Why have a projector, when you can have an application

Another thought has occured to me, after considering Central and how it will develop into the future. I have never understood why Macromedia has never spent any time on the Flash Projector shell that is published by the Flash IDE.

The projector provides no advantages to authoring other than being able to allow other people to view Flash content without the Flash Player. This puzzles me because it seems like Macromedia could easily take a bite out of the RAD development industry that many had hoped for on the desktop with tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, and these days .NET.

Tools like Director, SWFStudio and Screenweaver(others as well) have allowed this to occur and done a great job doing so. I personally am a fan of SWFStudio and have used it for many big projects at Teknision, but again I do not understand why Macromedia hasnt really got behind this.

Of course much competition exists especially with .NET, but in order for Flash to grow as a Platform, i see this being nescessity. More than that, when I think of Central and changing into more of a shell around RIAs as opposed to an application aggregator, I also think that the same functionality should be exposed in the Flash Projector.

Anyways, as a footnote, I have a pretty good relationship with Tim and the guys at Northcode, so I am not suggesting that Macromedia put them out of business or anything, but rather to take a closer look at what they are doing. When I consider the Flash Platform, a robust and flexible Desktop Application Shell is certianly in the spec in my mind.