Peter Elst

I did a little experiment this morning, disabling plug-ins in my browser aka “the iPad experience”.

See where things start to break down? The Apple iPad web browsing experience, not quite what you expect. Yes, there are native apps for a number of these sites (social gaming on Facebook anyone?) I’m specifically talking about the web browsing which Steve yesterday called “the best web experience you’ve ever had”.

The message here seems to be, if you have an interesting site that we don’t support create an app for it.

Just hours after the product got announced, a lot has already been said and written about the Apple iPad and I don’t particularly feel I have a lot to add except for that “one more thing”.

I’ve been working almost exclusively on Mac for about five years now and its a decision I’ve never regretted. One thing I’ve always admired is how polished the user experience is and the attention for details makes Apple products a real joy to work with.

Today, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed “It’s the best web experience you’ve ever had.” — while I would love to believe him on that, this is what we saw.

No Flash Player support. Surprising? Not really. Disappointing? Yes.

Think of Flash what you will, thats a different discussion, and I’ve shared my views in an earlier post. Flash content is an integral and important part of the web experience, there’s a full decade of SWF material out on the Internet that is essentially out of bounds for your users.

On a mobile device with limited specs we could see some reasoning behind it, although just about every other mobile manufacturer didn’t find it a problem to partner in the Open Screen Project and roll out Flash Player 10.1 support on their devices.

With the iPad we’re talking about a different device, a processor that clearly is capable of high performance rendering and a user base with different expectations when they sit down in their sofa to browse the web, play games, watch video and cartoons,…

This is your chance to really go for the best web browsing experience possible. With an iPad specific SDK reportedly coming out, work with Adobe and allow them to roll out a Flash Player for your new device. It will allow your users to opt-in to what a lot of us believe is a better experience on this ground breaking device.

To those of you that agree that Flash support is essential for a device like the iPad, I urge you to speak up as many have already done.

 

This morning I read an interesting blog post by John Dowdell highlighting some things that bothered me in the last week or so (and talked about on twitter).

We’ve been seeing some sensationalist headlines on tech blogs like “Open Source JavaScript to Replace Flash?” without seemingly any understanding of the (all be it incredibly cool) project in question.

Gordon is Javascript code that parses SWF files, loops through the frames and outputs SVG that can be played back in modern browsers without the need for the Flash Player plugin — that means it works on browsers like the one on the iPhone. A fantastic proof of concept and it works really well considering the amount of heavy lifting it needs to do.

The problem here is, this is not a Javascript based Flash runtime as it gets advertised. Its parsing an SWF file and outputting SVG graphics. If you look at the list of supported SWF tags you’ll notice these are all SWF version 1 and 2 — meaning very basic functionality. Search for some tutorials on Flash 1 or 2 if you can still find them and see what that limits you to.

Not to diminish this great project, at this time its practically only useful for very simple banners or animations without any sound or user interaction. It is also – understandably so – heavy on the CPU. Now you get the kicker with uninformed comments like this:

“While the open source Gordon is available to all, it still doesn’t solve one of Flash’s biggest problems. These SWF files still hog the CPU. One demo, a simple vector graphic of a tiger, throws my desktop browser up to around 100% CPU usage”

 
To be very clear: it is *not* running the SWF file — its parsing it, converting it using Javascript and outputting SVG. Running that same SWF file on a native Flash Player, even on a smartphone would be a fraction of that in terms of CPU usage.

Then you get people saying projects like this highlight how the Flash Player has become obsolete and its proprietary format is harming the “open web”. Somebody hasn’t been paying attention since 1998. The SWF format is open and freely available (as are many other formats and protocols used in the Flash Player), that is in fact what makes projects like Gordon possible without resorting to reverse engineering.

There is literally nothing stopping anyone from developing an open source Flash Player, Adobe’s implementation isn’t fully open source mostly due to some technologies it licenses and can’t release (video codecs and text rendering). Saying the Flash Player is a black box or its future is in jeopardy because of its proprietary format is just factually wrong.

I do hope to see more people take up the challenge and start developing code that plays back SWF content, we can only benefit from that.

