Jonathan Gay

Jonathan Gay (* 1967 ) is an American software entrepreneur from Northern California . In 1993 he co-founded FutureWave Software and was the leading programmer of Flash , the animation editor for websites , for a decade . He later founded a power engineering company called Software as Art, which was then renamed Greenbox.

youth

While he was still in high school, he received an award for programming an Apple II . When Gay's father was telling a group of Macintosh users about his son Jonathan's programming skills, he became aware of Charlie Jackson, founder of Silicon Beach Software. In his senior year of high school, Gay began programming for Silicon Beach. In 1985 the computer game Airborne! released its first product. In college he worked with game designer Mark Pierce and programmed Dark Castle and Beyond the Dark Castle.

After graduating from Harvey Mudd College in Clarement, California , Gay worked full time for Silicon Beach Software. During his employment, he developed significant features such as Bézier curves for Superpaint 2 and began developing IntelliDraw, which was later published by Aldus .

FutureWave software

In 1993, Gay and Jackson founded FutureWave Software to develop graphics software for pen computing, particularly the pen point operating system used for the EO Personal Communicator.

Together with the programmer Robert Tatsumi, he completed SmartSketch in 1994, a vector-based drawing program for Pen Point. Shortly thereafter, however, the operating system was shut down, causing the market for SmartSketch to be lost. As a result, SmartSketch was ported to Windows and Macintosh. When the World Wide Web was introduced in 1995, however, Gay saw the potential in the idea of ​​developing an editor that could create animations for websites. The technological core of SmartSketch was overhauled in order to develop the new product FutureSplash Animator, which offered timeline animation and a browser plug-in for Netscape.

The FutureSplash Animator was released in May 1996.

Macromedia

When MSN and Disney used FutureSplash Animator for their websites, FutureWave software was bought by Macromedia . After this acquisition in 1996, FutureSplash Animator was renamed to Flash 1.0.

Flash and Director

Since their main products of the two companies, Macromedia Director and FutureSplash, overlapped in many areas, the acquisition was unexpected. Both products were animation programs that offered an editor and a browser plug-in. As a web technology, Flash had the advantage of a significantly smaller runtime, and the learning curve was also much more beginner-friendly due to the lower complexity of the product. Director, on the other hand, was a heavyweight that has become very complex over six releases. It was also originally intended for the CD-ROM market.

Originally, Macromedia's Flash team was rather small and comprised only a few developers besides Gay and Tatsumi, in contrast to the Director Team. In the years that followed, however, the director team slowly shrank while the Flash team grew rapidly as Flash dominated the web-based interactive media market. Macromedia then tried to market Director as the big brother of Flash, and to offer it where Flash reached its limits. Director's success, however, was limited. Director continued to be one of the most popular tools for creating multimedia CD-ROMs, but Flash has been used in part for this purpose.

Flash 1-4

Gay became vice president of development for Macromedia and led the Flash development team at Macromedia's San Francisco headquarters. Although he was vice president, he continued to participate in the programming. He was responsible for rasterizing vector graphics, pen-computing inspired drawing tools, and the Flash Player Netscape plug-in. Tatsumi wrote most of the user interface for the Flash Editor. Few other developers were involved in Flash during the previous releases. An important addition to the team at the time was the programmer Gary Grossman, who implemented an ActionScript, a subset of JavaScript, for Flash 4. The resulting programming capabilities allowed Flash to be used for many different purposes.

Flash Video: Tin Can

As the development team grew and other developers increasingly took over the programming, Gay was able to focus more on a higher level of product strategy. He managed Flash on the way from an animation engine to a full-fledged multimedia platform.

During the development of Flash 5, Gay took a few months off the day-to-day work of the Flash team to think about new projects that would be important for the company. Instead of Gay, Peter Santangeli led the Flash team for the development of Flash 5 and Flash MX. Gay returned with ideas for a new kind of web application that enables communication, collaboration and what he calls "online storytelling". He saw the success of the Flash Player as an opportunity to spread his new communication technologies.

