The post was picked up on Slashdot and generated a lot of comment mostly from anti-Flash zealots and those who thought I was questioning the maths rather than the methodology (a survey commissioned by Adobe based on a small panel of opt-in users who were asked whether they could see various items of plug-in content complete with player download dialogs!).

However there was one particularly useful response…

…pointing interested parties in the direction of the “Rich Internet Statistics” site riastats.com. This is a single page site devoted to tracking the player penetration of rich internet application platforms and it outscores Adobe’s own tracking for a number of reasons:

• Figures are based on statistics derived without the need for a survey and from a much wider sample – at the time of writing around 1.5 million unique daily users over the previous 30 day period.
• You can embed some code to find results for your own site – which as James Ward the technical evangelist from Adobe pointed out is the statistic that really matters.
• You don’t have to dig down to find the crucial figures for reach based on the player version.
• You can see how Flash penetration compares to Java and Silverlight (mysteriously missing from Adobe’s analysis) and you can track changes over time with the Line chart.
• You can easily and interactively break down figures based on browser, operating system and language (and filter out stats from sites specifically about ria technologies)

Perhaps most important of all, the site itself is an excellent demonstration of why the Flash deniers and blockers are wrong (not that they’ll ever find out). Flash is capable of much more than irritating pop-up ads and riastats.com shows how it can be used to deliver content more attractively and, crucially, more effectively than HTML.

Riastats.com certainly isn’t perfect – the fact that it is Flash-based does suggest a certain in-built bias and it really ought to publish the sites where statistics are tracked and correct the typo in its title – and of course there’s no single statistical “truth”.

Having said that, what’s the answer? What are the riastats.com figures for Flash penetration?

At the time of writing (drum roll) riastats.com puts the figure for Flash player penetration at roughly 97% – and around 51% for Flash 10 content compared to Adobe’s 56%.

This 2% gap on the headline claim might seem insignificant but it’s not.

One of the problems of the 99% figure – a major plus if you’re Adobe – is that it is seen as effectively ubiquitous. 97% is getting there – and a real achievement and a massive advantage over rivals – but it’s definitely not ubiquitous.

This has important practical implications. In short don’t be tempted to provide Flash-based navigation or other content that is better handled via the truly ubiquitous HTML. Moreover don’t use Flash 10 content unless you have to and, if you’re a Linux-oriented site, be wary of using Flash at all – according to the current stats, 1-in-7 Linux users won’t see anything and less than 1-in-5 will see version 10 content.

These practical issues are important but, ultimately, the main reason that the riastats figure of around 97% is significantly different from Adobe’s figure of 99.0% is simple: it’s believable.

But should the claims be taken at face value?

Well let’s look at it in a bit more detail. At the time of writing there is a major headline:

“Flash content reaches 99.0% of Internet viewers”

followed by:  

“Adobe Flash Player is the world’s most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching 99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices.”

“Over 2 million professionals!” Eat your heart out Dr Evil. Presumably they meant to say the Flash authoring tool is used by that number. Amusing, but hardly reassuring.

Sure enough look at the PC Penetration page and you’ll see that the latest estimate (December 2008) for Flash player penetration is 947 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices. No doubt with the next quarterly update the 1 billion figure will have been smashed.

However things aren’t quite as straightforward as they look – as Adobe shows with its notes. 

The first of these reveals that the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago – an age in internet time. Already then the margin of error on numbers at least is enormous.

The second reveals that the figure is based on devices capable of reading Flash player 7 content. To be fair to Adobe they do give the penetration stats for different player releases and thanks to auto-updating the figure for the latest Flash player 10 is already around 55%. That’s pretty stunning in the timeframe but it’s not 99% (ie remember to target your SWFs at the lowest player capable of rendering your project).

The third note is the most significant:

“Total Player penetration is a calculation of the total number of PCs connected to the internet, multiplied by the weighted percentage of worldwide penetration from the Millward Brown study. This is an assumption made by Adobe.”

So what is the Millward Brown study? Well to begin with it’s not the fully independent survey you might assume as it was commissioned by Adobe.

Having said this, Adobe looks admirably open and helpful giving full details on the methodology page. You can even take the survey yourself – though I trust that the data from surveys originated from Adobe’s Flash Home page aren’t included!

