It would appear that some of the earliest Flash and Generator work myself and some of my colleagues were involved in back in the earliest days of Flash has broken one of the most ludicrous patent awards I have heard of.

Neil Balthaser has been awarded a Patent relating to the online production of RIAs using RIAs over a remote connection.

I find this incredible given the number of Flash applications that were around at that time that must have existed to be listed as prior art that would have shown quite obviously that there was not a single original idea, process or product related to the Balthather FX/ProFX site.

In the UK there is the MoonFruit platform for a start that was live before the Pro FX site, not least the fact that Macromedia's own Generator product offered exactly the engine of such automated production online.

So here for your delectation is ‘Casper’ - an application born in 1998/1999 some time originally utilizing Flash 3/4 and Generator and then more recently updated through Flash 5 and Flash MX. In the future I fully intend to bring the code base kicking and screaming into Flash AS2/3 and re-introduce the capabilities to ‘export’ or ‘produce’ rich media presentations from it.

For those of you who where also around producing this form of ‘RIA’ back in the day, I highly recommend you dig out and dust off your old FLAs and report those productions over at OSFlash.org as prior art.

Where this patent leaves future development of similar concepts in relation to Flex, server based MTasc/swfMill Ajax or any other form and or mixture of technology(ies) you can think of remains to be seen.

Boy am I cross.