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

Ok, this is not a fresh news which you hear from me. Besides I really don’t aim to announce that. I want to write about the iPhone Packager which is almost the only thing that many Flash Platform Developers expect from the new Flash. I will be talking about some concerns as we all are smiling after AdobeMAX 2009, and the positive sides are more than negatives. But…

First of all, it is good to see Actionscript based applications on iPhone, and Flash will be the strongest (media) platform ever. But many Objective-C guys will not be happy with that (as it is very painful to adapt that language if you are a Flash guy) as they were the only people who managed to build applications and make money (yes, money is the main thing that we build applications for). But here is the fact, they are actually right. Because in my opinion Apples’s AppStore will be a kind of junkyard after the public release of Flash CS5 as there are lots of Flash Developers (or people tend to be) out there. There will be a lot of silly games that are decompiled and graphically changed, and uploaded to AppStore, probably not free. This example should seem the ethic part of the story, and may be it is not that suitable, but I think you understand what I mean.

Also we will see more topics on Acrionscript forums than ever about iPhone Applications (come on, we all have seen a topic which says “I have just started to learn Actionscript yesterday and I want to build a Flash game, help me -this means send me the full source code-” once), also people who don’t know Objective-C or Actionscript will try to build applications with Actionscript because the Flash community is bigger than the XCode one, and there are more sources about Flash over the internet.

I think Apple shouldn’t have behaved stubborn about a native Flash Player on iPhone with browser support, as Adobe Engineers are way smarter than they imagine. So everything would stay clean, and there would be a difference between a native iPhone application and plug-in based application. Also the experience that Flash Player would bring to iPhone would keep hands of Apple stronger than ever.

So what now? Apple should really think about what to do to keep AppStore clean. Also the release of Flash CS5 will be the funeral of Objective-C for iPhone and many Objective-C Developers will only build applications for MAC OS X again. This is the awful truth.

One last thing. It is sad to find out that Flash Platform world is concentrated on iPhone Development as Flash Platform means more than that for me as the future of Flash is going to be brighter than ever in a couple of years. Also making money from a silly game will not make a Flash Developer’s career adorable, and money doesn’t last forever.

These concerns may seem meaningless now, and the Flash on iPhone may seem as a victory. But discovery of nuclear science was a victory too, until the cold war. And to be honest I will be developing applications for iPhone with Actionscript after the release of Flash CS5, (’cause I will be developing 5x apps with Actionscript than Objective-C), and leave Objective-C as a memory. Should I uninstall XCode now?

P.S : I live in Istanbul, and I am hearing from many digital agencies and know that people at these agencies are waiting for the release in greed, and they will exhaust the iPhone AppStore to make more money than ever, as most of the iPhone Applications built in Turkey are developed by software companies, and the big slice of share are going to these software companies. God save AppStore!

P.S. 2 : A topic with 8 popular tags from my blog? Nice one…

I have just uploaded an iPhone version for my website, which appears for iPhone and iPod Touch users.

This is just a trial for an upcoming complex version, as I am going to build a new website with a nice layout and more information about me, besides this blog which will probably be online as a subdomain.

So here is a screenshot of the iPhone version, which you can view at m.alpsoy.com

The time has come. For all Flash Developers stuck in Flash Lite Capabilities, 2009 is the year for you (yes, also for me).

Adobe announced that Flash Player 10 will available with all the capabilities on Android, S60/Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile.

But still no progress for iPhone and Blackberry devices (It is known that Adobe made Flash Player 10 to work on iPhone, so the problem is not iPhone OS Capabilities or technical difficulties that Adobe face, it is Apple itself. So when Apple has the enough pressure, they will let Flash Player and AIR on iPhone.)

It is obvious that Flash Player 10 already works on announced mobile platforms, but we have to wait the brand new devices that will support Flash Player 10.

Common mobile device companies support Adobe for Flash Player 10 and most devices that will be shipped at the end of this year will have built-in Flash Players.

So the new era on Flash Platform and mobile world is beginning, so digital agencies will have to adapt the mobile platform or watch mobile companies having all the share.

Finally, I want to mention again, it is not Flash Player Lite or Flash Player Mobile, it is Flash Player 10.