Dale Rankine

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!