Adobe and a number of industry leaders have announced a new initiative called the "Open Screen Project" that completely changes the game for RIA developers, and sets the stage for RIAs on mobile devices. The Open Screen Project removes restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications - now anyone can create their own player or tools to create SWF content, similar to how PDF is. Adobe is also publishing the device porting layer APIs for Flash Player, so that anyone can create their own Flash Player for platforms that aren't currently supported, especially useful for mobile devices.

Mobile development will also get a boost by the removal of license fees for distributing the Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices. Handset manufacturers will not need to pay Adobe to install the Flash Player on their devices. Adobe hopes that this will result in 1 billion phones having the mobile version of Flash (currently FlashLite) installed on them.

There's a lot of coverage of this online this morning. Slashdot has the story, which always has interesting views from the open source community. CNET, Ryan Stewart and the Washington Post have it from a news angle. TechCrunch has the story as well, with some very supportive comments from readers.

O'Reilly has launched a new RIA focused site - Inside RIA. The site currently features blog posts from leading RIA developers, including Andre Charland from Nitobi (a recent star on TV with Leo Laporte), Rich Tretola who blogs at EverythingFlex.com, Tony MacDonell from Teknision, Andrew Trice from Cynergy Systems, and more. They'll be blogging and talking about Designing rich Internet applications, Developing rich Internet applications and the Standards that exist for RIA development.

There is little doubt that Flex is a critical product for Adobe. Its the language of choice for most Flash applications that I see these days, and used in most of the top AIR applications as well. Its success is critically important to Adobe - not just for developer mindshare but also for the next generation of products that Adobe is building. Here is a list of known products from Adobe that are built with Flex.

Adobe Premiere Express - Used by YouTube, Photobucket and MTV, Premiere Express allows people to do simple editing of movie clips, sounds and photographs.
Photoshop Express - Similar to Premiere Express, Photoshop Express allows people to edit their photos online, in the browser, without having to use a desktop application. Its not yet released, but should be within the next 3 weeks according to previous reports.
Adobe Media Player - This Flex application runs on the desktop via Adobe AIR and aggregates RSS video feeds that play on your computer.
Buzzword - A word processor written by a Virtual Ubiquity, recently acquired by Adobe.
Brio - Just released, its a Flex based version of Acrobat Connect, currently available in beta at Adobe Labs.
Knowhow - A panel in Adobe Illustrator that allows sharing of helpful information for Illustrator users, built with Flex Flash.
Kuler - An online community for colours - it allows users to share colours, rate them, comment on them, and use them in their Creative Suite applications. Illustrator has a Kuler panel available inside the application, written in Flex Flash, like Knowhow. (Edit: This application is actually written in Flash, not Flex.)
Share - Allows anyone to share documents that are converted to Flash and display inline other text. Adobe gives users 1 GB of space to store files.
Adobe Document Center - Allows you to share and protect PDF documents.
JamJar - A proof of concept application that shows the power of Flex.
Adobe Digital Editions - A desktop application to manage eBooks.

Note: I updated this article to note the fact that Kuler and Knowhow were actually developed with Flash, not Flex.

OK, so its not exactly a rich Internet application, but it does show the potential of what you can add to your RIAs. Adobe's HD Gallery shows a number of HD videos all playing through the newly released Flash Player 9. You'll need the latest version of Flash Player to play the videos.

Adobe and Yahoo have teamed up to allow advertising inside of PDF documents. I can see this being useful for a few applications that publish newsletters and documents in PDFs - similar to how some bloggers (like me) use Google AdSense to monetize HTML content. However, the real value to you and other readers of this blog should be the hope that this might lead to the ability to put ads inside of RIAs.

Currently its extremely difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to monetize an RIA that you've built. You can try what Picnik is doing - adding features available to Premium Members only, but there's no real payment framework available to repeat that for many applications. Meaning you'd have to write your own payment infrastructure and handle all the customer service interactions on your own.

Some people are trying to solve this with AIR applications, but there's no one that I know of working on a solution for in browser Flex applications.

I don't know how developers will monetize the applications that they build in the future, but I do know that its great news that Adobe and Yahoo are working together in some fashion. Here's hoping it doesn't stop at PDFs.

John Loiacono, Senior Vice President for Adobe Creative Solutions, showed Adobe Photoshop Express yesterday at an industry event, and said that Adobe would make a beta available in 2007. He also said that the software would be made available through partners such as Shutterfly and Photobucket, as opposed to directly from Adobe. (Flickr has already inked a deal with Picnik.)

I've covered Photoshop Express before.

More coverage on Mashable.

Adobe has posted four customer success stories of large companies that are using Flex. All four of them are in the financial services sector. There are new articles about Robeco (investment services provider in the Netherlands), Rheinishcher Sparkassen und Giroverband (a German bank), eTrade Germany and Skygrid. Skygrid's StormWatch application received an honorable mention at the Adobe MAX Awards.

At the Adobe MAX conference today in Chicago, Adobe announced a Linux version of the Flex Builder product - Flex Builder Linux alpha. It was shown live in the Sneaks session of today's afternoon keynote at Adobe MAX. Here's the release note:
"This is the first release of Flex Builder to support Desktop Linux. This version is based on several features from Flex Builder 3 (codenamed "Moxie"). It includes project creation, code coloring, code hints, compilation, the Ajax Bridge, Find All References, and debugging. Not all Flex Builder 3 features are supported, so be sure to check out the release notes for a list of unsupported features." Digg this story.

Adobe released a beta of a new service that they're calling Share today. Share allows you to easily share documents with other people. A Flex based UI allows you to upload and and manage your files (Adobe gives you 1 GB of space). Once you've uploaded them, you can easily share them with others by emailing them a link or embedding the document into a website. Documents, including PDF documents, are converted to Flash files before being shown to the user.

Here is the UI for the application:

And one more screenshot...

TechCrunch has a little more on Share and the Buzzword acquisition. Other than that, there's not a lot more information about it. Its probably best to head over and try the application yourself.

The online word processing market got more interesting today when Adobe announced their intention of purchasing Virtual Ubiquity, the company that created Buzzword, an online Flex based word processor. Buzzword is currently available in a public beta: you can sign up today and see what its like today.

I've been using Buzzword for a few months now, and I have to say that its probably the best online word processor that I've seen. It is the only online word processor that I know of that does proper pagination, so the documents on the screen look exactly like they do when they print.

Adobe says they plan to incorporate the functionality into future versions of Adobe Connect, Create PDF Online and the Adobe Document Center.

Robert Scoble has more insight on what this means for Microsoft's near monopoly with Microsoft Office, as does Josh Catone at Read Write Web.

Microsoft countered today's announcement with the unveiling of Office Live Workspace. I haven't been able to test that out, but Mary Jo Foley has more information on Microsoft's announcement.