Posts Tagged ‘AIR’

Nice demo of Flash app on Win,Mac,Lin,Android,iPhone,iPad

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Posted 05 Apr 2010 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Development, Mobile, Technology

I’ve been watching the fall out of the initial iPad release over the weekend (was it really a coincidence that Apple decided to release the Jesus-tablet over Easter, bringing a class of devices back from the dead?) and the continuing stream of commentary and demos from my friends at Adobe, showing ported Flash and AIR apps running on various devices, including Apple’s.

There’s been so much said and thrown around regarding Flash’s relevance and performance on devices recently, and it doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. And while I think most of it has been rethoric and chest-puffing, there’s some stuff starting to filter out that is beginning to put some coherent thoughts together rergarding Flash running across multiple devices using a single runtime (Flash Player 10.1)

One such piece is a video that Adobe AIR guy Christian Cantrell released (almost immediately) after the iPad launched . It demonstrates a single Flash app (a classic Reversi game) running on various devices from a common code-base (however using a short 20-line wrapper “app” to set some device paramters and load in the common game code). The devices included Windows, Mac, Linux desktops, the web browser, Motorola Droid (Android phone),  iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad.  Watch it here:

From where I sit, despite what anyone thinks about Flash at the moment, that’s pretty cool. As I’ve written before though, I think you need to temper the technical brilliance of this with the need to create the best user experience for your application, and I don’t see that as working out to deliver 100% of your app the same across every device. The biggest winner out of this would have to be games – and games that don’t require much in the way of user input changes between devices. Apart from that, other application types are likely to require more definition on each screen it runs on, and more importantly perhaps, greater consideration for the computing power of each device.

But with that in mind, it’s fun to watch the ante being raised in this ongoing battle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of developers and content publishers!

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New Adobe DevNet resources and thoughts on “write-once”

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Posted 17 Feb 2010 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Mobile, Technology

There’s been a flurry of activity on the Adobe Developer Connection site recently due to this being the silly season for corporate announcements around mobile. Take a look at these articles and whitepapers to understand where the Flash Platform has moved to and how you will need to evolve as a Flash developer to make the most of this brave new(ish) world.

Thibault Imbert from Adobe has also authored a substantial document titled “Optimizing Mobile Content for the Adobe Flash Platform” which you can download as PDF here.

It’s great to see more and more resources being developed to assist Flash developers and designers make the jump to producing work for the small screen, but I’m mindful of the common misnomer that continues to be spoken about when looking at a “write-once, deploy-everywhere” approach to Flash development. Particularly now that Adobe AIR has been announced for devices, and the reality of a technical solution for dropping a single AIR file onto multiple devices, it’s vitally important to take a step back and remember that the user experiences for these multiple devices are very different. Read More

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New Training Video – Looking to the Future: Flash Player 10.1

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Posted 16 Dec 2009 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Mobile, Training

A new video (and the last in this series!) has been added to the “Developing with Flash Lite” series – “Looking to the Future: Flash Player 10.1“.

In this final episode of the Developing with Flash Lite series, we take a look at the main points surrounding the next stage of the Flash mobile platform – Flash Player 10.1. Find out what it all means for Flash developers creating rich mobile applications from 2010 and beyond.

I say this in the video, but wanted to also call it out here – a special thanks goes to Alan Tam and Mark Doherty at Adobe for their help in putting this video series together. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve had some great feedback from the community to say that it’s been worthwhile, which of course the main reason for doing it! Thanks everyone for watching, and maybe we’ll throw together some more videos in 2010.

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My thoughts on the week that was Adobe MAX 2009

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Posted 12 Oct 2009 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Events, Mobile

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 …

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Flash Lite murmurs from FITC Mobile

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Posted 15 Sep 2009 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Events, Mobile

I was unfortunately unable to make it to the recently run FITC Moible conference in Toronto (Canada is on my MUST visit places list), but I managed to catch a lot of content through various blog posts and Twitter feeds. There was some particularly interesting demos and slides around Flash for the mobile platform, and a “well done” Scott, Thomas, Mark and other Flash presenters for the time they spent spreading the word according to Flash!

Here’s some of the news that filtered out from FITC:

  • Flash Lite 4: A new version of the Flash Lite player with AS3 support, running as a browser plugin and standalone player (for BREW apparently) on lower-end devices. With all of the opimisation work that Adobe have done on the Flash Lite player over the past couple of years (Project Tamarin, etc), it’s at a point where keeping this “lite” version of the player for limited devices is a positive move.
  • Flash Player 10: The version for more powerful devices, again running as the browser plugin. Standalone applications will run using AIR Mobile (all sometime later in 2010)
  • Device Central 3: There’s some cool new features in the next version of Adobe’s mobile testing application …
    • Geo emulation – emulating GPS location services on devices
    • Better device profile filtering in the Libraries
    • Easier process for creating your own profiles (something that just about everyone has asked about at some point!)
  • SWFPack AIR application for packaging SIS and CAB files

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I’m really looking forward to Adobe MAX in a few weeks time, and getting a chance to seeing more of this demonstrated and talked about.

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