Adobe Open Screen Project, freedom!

Posted on May 1st, 2008 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Adobe, FlashCast.

I know it’s been….months since I last posted, but I had to write about the Open Project news.

So, the gist of the story is this:

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices…

This work includes:

* Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications

* Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player

* Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services

* Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

That last bit about removing the licensing fees is HUGE. At Amp’d, the very costly fee structure for the mobile version of the flash player was a big hindrance to our project. I had to fight pretty hard to get the higher ups to eat the cost. Adjusting that fee structure will definitely help Adobe get more attention from companies in the mobile space.

The reaction to the news has been pretty swift. ZDNet has an interesting article on the news which mentions how this Open Screen Project may affect what everyone in the Flash community is waiting to see: Flash on the iPhone. The article makes an assertion that I’ve never heard before:

He[ZDNet’s Ed Burnette] added that the performance of the Flash player speed on the Mac “sucks” when compared to Windows. “Apple might warm up to Flash, if Adobe paid a bit more attention to the Flash experience on Mac.”

That’s…interesting.

Anyways, here’s the link for Adobe’s Open Screen Project!

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Thoughts on the Flash Home demo at MAX

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

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 :)

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Another Flash Lite vs. Java article

Posted on May 14th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Adobe.

ZDNet Asia has posted the latest in a long string of Flash Lite vs. Java articles that are out there on the net. It’s a good article, but doesn’t present anything that hasn’t been stated in the dozens of other articles that bring up the debate. But I did like this little gem:

IMHO, there’s no technical reason that Java can’t do everything that Flash can do, with a little work.

Ahh, there’s the rub! Why go through that extra “little work” (which I think is a vast understatement) if you don’t have to? :)

Read “Is Flash Better than Java” at ZDNet

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A good review of Device Central CS3

Posted on April 20th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Adobe.

Alessandro over at biskero.org has a pretty good review of Device Central CS3, with pics!

Go check out the Device Central Review at Biskero.org

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Adobe releases media player…with DRM?!

Posted on April 16th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Adobe.

There’s tons of Adobe news today, most of it revolving around the release of Creative Suite 3. But in addition to that eagerly awaited release Adobe also announced that they’ll be releasing Adobe Media Player, a standalone desktop version of the Flash player with brand new features.

From Wired:

The Adobe Media Player has two elements that will appeal to content producers, but might leave consumers with some doubts. The first is a mechanism that will allow advertising to be embedded in downloaded clips in such a way that it can’t be separated from the content.

The second element is a “security” model (DRM) that will tie downloaded content to specific machines or users.

While both options are solely at the discretion of the content producer, a lack of DRM features in the Flash browser plugin is arguably one of the reasons for its success and by adding DRM to the desktop client Adobe may well be shooting itself in the foot.

Hmm, this is both good and bad. It’s good because one of the factors that kept major content producers from using Flash was the lack of DRM to help monetize the content, now that barrier is gone. But it’s bad because there is a huge potential for end-users to get annoyed by intrusive and limiting DRM rules, not to mention the potential for annoying ads which have already blemished Flash’s reputation on the web. We’ll have to see how this pans out.

Read more on the Flash Media Player at Wired Blog

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Should Adobe open source Flash Player right now?

Posted on April 13th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Adobe.

Recently one of the writers at ZDNet posted an opinion piece on whether the Flash Player should be open sourced. This article riled up a lot of people at Adobe including Ted Patrick, technical evangelist at Adobe. Ted Patrick’s response blasts the notion that Flash Player development happens in a vacuum, and gives great examples of how the Flash Player has evolved with the help of developers outside of Adobe. It’s not an open source community, but it’s certainly not a completely closed development process either.

I agree very much with Ted in that regard. My own experiences with Adobe have shown me that the Adobe developers are very open to suggestions, constructive criticism, and new ideas. They very proactively seek qualified beta and alpha users for their products and they value customer input. You don’t often hear about it because Adobe development is kept under wraps, but a lot of people outside of Adobe get early access to products to provide testing and dev help.

The issue of an open sourced flash player is particularly sensitive in the mobile arena where many companies are trying to minimize risk and cost by using open source technologies. I personally don’t buy into that logic completely, use the technology that is best for your needs. Open sourced code is great and I think that in an ideal world all platforms would be open. But today’s reality is that open source tools are a bonus, not a requisite, when it comes to picking the right platform for your business.

However, as a proponent of Open Source I can’t deny that I feel that if the Flash Player were open we would probably see much more penetration in the mobile arena, and more developer acceptance in general. But that’s not to say that Adobe hasn’t already contributed to the open source effort. As Ted says:

I do agree with Ryan that some aspects of the player should be open source, then again some aspects already are. We donated the brain of Flash Player to Mozilla as open source in the Tamarin project. The JIT ECMA4 runtime will power Javascript in FireFox and all enhancements will be shared among the OS participants.

In the future I see the Flash Player getting more and more open, but for now we’re not going to see a completely open player and I don’t think we need to.