 

I think many will agree that 2010 is going to be the year of mobile and devices. With Android becoming a serious contender and Apple reportedly coming out with some innovative new hardware its no surprise to me that there’s a lot of buzz around the Flash Player and whether or not Adobe will be able to deliver a good experience on mobile platforms.

Enter Flash Player 10.1 – a few years in the making, the engineers are specifically targeting this release for mobile consumption and added critical features like hardware video decoding, GPU graphic acceleration and serious CPU and memory optimizations.

Its fundamentally flawed to compare this Flash Player release with previous versions which were primarily built for use on personal computers with very different constraints in terms of CPU and memory usage. We’re finally seeing the first results of the Open Screen Project — call it a marketing effort if you must — but partners like Google, HTC, Intel, Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson and many others have no incentive to support and invest in a sub par technology.

Will it be perfect? Probably not, but we’re getting a hell of a lot closer to a full web experience on the majority of mobile devices.

Enter Flash CS5 – with Apple not playing nice with supporting a Flash Player initiative (or any other plugins for that matter) on the iPhone browser, we’ll now get the next best thing. Exporting native applications from Flash CS5 is going to be an easy way to port Flash content (including accelerometer, geolocation and other new APIs introduced for mobile) to iPhone ARM binaries for distribution on the iTunes store.

 


 
My prediction is this will be good as a way to port typical Flash content to the iPhone, not necessarily an IDE you would want to use for developing iPhone application where you need fine grained access to the underlying code. Objective-C will still be a good choice for your iPhone development, though Flash CS5 will now open up a very approachable development environment for the iPhone to Windows users.

Moving beyond just mobile phones, the Flash Platform is reaching out and the Flash Player is being used on set top boxes, digital television, on board computers on cars and boats, even user interfaces for refrigerators and microwaves.

 
What bothers me is how all sense of pragmatism seems to be lost on some bloggers. Wanting the Flash Player to die because of the unfounded believe that its not supportive of an “open web”, not SEO friendly or claiming that its been made obsolete by HTML5 (which will incidently take at least half a decade to come even close to being supported on the percentage of web users that the Flash Player can target now). A full decade of Flash content out on the web and 90% of video is not going to go away.

I am not an Adobe employee (though I am involved in their community programs), call me biased but I’m incredibly excited about what is in store for Flash support on mobile and what it promises for user experience. But more importantly I’m not ready to dismiss new technology before getting a chance to play around with it, a view I wish more people would share.

 

With just a few days left in 2009, I wanted to post some moments this year that stuck with me:

• Discussion about Fx prefix versus namespaces in Flex 4
• Flex Builder to get renamed to Flash Builder
• Fantastic first edition of Flash at the Lake in Zurich, Switzerland
• Carlos Ulloa speaks at TEDGlobal
• Summer of Flash podcast (now RIA Radio) gets started
• Joa Ebert’s jaw dropping presentation at Flash on the Beach
• Ralph Hauwert leaves the Papervision3D team
• Liz Frederik joins Adobe as part of the community program team
• Adobe acquires Omniture for $1.8 billion USD
• Omniture CEO boasting about getting Adobe to pay “a whole lot of money” at the MAX keynote
• AIR 2, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst public beta releases
• Adobe announces native iPhone application export from Flash CS5
• Flash CS5 public beta canceled

 
The annual tradition of complaining about Adobe MAX not paying speaker expenses of non-Adobe employees can now be put to rest, flight and hotel accommodation were covered and it turned out to be a fantastic event. Looking forward to heading to Los Angeles again next year for more Adobe goodness (and no doubt another trip to Universal Studios Hollywood).

Its been a difficult year for many, another 600 layoffs at Adobe this November – we’ve sadly lost the wonderful Stacy Sison of the community programs, evangelist extraordinaire Rufus Deuchler and several others.

For me personally I spent half a year teaching first year Devine students at the Technical University College of West-Flanders, was invited to speak at 5 conferences, presented 3 Flex/ActionScript workshops, did technical review on 2 books, attended a TED conference and have set up Project Cocoon Multimedia in Pondicherry, India with two good friends and fellow freelancers.

This next year I’m planning to spend both in India and back home in Belgium. I’ll be focusing on training and consultancy and building out our activities with Project Cocoon. You’ll no doubt still see me around at various conferences but plan on cutting down on my speaking engagements.

