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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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. :)

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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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Chumby has a couple of Flash jobs available

Posted on May 9th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite.

Scott Janousek posted that the folks at Chumby are looking for a Flash Programmer and Flash Artist. If you’re not familiar with Chumby, they’re the company that makes cute little devices that use wireless internet to display news, photos, etc. using Flash as the UI. Their offices are in beautiful San Diego, why wouldn’t any Flash dev want to work there? :)

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Video review of the Amp’d Q with Flash Lite UI

Posted on April 30th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Amp'd, Flash Lite.

I know many of you are still looking for pics/vids of the Amp’d Q Flash Lite UI in action. Noah at Phonedog.com did a short 60 second video review of the Amp’d Q that you can see on YouTube

Also be sure to check out the cool Q microsite at ampd.com (all done in Flash, of course). The microsite includes a preview of the upcoming Q commercial! :)

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4 comments.

ShiftCast has a Flash Lite dev kit?

Posted on April 25th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite.

I was poking around in some Flash Lite related press releases and I stumbled upon a release from ShiftCast.

ShiftCast, a new mobile start-up in Philadelphia, PA has announced that they have released a mobile software application and development kit that will enable small companies and indie developers to rapidly design and deploy professional mobile applications in minutes using Macromedia Flash Lite and a few specialty tools included in their mobile design SDK. This $1300 mobile design kit includes several finished mobile application templates compatible with Windows Mobile and Nokia/Symbian S60 phones such as streaming television, rss readers and stock analytics etc. Shiftcast tech personnel (as stated on their site) even assist SDK users with putting their first mobile creations together.

Sounds interesting, but at $1300 it better be damn good! :)

I poked around a little bit more on google and couldn’t find more details on their dev kit other than a link to http://shiftradio.com and http://shiftcast.mobi. If anyone has some more info please send it my way.

You can read the full ShiftCast press release here

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1 comment.

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.

Motorola Q Amp’d Edition is available on the Amp’d Website

Posted on April 10th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Amp'd, Flash Lite.

Yes folks, the time has arrived. You can now order your Flash Lite enabled Amp’d Q directly from get.ampd.com

Have fun!

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1 comment.

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