Mehmet Alpsoy

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

No, they are not. You could download FLEX SDK for free and use it with a bunch of non Adobe products like Eclipse, FDT, Flash Develop etc. Also there is Red5, Wowza for Media broadcast which use open standart RTMP protocol and Socket Servers such as ElectroServer, SmartFoxServer etc. for real time user interaction which are built on JAVA, Python and Actionscript.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Web experience is not only based on video, there are many web apps that run on Flash to achieve lots of specified goals. No need to list them all.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

And most of those 50,000 games are re-productions of Flash games. But we are talking about mobile web experience not just iPhone, iPad or iPod.  So how many games are there playable on iPhone’s Safari?

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Yes, Seteve Jobs is right at this point. Flash Player has had many major security issues and still have some. But most of them are fixed by Adobe and if you are an experienced Flash Platform Developer it is easy to keep your Flash App secure. But Adobe has to admit that leaving some of these security fixes to be done by the developer is not a good idea.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

It is obvious that if non H.264 videos do not run on Flash Player which runs on a mobile device, most publishers encode it for the appropriate codec (which is H.264) here to make them available.
Also these old generation encoded videos are still not available on Apple Mobile devices, so this excuse of jobs is not that realistic.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

If Steve Jobs opens Twitter home page, there is a hover tool tip box almost on every interactive object. So this excuse is also not reasonable. So even a web page based on HTML & Javascript, they have to be rewritten for touch experience

Download Latest Flash & Flex posters for your wall.

Ok, this happened at home before and I have solved.
One reason of the problem is a line located at the hosts file.
Changing line ::1 localhost to 127.0.0.1 localhost is a solution.

Another solution is :

• Open Flash Player Debug version
• Control click
• Click Debugger
• Select Other Machine
• Enter 127.0.0.1
• Click Connect

But there is another problem with MAC OS. Sometimes Flex Builder MAC OS do not open the right Flash Player application. I don’t know why or how, but it occurs.

Today it happened at office, and I have googled a lot and found the solutions located above, but none of them helped me. So I decided to find the Flash Player instance that Flex Builder calls when debugging and the rest of the solution is listed below.

• Click Debug at Flex.
• You get the warning Waiting for flash player to connect to debugger at Progress panel
• Open Activiy Monitor and find Flash Player in the list, select it and click Inspect
• Click Open File and Ports
• If everything was fine then the first line should be /Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/Players/Debug/Flash Player.app/Contents/MacOS/Flash Player

If you have the warning, absolutely it is not.

This occurs because you keep an unpackaged Flash Player Application file somewhere else for instance /Software/Adobe Flash Player, like me. And somehow MAC OS finds this file and opens it instead of the one that should be.

To solve the problem just delete the file that you keep somewhere else, or first archive it into a zip file if you want to keep for further usage before deleting. Click Debug again, and no more waiting.

Hope it helps…

Ok, this was the biggest surprise of 2009 about Flash Platform. There will be no more Flex Builder because Adobe decided to name it as Flash Builder. Detailed information and FAQ links are located below from authorized people.

Most Flex Developers like me will be disappointed with the re-branding decision. We are Flex lovers who had spent many years with Flash, and finally had a SDK and a geat tool that saved us from shiny, animated, overdrawn Flash designs. The word FLEX won’t be pronounced as it is today.

In my opinion the name change wasn’t needed (or could be more general like Flash Platform Builder) but this seems another intelligent branding strategy from Adobe as they always managed to do, like inventing the phrases Flash Platform and RIA. Also this action was forced by Flash Developers, who started to use Flex Builder as their main development tool for Actionscript, as I did. After switching to Flex Builder for Actionscript development, I started to hate Flash IDE. I think in future Flash Developers Adobe should release a tool which enables us to leave the Flash IDE (I don’t mean developing on Flex Builder, what I want to say is leaving it forever). Flash Catalyst seems a good example for the action, but I cannot stop thinking about the reaction or with a better explanation adaptation ability of designers. Because I haven’t seen a Flash DEsigner who switched completely to the new Motion Panel of CS4, because they think old Timeline Motion Tween are much easier to use as they are more familiar to it.

It is Adobe’s call, and we will get used to it. Besides the important thing is what we do.

More information:

Upcoming name change of Flex Builder to Flash Builder by Sven Claar

Flash Builder rebrand FAQ by Lee Brimelow

A much needed name change by Lee Brimelow

Last week I have attended the certificated “FLEX Builder 3 training with Sven Claar” at Medyasoft.

The training lasted 4 days, covered Flex Builder, Flex SDK, LiveCycle ES, AIR, FLEX Charting and more.

It helped me to put extra knowledge over mine and I ‘ve learned lots of tips and techniques which will hopefully make me a better Flex Developer.

Also it was nice to see that I have done things in the way they have to be, and see some which have not to be

This week I started to build two FLEX/AIR projects. One for the agency I work, and one for myself. Hope to share it with people soon.

Finally, I want to Thank Sven for his patiently given answers for my questions, and the things I’ ve learned.

Most actionscript developers as me are looking for a better editor especially since the release of Actionscript 3.0. It is a truth that Flash IDE Actions Panel isn’t sufficient for most of us. Lack of autocompletion and auto import, makes my fingers ache. A better auto-completion and suggestion would be nice. So

I decided to try some actionscript editors such as FDT (with eclipse), Flash Develop and ASDT.