Since we've been talking about various Flash players on the Playstation Portable, it started me thinking of the proliferation of Flash across various devices. As a certain do-it-yourself maven might say, this is a "good thing." A great thing really. The more Flash the better as far as I'm concerned. But we can't really talk about just one Flash anymore. Even though the adoption rate for the latest Flash player for your browser has been amazingly quick, we've got all of these other players for different devices, some their own flavor of Flash (e.g., FlashLite), some just legacy players on devices (PSP case in point). Then there's Zaphod, the latest beta player (until recently also called version 8.5, now 9).

The Flash 8 certification exams haven't come out yet, but I wonder what they will look like. Instead of certification in a product, I wonder if we'll see certifications in what you do with that product. Instead of Flash designer/developer exams, we may see Flash Video Developer, Flash Mobile Developer, Flash Animator, Flash Rich Internet Application Developer, etc. I know that the official training curricula are moving in this direction.

I guess I'm less concerned with the actual certification exams than just thinking about how far Flash has come. It's a little hard to pigeonhole now (another "good thing"). Maybe this is the crux of the whole "Flash Platform" idea. But it makes it more difficult for any one person to call his or herself a Flash developer without some sort of qualification of that term.

It's interesting that as Adobe is trying to consolidate its hold on the Flash brand, the brand is diversifying itself almost beyond recognition. That being said, I can't wait to see where the whole Apollo project  takes things int he next year or so (see MAX 2005 General Session notes for starters)...