I’m sure they’re not, but of course any internet-based research is automatically self-selecting – users who find and sign up to become members of the Lightspeed panel for rewards including music downloads will naturally tend to be home-based heavy internet users who have picked up more plug-ins than average as they go.

Moreover the survey works by showing animations and asking if you can see them. You are instructed not to download the plug-in when the dialog appears (why weren’t these disabled?), but I think it’s human nature to want to see what you’re missing and to hit OK rather than Cancel and especially on the first page where this is likely to happen which just so happens to be the Flash 10 page.

On top of which the underlying numbers on which such a major claim are built seem tiny with an apparent total survey sample size of 4,600 ie around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total (and then weighted according to the CIA World Factbook!).  Adobe then seems to “assume” that these figures scale up neatly, but presumably Millward Brown doesn’t endorse that assumption. Moreover it’s only when you dig down that you discover that the figures give a signficant margin of error of around +/- 5% with 95% confidence.

So where does this all leave us?

As regular readers will know I’m a big fan of the power and potential of the Flash platform (though not of the majority of current Flash-based sites) and would like to see it spread as widely as possible. 

Moreover I’m sure that Flash is the most pervasive cross-platform web platform and if you throw in Flash Lite-enabled mobile devices, arguably the most pervasive software-lite platform. I’m certainly not disputing that it’s more popular than all other rival web platforms such as Java and so the best choice for most scenarios.

However in that Adobe headline both the seeming precision – “99.0%”- and the poorly-defined wooliness – “Internet viewers” – are clearly deceptive. 

More to the point is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems? Including my granny?

I guess the big test is whether the next set of figures from Adobe will finally break through the even more psychologically-significant 100% barrier.

In my last digital design column in the latest issue of the magazine I take a look at the long history of “iPaper”. It’s essentially the story of the holy grail for designers: a format that manages to combine the design strengths and reading experience of paper with the unbeatable advantages offered by the internet – universal, instant and effectively free publishing and delivery.

Back in my first column, 150 issues previously, I had thought it was obvious what format would come to fill this role: the web-optimised PDF. And, as the most common document format on the web after HTML and with semi-integrated playback in most browsers, to an extent it does. Generally though, despite all its other strengths, PDF has failed miserably in its web ambitions. 

So is there an alternative?

One of the most interesting new takes on the longstanding iPaper dream comes from Scribd.com and is called… “iPaper”. Scribd is generating quite a bit of interest at the moment as a site where users can upload and share their written work. Just two years on from launch and with over 15 billion words in its public library, over 50,000 new uploads every day and over 50 million visitors a month, Scribd is well on track to establish itself as the “YouTube for writers”.

This file sharing is interesting enough especially as – again like YouTube – you can embed the iPaper content and reader into your own pages with a short snippet of code – something I’ve taken advantage of recently to enable quick posting of brochures to a web 2.0 user-generated site (there’s even a nice Drupal iPaper module to make this even easier).

What’s particularly interesting though is how Scribd has chosen to implement the site. You can upload files in a number of formats – DOC, OpenOffice, PPT etc – and these are then automatically and rapidly converted into both PDF and into Flash SWF. It’s the latter which is the main format used for display.

The beauty of this dual approach is that you don’t need the baggage of Adobe Reader to just quickly view and navigate the design rich SWF file (including search and print) which is all that most user want to do 99% of the time. For those rare occasions when you do want more, it’s simple to download the PDF version for offline reading, commenting, archiving etc. 

With the iPaper player “about a 1/1000th of the size of Reader” and the SWF content files smaller than their PDF equivalents, Scribd cruelly exposes the inherent bloat and semi-detached nature of the supposedly “web-optimised” PDF. 

Adobe is clearly well aware of both the problem and the solution. Indeed it has largely copied the Scribd model for its own Flash-based handling of hosted PDFs at Acrobat.com.

I wonder though whether this could be the herald of deeper integration. Now that Adobe owns both PDF and SWF formats and their respective players wouldn’t it make sense to spread iPaper-style benefits beyond these cloud-based server solutions? 

