Dale Rankine

Well, the renaming of Flex Builder to Flash Builder will make for even more interesting reading when you can use it to create native iPhone, Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile applications – which is apparently the goal of Elips’ Open-Plug framework. The idea is simple (and not that new) – write app in ActionScript using existing Adobe tools (Flex/Flash Builder) and compile to native platform code (C++, etc) for these mass-market mobile platforms. Others are doing it, but Elips seem to be wrapping it into a framework pretty nicely (although I’m sure the demo had a fair few smoke and mirrors in operation, as most demos at trades shows do).

Scott posted about this framework that was demonstrated at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, and I have to agree with him – I’m not surprised that this wasn’t given any airtime from the Adobe attendees. There’s some (fairly lengthy) marketing videos available,  but the one you want to watch has Enrique Duvos getting a demo from the Elips guys with going from Flex and AS3 code, to a native Windows Mobile application (I love the heckles from Mark D behind the camera when he asks to see the Flex components render on the device).

ELIPS from Enrique Duvos on Vimeo.

And for those that don’t want to watch the whole thing – this is not rendering on devices using the Flash player. Elips bundle their own run-time with the install packages for the applications created using their framework, which is installed (hopefully just the first time)  when you first run the app. The run-time is comparative in size to the Flash Lite player (around 500kb) and also similarly supports a sub-set of Flex components that make sense for use in mobile applications. The stated goal is to support the full AS3 language however. They are also apparently talking with manufacturers regarding pre-installing the run-time. Sounds like a familiar path, yeah?

Really wanted to see of course, as most of you would, the conversion from As3 to native iPhone in their video, but that might have required too much smoke and mirrors for the product at the time. Momentum is definitely picking up though in the tooling space for mobile application developers, with more and more effort being put into ways to reach the perceived “gold mines” of the mobile app stores in this brave new “off-deck” world we find ourselves in now.

More information in a white paper is promised here if you would like to keep up with this development, and I’ll certainly blog about anything more that comes to light.