To implement this vision, he founded a new team, code-named "Tin Can", a reference to corded telephones . This team worked with the Flash team to integrate real-time video and audio technology for the Flash Player. The first version was released in March 2002 as part of Macromedia Flash Player 6. At the same time, the Tin Can team developed the Flash Communication Server (later renamed Flash Media Server), which communicated with the Flash Player using the new real-time protocol RTMP. Tin Can could be used for simple use cases like streaming video, as well as more complex ones like video conferencing systems.

The new flash player with video functionality quickly became the most popular method for embedding videos on the Internet. With the proliferation of the Flash player, Flash Video was able to avoid a major problem with competing products, namely the need for an additional browser plug-in. Other advantages of Flash Video were the lack of the chrome frame typical of web videos at the time, and the adaptability of the interface, with which web developers could implement their own stylized video players. Flash Video is a very popular technology for playing videos in web browsers, but it is slowly being replaced by HTML5 .

Breeze

Ben Dillon and Peter Santangeli founded the Breeze Team at Macromedia to develop an enterprise solution for web conferencing, e-learning and collaboration in addition to the Flash Media Server. Gay was the development manager and product visionary for the web conferencing elements of the product, "Breeze Live". Despite the possibly revolutionary communication possibilities of the Flash Media Server, a great success was initially not achieved. Macromedia wanted to use Breeze to give momentum to the Flash Media Server. They wanted to show which applications the Flash Media Player made possible, wanted to get to know a new business model and understand the difficulties that could arise in developing applications with the Flash Media Server.

Using Presedia technology, Breeze was now able to convert Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to Flash SFW files that could be viewed on the web. Breeze also offered "Breeze Live", a conference system via the Flash Media Server, which enabled audio and video conferences, a shared whiteboard, screen sharing and the joint viewing of presentations. After Macromedia was bought by Adobe Systems, Breeze was continued as Adobe Connect.

Flash success

By 2001, 50 developers were working on Flash, 500,000 developers were using it, and Flash Player had over 325 million users.

A survey in 2007 showed that 96% of internet-enabled computers worldwide had Flash installed.

Time after Macromedia

On April 18, 2005, Adobe Systems Inc. announced the acquisition of Macromedia. Gay decided to take a different route and left Macromedia in December 2005.

Software as Art

In August 2006, Gay founded a new software company, Software as Art, together with three other former members of the Flash and Breeze teams. The company develops energy technology solutions for households.

Silver Spring Networks

In October 2009 the company, now known as Greenbox, was bought by Silver Spring Networks.

Exit from the IT industry

In May 2010 he ran a small business that sold pasture beef directly.

Web links

• Software as Art
• Thoughts on "Software as Art" by Jonathan Gay ( Memento from November 29, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
• The Flash History by Rick Waldron
• The History of Flash by Jonathan Gay ( Memento June 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jonathan Gay: The History of Flash . Adobe. Archived from the original on January 1, 2015. Retrieved June 5, 2015.
2. ↑ Jonathan Gay: The History of Flash . Adobe. Archived from the original on February 4, 2009.
3. ↑ Jonathan Gay: The History of Flash . Adobe. Archived from the original on February 2, 2009.
4. ^ Kristi Coale: Macromedia Rides The FutureWave . Wired. January 6, 1997. Archived from the original on August 16, 2013.
5. ↑ John Dowdell: Zaphod emulates Tin Can . Adobe. July 26, 2006. Archived from the original on June 19, 2007. Retrieved June 6, 2015.
6. ↑ Kevin Towes: Preface to Macromedia Flash Communications Server MX . O'Reilly. December 2, 2002. Archived from the original on February 9, 2008. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 6, 2015. 
7. ↑ Jonathan Gay: The History of Flash . Adobe. Archived from the original on March 20, 2015. Retrieved June 6, 2015.
8. ↑ Technology Breakdown . Adobe. Archived from the original on June 5, 2011. Retrieved June 6, 2015.
9. ^ Adobe to acquire Macromedia . Adobe. Archived from the original on April 20, 2005. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 6, 2015. 
10. ↑ Macromedia Management Team . Macromedia. Archived from the original on May 16, 2009. Retrieved June 6, 2015.
11. ↑ About Software as Art . Software as Art. Archived from the original on January 13, 2010. Retrieved June 6, 2015.
12. ↑ Flash co-creator Jonathan Gay Responds To Steve Jobs . ColdHardFlash. May 18, 2010. Retrieved June 6, 2015.