In April 2010 Adobe released Creative Suite 5. Among all of the amazing features of this release was one feature that allows Flash Developers to export their Flash developed Apps as native iOS (.IPA) Apps from Flash Professional CS5. However, due to a change in Apple's developer agreement the future of this technology was unclear as Apple basically changed their agreement in ways that would potentially block Apps that were not created with Apple's tools. Well yesterday Apple changed this policy and I couldn't be happier for the developer community! This is great news for developers and we’re hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store. I should point out that Apple’s restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.
Adobe will continue to work with key industry partners, including Google, RIM, Nokia, Motorola and Palm/HP to enable their device users to browse the full web through Flash Player 10.1 and run standalone applications on AIR. We are excited about the great progress our partners are making as they deliver the first smartphones to market with full Flash support.
The Video I Never Got To Show
You might remember my popular series "My Top 5 Favorite Features of CS5" that I ran on YouTube and my Creative Suite Video Podcast. I recorded those videos right before the official release of CS5. However, I chose to re-record my Flash/Dreamweaver video because I felt there was no need to talk about the iOS App Packager in Flash CS5 since Apps created with this technology could have been potentially blocked from the App Store. Well now I finally get to show you the video that I intended to show from the beginning. Here's my "original" Top 5 Favorite Features of Dreamweaver and Flash CS5. I think you'll like the last feature 🙂 :
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgVmH8GMvnw
By the way, don't forget to check out Adobe's iOS Apps here.
That’s really great news for many kinds of developers for sure! Hoping that the performance of Flash developed iOS apps will be great too. I hate it when my mobile devices are not performancing instantly but instead keep me waiting. Not that Flash apps would be judged to perfomn bad, it’s just that even some native Apple developer tools developed apps do not performn all that instantly if code is not well written.
What I don’t like is Adobe and Adobe evangelists spreading this “full web” with Flash Player 10.1 on their mobile devices. What I have learned is that not that many mobile devices are having or are getting Flash Player 10.1 and even with Flash Player 10.1 you are not getting full Flash experience because of performance issues or some Flash just wont work or operations would need keyboard or mouse or both.
A lot of Flash content out there is not working EVEN THOUGH Adobe is constantly saying (like Terry here) that you can have “full web” with Flash Player 10.1 enabled mobile devices, but that just isn’t true and could be considered misinformation for consumers hoping to really have all the Flash content available on their mobile devices as Adobe says.
Here’s some footage of when Flash performances not so good: http://bit.ly/9k7zUi
You can argue that Adobe only says they are committed to “continue to work” with enabling mobile device browsing for full web (Flash enabled) with Flash Player 10.1 BUT they don’t make clear their “full web” is actually not the same as on a desktop for whatever reasons.
You make a valid point. However, this is not just a “Flash” problem. When the iPhone came out Apple stated that you would have the “full internet in your pocket” and while Mobile Safari was (and still is) groundbreaking at the time, there are still regular old (non Flash) HTML sites that don’t play well on iOS devices.
The Bottom Line is no matter what the technology is (HTML, Flash, Javascript, HTML 5, etc) there will be web designers that do strange, bad, funky things in their site designs that may work well on one platform, but not another. In many cases even if a site performs well in a mobile browser, I will still prefer to use the site’s mobile version if there’s one available because it’s OPTIMIZED for mobile devices (like my own blog).
We can even go back to my print days when I would explain to my classes that just because a page layout app lets you use any number of fonts, colors, graphics, transparency, designs, etc. doesn’t mean that if you build a “bad” document that it’s going to print. Lastly, this goes for Apps too. If you code an App badly, it will perform badly no matter what technology was used to write/compile it.
With the growing number of mobile devices coming online, site developers will have to think beyond desktop browsers and the experience will continue to get better for all of us. Let us also not forget about Apps (the subject of this post). Look at the big news sites. They have regular sites for desktops, most have mobile versions of their sites and lastly they also have “Apps” to view their content. More and more I think (my opinion, not Adobe’s) the trend is going to go towards Apps for mobile devices and a “full web” experience for those who want it on their desktops.
Terry, here is a link to one of the finest web sites I have found for high quality video and audio:
http://www.digitalconcerthall.com/
They use Flash to copy protect their live and archived concert streams, but the video and audio delivery is 1280×720 H.264 and 320 bit AAC respectively…..it’s awesome and immersive…like being there in Berlin. Check out their video that describes how they have set up their technology to do what they do.
In my experience, they have found the right place for Flash in the content mix.