Dale Rankine

I’m back in the office this week adjusting to life after the 2009 Adobe MAX conference in LA, and coming to terms with everything that was announced and demoed. There was certainly the feeling that this year ended up being all about mobile, which has been promised in the past but never fully delivered on. I think this year though, some of the Flash mobile haters would even have to concede that things are looking pretty interesting for the space. Here’s some thoughts I’ve had since returning home from MAX on the mobile-related announcements and the future of Flash on devices …

Flash Player 10.1

The Flash Player 10.1 announcement was (I think) the most significant, for the simple fact that it filled in more pieces of the puzzle. I mean, what has been the most argued point by Flash devs for the past 5 years? “We don’t want to have to code for a different runtime, especially if it’s a backwards step”. How great is it then, that the new runtime for Flash devs and AS3 programmers will be targeting for desktops and the browser, is actually the one that was developed for mobile devices! The Flash platform has a lot to thank mobile for, and more specifically the Open Screen Project. It’s because of the work done by the Adobe engineers on the mobile space that all Flash devs will have a runtime that renders and performs so much better than previous versions.

FP10.1 does NOT solve all of mobile’s fragmentation – this is something that comes with the territory and needs to be understood by Flash devs coming to the platform. There’s also the reality that it will still be a long time before there’s a large enough segment of the device ecosystem that has the FP10.1 runtime embedded, and therefore a segment of target devices that represent an investable market for those companies (be they app development, entertainment, consumer brands, etc) who would spend money on mobile. And this is why I think the “other” mobile announcement at MAX was important …

Flash Apps running on the iPhone

(Full announcement) Let me start by saying that there is a long way to go before what we saw demoed on stage and through the App Store with the current crop of Flash-developed iPhone apps becomes a fully-fledged product. Right now, the product known as “Notus” is working just enough to create some demos for some people who are working with un-releasable code bases and command-line-esque tools. What it looks like once we get to the stage of a checkbox in Flash CS5 “Publish Settings” that says “Export for ARM devices” or “Export for iPhone” is still being worked on.

But going on from my comment leading into this section, I think this solution is powerful for Flash devs because it’s a fact of life that what you can charge for an iPhone app is much higher than what you can pay for a Flash application for other mobile devices. And it’s not hard to understand why. Despite the obvious lack of marketshare compared with other leading smartphone manufacturers, the iPhone carries with it the force of “Steve’s Amazing and Unstoppable Magic Marketing Machine”, that has turned it into the device of choice for any brand that also wants to be cool by association. Can I make a game now and distribute to 100,000,000’s of Nokia devices and even monetize that through the Ovi Store? YES! But so many brands are investing in the device that only reaches tens of millions because they want to be “on the iPhone”. So, while FP10.1 is opening doors to every other open-minded smartphone manufacturer through the Open Screen Project, getting Flash apps to run on the iPhone is filling the gap and will allow developers and businesses to take advantage of the interest that Steve’s media machine has built up amongst their clients and provide solutions for that single device as well – all without having to retool.

That all being said however, I’m yet to be convinved that Adobe’s solution will be suited to all possibilities on the iPhone – perhaps it’ll best suited towards casual games and those that make up compents of marketing campaigns, more than data-intensive, location-aware applications? This will be answered in time, but for now I’m happy that Adobe have been proactive in this area and done everything that can. The rest, as always, will be left up to Cupertino.

The Flash Mobile Community

It’s fair to say that we were pretty thin on the ground this year. Many who have attended regularly in the past were missing through various acts of economic recession, relocation, or having moved into other areas of development in an attempt to make some decent money I had a few opportunities to speak at the conference, and while it was still around the Flash Lite player, I tried to inject a lot of enthusiasim for the mobile platform to indeed make it look like a fun place to work (sans karate suit this year). Certainly the announcements made that conversation very easy to start, and even made the discussion of the real mobile platform pain-points (those outside of Flash) quite interesting for most. But what is the state of our community? How does it reflect the opportunities in mobile for Adobe product users?

I have some concerns at the moment around the movement on the Flash mobile platform, and how this is affecting the small but dedicated community that has developed over the past 4-5 years. Given the realisation of a common runtime, Flash (Lite) mobile developers have some choices, which are probably based on how they’ve approached their association with Flash on devices so far (and here we thought that the main choices would be for current Flash devs jumping onto mobile!). Many Flash Lite devs don’t know As3. Many don’t come from a pure “coding” background, or would consider themselves application developers.

Put simply, we either have to adapt, or be left behind.

There is now an influx of developers to the mobile world that speak a different language to those that many of us have been speaking for the past several years, and to be honest have the capacity to carry with them a superiority complex where they believe themselves to be further down the evolutionary chain because they build with Flex or AIR or build native iPhone apps in their spare time. Not an uncommon scenario in the software world, and I’ll point out right now that I have no-one specific in mind here – I’m not out to tear anyone down here. But there are a lot of good people that have been working on the Flash mobile platform for many years that have enormous understanding of the mobile space from points-of-view other than what platform or toolset you’re using.

There is so much to learn about the mobile space that is not directly related to a runtime or specific technology, that the existing Flash mobile community has a lot to offer and can help make this transition a smooth, educational and ultimately growing experience. The Flash platform community needs to leverage this knowledge and experience that has been earned and learned through much blood, sweat and tears, and understand that just because they can publish to FP10.1 from Flash Builder and have the SWF technically run on desktop, web and mobile, it doesn’t mean that publishing for a mobile audience is the same.

The high-level messaging and practical implementation of that messaging from Adobe needs to empower and include Flash Lite developers who are “moving up” to a more powerful and broader Flash platform than what we’ve had, as well as educate and inspire those Flash developers who are “moving across” onto a new screen and into a new market with its own set of specific rules and intricacies.

What will MAX 2010 look like?*

Who knows!? It’ll be in LA again, so we’ll all be familiar with the local restuarants and bars at least I’m expecting that a lot of water will have passed under the bridge by this time next year; many Flash apps in the App Store and more of an idea of how they are performing amongst native iPhone apps, Flash CS5 with new versions Device Central and maybe mobile Flex frameworks will have changed the tooling landscape, and some new devices will have shipped with Flash Player 10.1.

It’s safe to say though that this next year will bring the most dramatic shifts for Flash mobile developers that we have experienced. It won’t be an easy year, but it will be full of exciting new challanges and opportunities that aren’t here now. Embrace it.

To see what you missed, head over to tv.adobe.com for session videos

I’d like to specifically thank these guys for making Adobe MAX 2009 a great trip for me – Darren, Mark, Bill, Max, Chris, Spaulds, Serge, Tomas, Alan, Manu, MNR, Evan, Luca, Marco, Andrew, Scott, Mark Hamill, the MAX Speaker Team, and Things From Another World who sold me some cool Hong Kong Phooey and Captain Caveman vynil toys

(*I have no idea of timings of actual products or anything, so this is all completely speculative)