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2 comments.

Flash Lite on iPod? Maybe…

Posted on April 12th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Adobe.

While perusing the web I stumbled upon a post at Ludicrous Software that mentioned a Wired article that talked about reviving the dying art of Album Covers with interactive media. My interest really piqued when I read this part:

A very simple demonstration that we’ve done takes the Gnarls Barkley liner notes and does a fly-through (using Adobe Flash Lite). You’re actually moving through the lyrics and artwork. It’s sort of like a theme park ride through the album. It’s really, really cool-looking on an iPod.

Now at this point I’m thinking to myself “Ipod!? Did he just say Ipod!?! Ipod and Flash Lite in the same paragraph!?!”

So I keep reading.

White also pointed to Warner’s Wamo pack, which gave Japanese cell phone users digital albums with ringtones, video, full tracks and artist interviews. Wamo packs aren’t new — they launched overseas a year ago. But White says Warner plans to produce more of these bundles. He also mentioned that while Wamo packs use Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or SMIL, for their interactive menus, Adobe’s Flash Lite would be a better candidate for “the level of sophistication people expect from Warner Music Group’s artists.”

“Yes, YES!!” I say to myself. “This is exactly what the Flash Lite community needs!”

But then I read the next line:

(Adobe confirmed that Warner’s iPod/Flash Lite demonstrations had taken place, but said that the company “has not announced any joint plans for Flash or Flash Lite to be used in next-generation digital albums.”)

Damn. :(

But all hope is not lost. With Apple’s recent announcement of 100 million iPods sold, Adobe would probably love to work with Warner to get their Flash Lite client on that platform. Apple’s been pretty protective of their platforms though. The real question is will Apple let Adobe officially play in their sandbox.

Time will tell.

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1 comment.

I can’t wait for mobile Flash Video

Posted on April 9th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Amp'd, Flash Lite, Adobe.

So as everyone probably knows by now, Flash Lite 3 will feature Flash Lite video support.

There are some pretty obvious applications of this new feature (youtube anyone?) but there is a lot more to it than that.

For me personally I am looking forward to the ability to easily overlay graphics on video. Real estate is at a premium on most mobile device screens and anything you can do to get two things to exist in the same space is a bonus. The first thing I’m going to do when Flash Video hits mobile is slap video controls and state messages (buffering, paused, playing) on top of the video so I can save some space. This is especially true for fullscreen video like we do for the Amp’d Motorola Q. The ability to bring up controls on top of the video in Flash is going to be killer.

Speaking of controls, the ability to control video should be greatly improved with FLV support. With the current device video solution in Flash Lite 2.1 you can only do so much. Want to scale your video? Good luck with that one. Want to scrub through the video? You’d better hope the seek() functionality is implemented on your target device. With FLV support we should have a whole new realm of options available, I only worry about performance. :) All indications point to the Flash Lite 3 client being quite a bit heavier than its predecessor, let’s hope that doesn’t hurt the player’s adoption rate.

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How many Flash developers are really out there?

Posted on March 29th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Adobe.

So I was reading this article on Flash Lite at RCR news and ran into this interesting line:

Perhaps most importantly, though, Flash has the benefit of a community of more than 1.3 million developers, many of them game-makers

Oh really? Hmm. I’ve seen Adobe say something like there are 2 million+ Flash developers out there, some estimates say over 3 million, but regardless of the number I wouldn’t say that “many” of them are “game-makers”. Most seem to be still doing web work for Agencies or interactive CD-ROMS, integrating Flash with PHP, doing Flash Video stuff, etc.

But I continued pondering these mysterious numbers and asked another question. How many mobile Flash developers are out there? Any guesses?

I think that as more carriers like Verizon and Docomo commit to Flash-based technologies the numbers will go up. Device Central and CS3 should also help with that, but ultimately I think that Adobe needs to convert some of those hardcore Java, BREW, and Symbian developers in order to really take over the mobile world.

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Chunghwa Telecom also gets FlashCast

Posted on March 28th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Adobe, FlashCast.

In addition to Verizon’s FlashCast announcement today, Adobe also announced that Taiwanese carrier Chunghwa Telecom will also be launching FlashCast service.

“With mobile handset penetration in Taiwan greater than 100%, it is critical to bring mobile data services to a new and unprecedented level,” said Chang-Rong Chen, vice president of Mobile Business Group at CHT. “By delivering more engaging mobile experiences through Adobe FlashCast, Chunghwa Telecom is able to differentiate its brand in the mobile marketplace, increase customer loyalty and build an ecosystem of partners to generate new revenue streams.”

Chunghwa has millions of subscribers. Factor in the previous Verizon, Telenor, and Docomo deals and I believe that FlashCast will soon have more subscribers worldwide than any other single subscription platform. :)

Oddly enough, despite all this good news, Adobe's stock price is down 2 percent. What's up with that?

Read the Adobe Press Release

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