The far-off drumbeats are getting closer: While trade-show rumblings point toward a November Adobe Creative Suite 4 release that will throw a megawatt spotlight on Flash, PDFzone's own Adobe mole is hearing that CS4 will be announced as early as October and will be released in advance of Adobe Max, the company's flagship seminar, to give the Adobe's handpicked presenters some grist for the projection-screen mill.

There's just one problem, he says, from hands-on experience of InDesign, still in private beta: Adobe execs will be likely extolling the virtues of what appears to be flawed InDesign Flash output. If they do, he says of the hoopla—paraphrasing Gertrude Stein's description of her lost childhood home in Oakland—there won't be a there there. As in, Flash output from InDesign is missing key multimedia components such as audio and other media that can be built into InDesign files, according to his experience with the (admittedly prerelease) CS4 tools.

Missing content can be readded in the Flash authoring tool, he says, but that extra step, in his view, makes InDesign Flash export a pointless exercise. Especially if there's much text to read—which in Flash can be much tougher than with PDF, because PDF files offer more scalable, more easily manipulated views.

The same multimedia files in InDesign, however, export to PDF with all the bells and whistles intact, making it the Swiss army knife output format in this 2008 media universe, a place where, as InDesign Senior Product Manager Michael Ninness put it at a Feb. 26 Mogo Media conference previewing potential Flash features, "Print is not dead, but design for print only is dying."

Another expert in our Rolodex, a Flash guy who does print and Web design for a living, agrees that Flash from InDesign would be a feature built for nonexistent uses—except, perhaps, to drag a few Luddite print-only designers into the Flash fold.

Smoother transfer of Photoshop and Illustrator data to Flash has many more practical applications in actual Web and interactive media design, this guy says, and hopes CS4 will deliver it. InDesign, in his mind, will forever be a page layout tool for print—and that's it.

Which brings us to Silverlight: Earlier this in August, a PDF mentor with whom I routinely shoot the breeze postulated that Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash alternative, isn't about devouring Flash as much as it is about knocking out Flex.

Not quite, say our two sources here, early adopters of everything Adobe: They feel Microsoft's Silverlight format is all about keeping .NET developers at home and not migrating to Flash and other ex-Macromedia apps. While conspiracy theorists out there might think Microsoft is trying to torpedo Adobe and Flash with Silverlight, Redmond's thinking may be far less sinister.

Microsoft's real plan, our sources are guessing, is to develop Silverlight and its related authoring tools in order to stem the growth of Adobe's reach into its own .NET backyard. The conflict isn't Microsoft going after Adobe, but the other way around. Adobe, for its part, needs to aggressively increase its user base, because it bought Macromedia and now needs to do something with Flash to keep the company's revenue and stock prices on that rosy upward path investors have enjoyed for so long.

Will the act of bringing Flash deeper into CS4—which includes Acrobat 9 and its rack of new, robust Flash tools—increase Flash's implementation and value? Our early adopters speculate that it's a long shot. At worst, we might be about to see a rare Adobe marketing misstep, the software equivalent of a CS4 box-office flop. But the presentations at Adobe Max will sure be hot.