Photoshop Product Manager John Nack spoke about Flash and Photoshop, Adobe/Macromedia integration, and more in an podcast interview with Inside Mac Radio's Scott Sheppard. The interview took place this week at Flash Forward 2006, which was the first Flash conference since the Adobe-Macromedia merger.

You can hear the full interview on the March 2, 2006 episode of Inside Mac Radio [ iTunes Music Store link ]

Here are key excerpts from the Nash interview:

On his own Flash background:

"It's really funny. Flash is really the reason I came to Adobe. I was working for an agency out in New York called agency.com. We were doing Web sites in Flash for Nike, and Gucci, and all these big companies. And I really wanted to build a new experience there and solve some of the problems I was having. So Adobe said, hey we're making a Flash animation tool. Do you want to come work on that. So I said sure. And they were just about to ship their first version. So I came out and joined the Live Motion team in 2000. And worked hard, got a bunch of cool things going. But ultimately we didn't get enough things right fast enough to really make it take off, and the project got canceled. So about four years ago I left that and came over to Photoshop. Well then you can imagine last April I just about dropped my cereal on the floor. I was like, what Adobe and Macromedia are getting together. Totally unbelievable. I couldn't be more excited because a lot of the pain points, the things that just waste people's time and keep them from doing cool stuff, we can now finally fix. And that's really exciting."

On potential integration of Photoshop and Flash:

"Mike Downey, the Flash product manager, put up a survey a week or two on his blog and said, what's the top thing you want to integrate. And I think the top thing was Photoshop and Flash. But of course a lot of folks are using Illustrator, Fireworks, and they want those to integrate as well. Same with After Effects."

"There are just a lot of really obvious basic things we can make work right--bringing in a layered PSD file, bringing in a layered Illustrator file--things that are not creative tasks, but things that just should work better. And it's really great that we can get the teams together and give them access to each others' code and a lot of knowledge, and make that stuff work. . ."On empowering the Flash developer community to create Photoshop tools:

"Just moving files around is a big thing. But also we need to think about, well look, Flash and Flex there's this great developer community. They're using other Adobe tools than Photoshop. They want to sell their knowledge and skills more broadly. How can we leverage technologies like Flash to make it easier to develop for things like Photoshop and Illustrator, and can we make it so that you can develop interfaces that work across platforms and across applications -- things that folks have wanted for years but we never had a way to do it. And I think that when we move those tools together developers will have a whole new way to leverage their skills that takes what they do for the Web even beyond that."

What did Nack see at Flash Forward that wowed him?

"We got to see Erik Natsky's talk on Tuesday, and he was showing how he evolved from being just like a pure timeline/motion graphics guy to writing his own scripts and then writing his own tools that write scripts. That's really inspiring because it means that you shouldn't have to wait on Adobe or another developer 18 months, 2 years, whatever, to make a new tool. If you have the skills, you should be able to make it yourself. And that's the kind of thing where we open these doors to developers. So that really got me thinking."

"Seeing the guys from Jib Jab today with the way that they animate in Flash, then take that into After Effects and start adding some blurs and lighting effects and 3D. I mean, my head is just spinning with where we can go with this stuff."

"We're definitely seeing a trend towards really rapid prototyping, really rapid application development. There was a demo in the keynote of Flex, about how to build an application like iTunes built in about 5 minutes, just snapping together components with Flex. So if you think about, well that's cool, I can put that on the Web. Well why can't I put that on my desktop, or why can't I put that in one of my desktop tools? So I think there are a lot of possibilities there. And it means that with one set of skills and even with one set of assets in some cases you can build experiences for online, you can build them for the desktop, you can build them as components. And so it opens a whole lot of new doors, and I think a lot of different communities are going to benefit from that. . . "

"Wouldn't it be cool if instead of necessarily having to run all of your Photoshop extensions in a plug-in window, why not have them be tools. . . . We should democratize the development of tools, so that it's not just you kind of put a message in a bottle and you send it to Adobe and hopefully we get a chance to make it happen. If you want to make something different you should have the chance to pop open the hood, start banging around, and make it different. . ."

