No Flash on the iPhone?

Posted on June 26th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Uncategorized.

The whole internet seems to be all abuzz with the impending release of Apple’s iPhone. But all I really care about is if it’ll have Flash support. It seems that it won’t though, at least for launch.

One of the iPhone commercials indicated that there might be Flash support on the iPhone’s browser, vivek over at i2fly had a post on this a week ago. It would seem that the images in that commercial were faked though, since further reports indicate that there’s no flash plugin on the iPhone. At WWDC Steve Jobs himself apparently said:

Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

So the iPhone will have YouTube, but transcoded videos, not the Flash videos we’ve gotten used to seeing on the web.

And the last sad bit of news for Flash enthusiasts? I spoke with a source at Adobe and even they are doubtful that the iPhone will support Flash on launch, despite their helpful efforts to get Apple to include it.

What does it mean if perhaps the most eagerly anticipated cellphone ever doesn’t support Flash? How can Apple advertise “the real internet” on the iPhone without Flash support? The whole thing just leaves me confused.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

0 comments.

The latest PaperVision3D demo is awesome!

Posted on May 8th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Uncategorized.

The guys at PaperVision3D have posted their latest demo that was shown at Flash In the Can. It’s an awesome 3D underwater environment complete with interactive fish

“Designed to showcase the current revision of Papervision3D, it features different types of objects and materials. There are 70 fish, made of 5 plane objects in straight hierarchy, with transparent textures divided in pieces at runtime. Animation is calculated for each plane, and assigned as XZ position and rotationY. That’s another 700 triangles.”

This is a great demo of the tech and a superb example of how far Flash has come. It’s just a matter of time before we start seeing 3D flash games on consoles like the PS3 and XBOX.

Read the PaperVision 3D RC1 shark demo post

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

0 comments.

Digg.com is holding a Flash contest!

Posted on April 24th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Uncategorized.

The Digg API Visualization contest is under way!

Digg has just released its new API, which provides developers with access to the amazing data, information, and processes of the Digg site. To celebrate this milestone, we’re challenging you to come up with the most creative and dynamic Flash visualizations and applications that utilize the Digg API.

Prizes include a killer Falcon Northwest gaming PC and a free copy of Flash CS3.

Get more info at digg.com/contest

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

0 comments.

Flash is the new publishing tool of the century

Posted on April 5th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Uncategorized.

“Flash is the new publishing tool of the century”, that’s the tagline for a recently published article at UK newspaper The Guardian. The article focuses on the views of Mark Anders, Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe and the guy in charge of building the future of the Flash authoring tool.

How has Flash thrived? “It’s a combination of broadband and in the number of people being comfortable with it,” says Anders. Flash is the new publishing tool of the century, he argues: “We have let more people publish - whether it’s blogging or having a MySpace page, or uploading to YouTube.”

Bold statements, but true. :)

The article also delves into Apollo references and Flash Lite references, but I think the big thing to take away from it is that Adobe is not forgetting that an easy but powerful authoring tool is just as important as getting the player on as many computing devices as possible.

Read the interview with Adboe Senior Principal Scientist Mark Anders

0 comments.

Don’t forget, Flash runs on game consoles.

Posted on April 2nd, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Uncategorized.

There’s an important fact that I think has gotten lost in all the shuffle of all the recent news on Flash Lite and FlashCast.

There is a Flash Player available on all the major game console platforms.

- Nintendo Wii
- Playstation 3
- Playstation Portable (PSP)
- Xbox 360

So what does that really mean? Well, at the moment, not much. :)

But as Flash evolves I definitely see it becoming a more viable game development platform. We’ve already seen Flash games on the web become extremely popular, so popular that some Flash games like fl0w and Alien Hominid later graduated to full-fledged console games. Flash is already becoming a popular development platform for mobile phone games because of the quick development time and ease of portability. I think it’s just a matter of time before Flash evolves to the point where it would be a legitimate platform for a dedicated gaming machine.

Now the hardcore gamers out there will say that fl0w was pretty and all, but it didn’t have the eye popping graphics of a usual 3D console title. That’s very true, but Flash is getting to the point where it can do some pretty interesting 3D stuff. Papervision3D is one of the better Flash 3D engines available out there, and it’s got a pretty damn fun X-Wing demo too (but I would suggest using the options to turn invert mouse off) :)

Flash isn’t ready to be a serious console game platform yet, but the possibilities are there.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

0 comments.

About

Posted on March 24th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Uncategorized.

MaDFlash is a site dedicated to talking about the expanding world of Flash development on mobile phones and other devices. The site is maintained by Ramsey Isler, a Los Angeles based Flash Developer at Amp’d Mobile.

2 comments.