Thoughts on the Flash Home demo at MAX

Posted on October 16th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Adobe, Flash Lite.

I didn’t have the chance to attend MAX 2007, but Peter Elst posted some vids of the presentations. The most interesting, for me and other Flash mobile devs, was the presentation showing off Flash Home, which you can see here :)

I had the pleasure and honor of being able to participate in some of the alpha testing of the project that eventually became Flash Home. That project offered up some great APIs for developers to use for things like calendar, call logs, and a few other phone system functions. It’s good to see Adobe making progress with it, especially since there were some people I had spoken with at a certain American OEM that considered the whole product to be “vaporware”.It’s even funnier considering the phone that was used for the demo. :)

The presenter for Flash Home at MAX, Ken Sundermeyer, is a great guy that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting on a couple of occasions. He and his team are really dedicated to the platform. It was great to see the demo actually boot up on the phone and receive and handle an incoming call. That’s a big step up.

But not all my questions about the Flash Home platform were answered. Getting an app to boot on the home screen is tricky, but not a huge deal if you’ve got some BREW coders to help you out (the demo was on a Verizon phone, so we’re talking BREW) and maybe a little help from the OEM. The harder part is handling things like:

  • Will Flash home be able to truly take over the ENTIRE phone UI? Previous flash-based home screen implementations on the LG Chocolate and Samsung SGH-D900 Living World fell short of taking over the whole user experience. I’m hoping for some cohesion and consistency with Flash Home.
  • This is just me being a big phone dev geek, but what happens behind the scenes with Flash Home when the clamshell is closed? With some devices, a whole lot of odd system things happen when that phone gets closed, and your homescreen app may not be there when you open the phone again. I know, I know, one has to assume that Adobe will cover that basic issue, but I wonder how long it’ll take and how thorough the QA will be :)
  • What about control over the external/secondary screens on clamshell devices? Can Flash Home put some stuff up there?
  • Are low level system notifications like low battery or bluetooth connections handled by Flash Home? It would suck to have the standard phone UI interrupt my pretty Flash Home screen…ever :). Once again, it’s about cohesion and consistency.

Those are some of the tough issues that I’m still wondering about for this platform (besides what it might cost). But I haven’t been in the loop on their recent progress, so they may indeed already have these bases covered.

Technical hurdles aside, the Flash Home concept seems to be coming together very well. With the integration of FlashCast and eventual Flash Video into Flash Home, I think Adobe is poised to offer THE best mobile UI platform out there.

Now if only they could do something on the iPhone :)

[tags]Adobe, Flash Home, Flash Lite, MAX 2007[/tags]

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Which US carrier will embrace Flash Lite next?

Posted on October 15th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Verizon.

Hey there folks, I’m back after a long hiatus. :)

As many of you no doubt know, Amp’d Mobile is dead. Gone. Extinct. It’s quite sad really because we were just starting to get over the growing pains and plan some really exciting, cutting edge development. In particular, Amp’d was dedicated to using Flash Lite for all the upcoming version of the Amp’d Live UI application. The interface for the Amp’d Q, short-lived though it was, was just the first of what was planned to be a string a Flash-based media applications. The Q UI was a remarkable and unique app that used Flash Lite 2.1 for the front end. Adobe was thrilled to see Flash Lite used in that manner, and let me tell you, it shook up a lot of people in the mobile UI business.

But now, with an edgy risk-taking company like Amp’d out of the picture, who’s going to push Flash Lite to its limits in the US? Verizon is doing an admirable job with getting FL on a lot of phones, but they’re not exactly what I would call…innovative. Which carrier in the USA is really going to encourage and support the kind of wildly impressive and useful apps that we see coming out of the web and AIR communities? T-Mobile? AT&T? Will it be one of the MVNOs? Boost perhaps?

Personally, I think it’s going to be a while yet before we see anybody step and lead the charge. Flash Lite 3 and its support of FLV is a huge step in the right direction, but I think it’s going to take something like Adobe’s upcoming Flash Home to really get carriers to understand the full potential of what the Flash Lite platform can do for them. Until then, they’re going to stick with what’s known to be safe and bankable.

Also, in the near future I’ll be posting a full-feature video of the Amp’d Q interface. Mainly for posterity, partly to brag, and a little bit for nostalgia. :)

[tags]Adobe, Amp’d, Flash Lite, Verizon[/tags]

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