On extensibility in Lightroom:

"In the case of Lightroom one of the big things for that team is extensibility. Now they look back at the history of Photoshop, and one of the things that made it successful from 1990 onwards was the fact you could build plug-ins. And it was like, yeah I like 8 out of 10 things here but these two aren't really working. So that's an opportunity for a third party. Well those guys are saying, that's great, but third parties shouldn't be limited in that way. Why not be able to develop entire modules for the application. And why not leverage some of these Web technologies directly, so you can do things like, well the sky's the limit. But suffice to say that rapid extensibility is a big, big part of their plan going forward."

On progress toward Universal Binary versions of Adobe products:

"We recognize that to really address the way the market's been changing around digital photography it wasn't going to be good enough to just keep doing incremental additions to our existing code. What we really need is to start with a fresh slate. So in the case of Lightroom, because they did that, it's been a lot quicker for them to move to Mactel.

"With some of the more mature apps, like Photoshop, Illustrator, it's a really big project, and there's a lot of work to move the code from Code Warrior over into XCode, get that compiling, and then get that compiling on Mactel. So it's something where it's a long process. I wish we could do it faster. But Apple's been really great in supporting that. There've been Apple folks on site all the time over at Adobe answering questions, bouncing ideas back and forth. . . Both companies really want to see this happen, just like users do. We'll have it out as soon as we can, with the obvious qualifier that we want to right. We don't want to just rush it out there and have it not work well. So it'll take some time, but we're definitely working closely on it."

"As we work with Apple we want to make sure that our applications keep evolving and taking really good advantage of all the new innovations they've got. They came out with the dual processor, dual core G5's. They're making some really great changes around the graphics architecture, like with the new MacBook--much faster memory systems with their GPU. And so I think that this evolution will help us stay really current and take good advantage of that. And of course every time a new system comes out one of the key benchmarks is how fast does it run Photoshop. And so it's in everybody's interest to make sure that our apps really shine on the new boxes."

On getting together with all the Adobe product managers at Flash Forward:

"It's kind of funny. We actually realized that we had never had the product managers from Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and After Effects physically in the same room together. We'd been on the phone; we'd been talking on email. But because we're all in three separate offices we'd never actually been in the same room. So it [being together at Flash Forward] was pretty cool. We had a chance to publicize it a bit on the blogs, and to say hey, you know what, this is all new to us. You know we've never really been one team before. So come on out. Let us know what you're thinking."

On feedback about how to integrate Flash with other Adobe software:

"You know a lot of what people said wasn't a surprise, which I think is good thing because it means what we're already coding up is going to be pretty successful. But, yeah people had all kinds of good ideas--things like: Hey when I'm designing in Photoshop or Illustrator give me a mode where I can tell what's going to work well in Flash and what isn't. Make it easy to get between After Effects and Flash, and then Flash back to After Effects. Just lots and lots of ideas there. And actually I'm going to go and bending out engineers ears, and saying what if we did xyz, I bet that would be cool."

More on Macromedia-Adobe integration:

"So basically the upshot of all this is--it's really new to us. It's only been three months since the deal closed, and we've actually been legally allowed to talk to each other. So we're really just in the very early days of this planning. So we're going out on the road. We're meeting customers togther. We're asking questions on blogs, reading up on what each of us finds out."

"I just really encourage people--if you've got something to say and you've got some ideas, there's a million ways to do it. A bunch of us have blogs at adobe.com. Or you can read the Macromedia News Aggregator. Of course we've got user forums, and we're reading those."

"This is as excited as I've been to be at Adobe in about six years, which is exactly how long I've been here. We're just getting warmed up. I'm psyched."

"I think that each company, for good reasons, when they were separate was kind of off on its own, doing it's own thing, and didn't have a lot of access to some shared technology. We'd all try to work together, but there's only so much you could do. And so now I really feel like, when I was a kid you'd get a new set of legos, and you'd bust that open, and you'd be like, oh man, now I've got a horse, and an arch, and these chairs, and like I could just build anything with that. And I really feel like that with the technology."

 "What I really want to do is make sure we use the technology to open doors so that users themselves can build this really cool stuff. Because as many good ideas as we're going to come up with, people are just continually amazing us with the stuff they end up building. And so I think that's the key thing--is just to open the door, and people are going to run through it."

"I feel like we're just drinkin' from the fire hose. In these early days we're just sucking down information, and have probably dreamed up ten years worth of features just in the last couple months. So I really feel like as we go forward hopefully people will give us feedback, keep us honest, make sure we're not running off in some wierd direction. I'm psyched to see what we can come up with together."