What I’m imagining is a truly web-optimised flavour of PDF with its own associated Flash wrapper. This Flash version of the document would enable fast and truly integrated online display within the browser either full-screen or embedded via a dedicated lightweight document reader incorporated directly into the ubiquitous Flash player. If you like the look of it, simply right-click and download the underlying PDF into Adobe Reader for offline viewing, printing, archiving and so on.

It certainly wouldn’t be the holy grail – as I discuss in my article – but it would be a major step towards it.

Well the launch of Acrobat 9 might well give us a very strong clue. The Acrobat applications are focussed on the business/office productivity market, but the introduction of new PDF capabilities gives the CS teams something to work with. And with Acrobat 9 that’s an understatement…

The first key is the merging of the Flash player into the free Adobe Reader. This enables traditionally static PDF ePaper documents to become fully interactive multimedia extravaganzas. InDesign already offers some electronic publishing capabilities but now the platform is in place to take this far further – and with the latest QuarkXPress 8 adding comprehensive Flash authoring capabilities the pressure is really on. For more graphics-intensive short-publication work this could also give the multi-page, Flash-oriented Fireworks CS4 a real – and well-deserved – central role.

The merger of Flash/PDF shouldn’t just benefit the page-oriented apps. The big limitation of the Flash platform at the moment is that you need to be online and in the browser to take advantage of it. By outputting Flash projects to PDF rather than SWF, Flash CS4 Professional would open up an important new offline delivery route (effectively a Flash document would be a projector without the hassle of EXE-based delivery).

The potential is even more exciting for the media-focused CS apps. Currently these seem semi-detached from the publishing apps but if Premiere Pro CS4, After Effects CS4, Soundbooth CS4 and Encore CS4 all add PDF output they would become full members of Adobe’s universal Acrobat strategy at a stroke. By wrapping the all-important FLV video format in a PDF wrapper you also get simple offline cross-platform playback.

And the merger of Flash/PDF was only one aspect of the Acrobat 9 launch – perhaps even more important was the launch of Acrobat.com with its free 5GB hosting and services. This isn’t just personal file storage – Acrobat.com creates a Flash version of each PDF for online display and sharing. The potential for integration with CS4 is mouth-watering.

What else? How about multiple page support for Illustrator at last (maybe not if Fireworks takes on this role)? The bundling of Flex? Live Color for InDesign? Photoshop makes your tea?

Of course this is all speculation and the truth might be very different. However I can’t help feeling excited about the prospects for CS4.

I was invited down to London a month or so ago to the press briefing and it was clear that Adobe considers this a major release. And after the pitiful version 8 it really can’t help but shine.

The feature that Adobe was stressing is the new ability to handle Flash – but just how significant is this development? And come to that – just how new is it? And how welcome?

After all Acrobat already supports Flash and has done so since version 6. If you don’t believe me, select the Movie tool (hidden away in version 8 under Tools > Advanced Editing), drag on your page and then see which files formats are supported. There, lurking among the AVIs, MOVs and WMVs, is SWF.

The first big difference is that with version 9, the Flash player is actually built in to Adobe Reader. Previously you had to rely on the end user having independently installed the Flash player to ensure reliable playback – now it’s an absolute given. It’s part of the platform.

The second major difference is that Acrobat 9 now supports Flash video (FLV) not just SWF. And with the new Acrobat Pro Extended it can automatically convert all those AVI, MOV and WMV files to FLV for efficient web-delivery and playback. Effectively this means that PDF has now moved on from its static ePaper roots to become a universal dynamic multimedia format.

So how welcome is this? Already there are those Flash-phobics that are bemoaning the despoiling of their apparently safely static format (though see above).

I have to say that I don’t agree. Yes there undoubtedly will be some horrid design excesses and download times, but you have to blame the designer for that not the platform. And when it is used sensibly and subtly, Flash’s multimedia handling can take efficient design work onto an entirely new level.

More to the point even in everyday use, audio and video is just becoming a natural part of computing life. In particular, with the spread of webcams and movie-enabled digital cameras and camera phones, video is now becoming ubiquitous and, as a universal file exchange format, PDF needs to reflect that.

Imagine you’re buying a property and download the PDF schedule. Now thanks to Acrobat 9 alongside the text, photos and drawings you’ll be able to see a video walkthrough. Surely that has to be a good thing?