I'm beginning to see more and more that central is not a step forward in flash application design, there's nothing about the actual apps that's new to standalone users, rather it's about the central environment that provides a means of distributing the applications in a way that standardises payment, trial periods, etc.

sorry if it's obvious to others, I'm just thinking aloud.

as I mentioned before somewhere, I'm not sure exactly what kind of market MM expect from this. I'm sure they've done a lot of research into it, but I can only see potential users coming from the type of people who use standalones now to produce small applications, mostly based on web services. I'm not convinced that any corporations would want to produce applications, mostly promotional at this point, for use in central. They're restricted by the environment and association with the central app. So that leaves independent developers coming up with interesting uses for web services etc. Not much of a market me thinks, but maybe I'm missing something.

A lot of the energy in standalones seems to be coming from the ability to produce apps with transparent backgrounds, so people can create cool looking MP3 players, that kind of thing isn't possible with central I assume since the central environment is standardised to a certain extent and, even though some apps may 'breakaway', there are certain restrictions to this.