 
Wishing you all a fantastic 2010!

 

Definitely one of the biggest announcements at todays Adobe MAX keynote was the ability to compile Flash applications to native iPhone ARM binaries. Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean Flash Player runs on the iPhone or SWF files get interpreted at runtime.

I’m happy to see Adobe push things forward for mobile and not having Apple restrict innovation. One of the interesting consequences of being able to export to native iPhone code from Flash CS5 is that developers are no longer required to develop on a Mac, opening up a whole new developer ecosystem.

There are more signs Adobe is putting additional pressure on Apple, whether this will be successful or not is another issue. At least it makes it perfectly clear that Adobe is committed to supporting the iPhone as a platform, whatever it takes.

An example of this is the page iPhone users get to see when they try to install Flash Player.

Lots more interesting information coming out, especially around Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 — I’ll blog more about that as I find out.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend all four editions of Flash on the Beach since it started in 2006, three of them as a speaker and hope to get invited to do many more. Looking back I can honestly say this year was the best one yet — it had something for everyone and think John got the mix between creative and technical sessions just right.

My personal highlights of the conference were Joa Ebert’s mind-blowing display of Flash Player optimization and Craig Swann’s inspirational session that went on to cover some unexpected topics. I’d say those two were definitely the buzz of the conference and rightly so.

Flashmagazine has excellent write ups of all three days of the conference. Here are a couple of interesting things that get announced:

• Flash CS5 will have code hinting for custom classes and integration with Flash Builder as a code editor
• AIR 2.0 will allow you to bundle native code and execute it, has a new FileMonitor, VolumeMonitor and StorageVolume API for accessing USB connected drives
• Joa Ebert wrote a C# and Java to SWF compiler
• Ralph Hauwert is leaving the Papervision3D team

I’m yet to hear anyone say he was disappointed attending Flash on the Beach in these four years. I can’t wait for the fifth edition — go John go! best. conference. ever.

This last week or two we’ve seen a lot of heated debate around the future of ActionScript and the Flash Player. Its nice to see this kind of excitement and passion for the technology — yet I can’t help but feel we’re experiencing a form of ‘continental drift’ here.

I’ve seen ActionScript grow up from its humble beginnings with just a handful of frame actions to supporting prototypes, object-oriented syntactical sugar to where we now have a full fledged object-oriented programming model.

 
That is a good thing, right?

Yes and no. While I wouldn’t have dreamed it some time back when I was advocating object-oriented code as the one-stop solution to all your problems, I’m starting to feel we’re losing out on a lot that made ActionScript so appealing.

This is something Aral Balkan has been saying for the last year or two and I initially considered blasphemous. Is a focus on how to do things ‘properly’ holding us back getting things done? I believe so.

Is there anything now – excluding improvements to Flash Player performance – that could not have been done with ActionScript 1.0? Very little, though admittedly it now takes a lot less effort.

 
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Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:

• Introduction to Flash Catalyst

• What’s New in Flex 4
• Skinning Components and Apps in Flex 4
• New Productivity Features in Flash Builder 4
• New Data Features in Flash Builder 4
• Update on Adobe AIR
• Using Effects and Animation in Flex 4
• Advanced CSS in Flex 4

 
These are some really good in depth presentations that I can highly recommend you check out!
 

It seems Google did an update to how it indexes Flash content yesterday. Some of you might have already heard about the headless Flash Player aka “Ichabod” that Google and Yahoo got from Adobe — it seems it is now being put to better use.

Google has been indexing Flash content for years, basically extracting any static text that might be embedded in there. If you do a search with the filetype:swf flag you’ll see what that turns up.

Now with this new headless Flash Player, rather than trying to extract static data from the SWF file, it runs it over a command-line (non-visually) and gets back information about the contents of your Flash file, it will simulate button clicks etc. and capture the text results for indexing.

The important update now is that Google will also follow external resources, so for example XML files or other data that gets loaded in and not index it as a separate URL (as before) but in context to your Flash content. If you want to avoid your SWF files from getting crawled you can simply include them in a robots.txt directive like any other content.

 
More information here