The mobile web browser - Wheres the flash player?

As I look more and more at the industry trends, we see more and more handheld devices being developed, that's a no brainer. More and more devices, such as the android, sidekick, blackberry and iphone have some form of a web browser. Just the other day I was walking outside and I saw atleast 4 young kids with sidekicks, a blackberry and a couple with an iphone.

Now when we look at trends we see that the majority of people browse with their own personal computers, but as the future progresses more and more people will be using their mobile devices to browse the web. Of the 4 different devices I mentioned NONE have the flash player, or are capable of viewing flash in a normal browsing environment.

Now, I've been developing flash applications for over 10 years, I started with flash 4. Used flex, and all variations with design patterns, coding standards, but the one thing that is becoming more difficult is convincing executives of the company to use a flash solution when all of the above devices competently show ajax and html just fine.

I know that the flash player is going to come to the android.... but let's get real, is adobe taking a serious look at this? I mean its awesome to do flashlite for the various nokia devices and devices that can support this. But there needs to be major changes here because as the industry moves more and more mobile, ajax/html solutions are becoming a lot more appealing because these mobile devices render ajax/html without hickups.

Is there any official word on this, supporting these various devices that are mainstream such as the sidekick, blackberry, iphone and android ?

I dont mean to rehash an old subject, but there are a lot of projects in the works and if there is no flash player for these devices then it really limits the potential and thus getting the bosses to agree to a flash solution greatly decreases. After all they have the blackberries and iphones. I love flash, but really it comes down to getting flash everywhere. Flash won because of how ubiquitous it was, now... this is fading as the mobile arena becomes bigger and bigger.

Every kid on the block is getting a cell phone... Is this a major concern for adobe?

Mobile development, best way to start?

If someone were interested in developing for the android or a sidekick, what is the best way to learn. I know the iphone is objective-c, but does anyone have any advice for this? Im trying to get perspectives from different developers as the best way to learn this field, coming from an as2 - as3 - heavy oop background with some java apps built but not proficient in J2ME. Obviously each unit requires different skills, but what is the best recommended learning environment for this? This is a very general question i realize this, but it would be good to know from pro developers any feedback on this.

2009 - Actionscript 4?

Is there any kind of official word on whether there is going to be an actionscript 4? Im curious, as i develop mainly in as2.0 and some 3, but the jumps are huge. Is there just going to be actionscript 3 and small modifications to it as the player comes out?

Flex getting all of the love?

Is it me, or did Colin Moock's post stir up some feelings I have about flash 9 cs3?

I've used flash 8 for years and haven't had a single problem with it except for the slow compile times. Now, adobe comes out with the new flash 9 cs3. Not only do they take out the data services, they add in this really odd way of generating classes and re-work the entire way the objects are created on the stage. This makes the workflow not as simple and generally re-works the flow.

So, my question on flash 9 cs3 is, why?

1. Why take out the data services? So we all move to flex?

I do flex projects, don't get me wrong. I think flex is great for what it is. But the problem is in flash there is SOOO much more freedom because of assets and the timeline and animation and designs are so much easier to create.

2. Why make it more complex?

Why make every object it's own class? What if we have a whole series of nested objects and don't want to make every nested symbol a property in a file? Why not just simply let it be by itself... Keep it simple. The amount of times I've opened a project and not been able to compile it because of the "Automatically declare stage instances." really gets on my nerves.

Error messages -- Man - some of these just don't make sense. They are verbose and unclear. In flash 8 it was simple.

3. Runtime mxml?

Why not make it easy to load in runtime mxml in flash 9 cs3?
This way we can load in xml on the fly and have it generate form data? I think this would be awesome and very useful.

4. How about a set of layout controls for flash 9 cs3? Use flash for what it's good for...

Don't get me wrong. I think as3 is cool and the speed factor is cool, but I think the workflow of flash 9 cs3 is what is the most important thing. Its not the language - with fdt 1.5 I felt complete with as2.0. Never had a problem, could do anything I wanted to do. With as3 its a bit of a headache sometime because of all of these changes.

Layout XML - To embed or not to embed

I've been thinking a few things out on a dynamic layout engine written in xml. Flex mxml layouts are all precompiled. This makes it faster at loading, however it makes the layout xml not reside on disk which therefore makes it harder who do not know flex to make modifications.

We recently wrote an entire actionscript 2.0 layout engine which was an enormous amount of work, but we achieved the point of having other developers make modifications to the xml without them having to know the entire flex framework. So it was pretty cool.

But, the question is - what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing a new layout engine for flash 9 cs3. Is it worth it? My problem with the flex framework is that the movies always seem over bloated some times.

As an example, the actionscript 2.0 layout engine, the core layout code ended up being 60k, for full HBox, VBox, widget set.

What do you think?

Actionscript 2.0 hebrew implementation - Scientology.org

Well, it was a tough battle, but the new scientology.org site now has been translated in flash into hebrew. The main way we did it is through embedding fonts. If you embed fonts then the flash player rendering engine does not apply bidi and therefore you can do your own implementation.



The awesome part of this is the amount of videos that is now on this site. Im going to do a full listing, but the videos are very informative and some of them just put an awesome message on the site.

It's actually available in 15 languages now -- now that hebrew is up.

One of my favorite videos is this one:



Check it out here: http://www.scientology.org

Moving a flash animation to HD Video

I was on a project which required me to be able to take a 60 second intro that I did in flash and save it to dvd. I thought this would go smoothly now that flash 9 cs3 can export to quicktime video.

Little did I know that this was ultra lame as when cs3 records the movie to quicktime it screws up the frame rate and the .mov looked really bad. After a bunch of unsuccessful attempts at getting it right, I tried screen recorders (about 10) and couldn't find any that worked right. Adobe needs to work a little harder on this one as DV pros need to be able to have a constant framerate which can be burned to DVD, etc - otherwise it's almost impossible to recreate the flash movie.

The animation I made combines actionscript with frames, creating random actionscript particles and just recording it is very hard.

So I grabbed a program called MagicSWF and this recorded it at 22 frames per second to an AVI. It was smoothe as hell.

I then took the AVI into after effects and recomposited the quicktime video with a wav file and the AVI file and voila I had a flash animation prepared for going HD. And it looked almost as good as the original SWF. I could blow it up -- stretching and the hardware scaling worked great.

Anyway, this is a tip for anyone trying to record a flash movie to HD.