strategy by Google to bring content authors to the Android platform and to court tool-maker Adobe.
But I still say that the introduction of the iPad is a signal of doom for Flash-as-a-format. On the other hand, as Adobe gets more serious about producing HTML5, SVG, Canvas, JavaScript from their Flash IDE, well...
Shelley has a good long read about web standards, Silverlight, etc. I haven't yet installed Silverlight (I'm on Linux most of the time) so I can't even look at the effect everyone's getting all gooey about over at the Hard Rock Cafe site. Maybe one day I'll get around to it. Unless it's truly 3D effect, I have a hard time believing that the effect can't be done using SVG and SMIL and made to work in 3 of the 4 major browsers today. And this with standards that have been around for more than half a decade. So there. Nyah.
Speaking of plugins, I've been watching this guy continue to improve his SVG viewer (a SWF file that runs in Adobe's Flash player) with about an update per week. Interesting idea (which has been pursued before incidentally). I'll be really impressed if he can get the thing to a point where SMIL and scripting can be implemented.
Still, nothing beats some type of native support. In the meantime, I'd even accept 'native' plugin support from the big stick-in-the-muds. I still haven't ruled out the idea that one day in the future, the Silverlight or Flash plugins might suddenly be able to render SVG directly, with no translation step in between. Here's hoping for Flash 11 and Silverlight 3... Why not? They both already support a scripting engine, interactivity, XML parsing, animation, vector graphics, gradients, etc. Hm, why not, indeed.
Renesis 1.2 was supposed to be released on or about yesterday. Maybe it will come today? It would be a good little birthday present. Seven of Nine bugs marked as Fixed in 1.2 are mine, so I've been looking forward to it for about a month. Who knows, I might be able to recommend it one day as a viable replacement for the Adobe SVG Viewer.