Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push 181
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by
timothy
from the here-are-your-new-buttons dept.
from the here-are-your-new-buttons dept.
nerdyH writes "Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices. It promised runtimes for several popular mobile OSes, including WinMo, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Android, with future RIM/Blackberry support hinted as well. Moreover, it reiterated its commitment to the Open Screen Project, an Adobe-led industry group that, if you deconstruct its name and look at its membership roster, appears tactically focused on enabling hardware acceleration of Flash/AIR on devices, as part of a larger strategy of making the runtimes ubiquitous as UI development frameworks for essentially every computer-like device with a user interface."
First Post! (Score:0, Informative)
Woot I win!
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
I think you should perhaps go back and read the summary carefully.
You're the first one to mention open source. Unless you think the story submitter spells source in a really eccentric fashion.
Re:Life in the slow lane (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:3, Informative)
What can you do with Flash that you can't do with html5?
Play existing Flash content.
Re:More attractive for you... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:1, Informative)
There might not be much different from a capability standpoint but from a development standpoint Flash has it made. The tools for making html5 app are raw and disjoint. To make a flash app you have a flushed out and solid development environment.
Re:What's the point of Flash today (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seems like Adobe is waking up (Score:3, Informative)
Bejeweled has also undergone heavy redevelopment, as do all popcap games. They are "demoed" on the web as flash games but what you buy on Win, Mac, iPhone, Palm, Xbox, etc, is developed for the platform.
Flash has it's uses, but as a cash purchase I don't think I'll hop on board.
Re:More attractive for you... (Score:3, Informative)
Why wouldn't it take advantage of platform specific features? Flash's new "export to iPhone" function makes use of things like multitouch and the accelerometer just fine.
But that's building a game targeted at one platform, a platform with multitouch and accelerometer (which would include the G1).
The original poster was talking about writing a game once, to deploy everywhere - which means not taking full advantage of the platform specific features, because you have to rely on the lowest common denominator of things available. Furthermore, games are highly pixel specific and having to code to non-fixed sizes can result in either wasted screen real estate or the game not working as well on some platforms. Again you are having to dumb down the thing because you can't be sure of some factors.
Using this platform as a base for iPhone games has a different issue, that you cannot make use of the standard UI elements that are sometime used for scoring or configuration screens.
Re:The possibility fo forks is necessary (Score:3, Informative)
Consider C-Kermit, wu-imapd, djbdns, and daemontools. While Dan Bernstein has relented, the owners of the other packages have not, and they've basically evaporated from typical distributions, and even Dan Bernstein's djbdns and daemontools have basically fallen by the wayside.
Adobe is a horrible company to do business with (Score:3, Informative)
Let's say you're work for a small business or non-profit and you have, say, four licensed copies of Adobe's Creative Suite products. When you bought them, the current version was CS62. Several months later, you've decided there's value in providing these tools to another employee. That's right, you want to give Adobe another $500-2500, depending on the product(s) included. Sorry, Adobe is now at CS63, and they won't sell you CS62 anymore. What's more, the two versions are "sort of" compatible. You can import one version into the other, but all elements may not translate properly. Nope, if you want to add another user of their software, you have to purchase another full license and four upgrades in order to keep them all at the same version!
Did you get a lot of life out of your Photoshop installation but finally decide to upgrade? Great! Check online for eligible upgrade versions. Hooray, it's listed! But wait, when you attempt to install it, it won't accept the license key from your old version of Photoshop. It turns out Adobe's installation path for your version is to call customer service. [insert dead horse about how ridiculous it is to punish your paying customers vs. pirates by forcing them to activate] So you get Adobe on the phone. "We're sorry, in order to upgrade your version, you're going to have to uninstall the product, then reinstall it again with a special command line switch."
Personally, I will avoid Adobe products wherever there is a viable alternative. Adobe chooses to follow the Microsoft example of exploiting dominance in a sector by putting their customers through bullshit those with a choice would never put up with.
Has anyone mentioned that developing Flex Sucks? (Score:2, Informative)
Has anyone else tried to use Flash/Flex to do anything more then just a game/animation? The frameworks are at best immature. While the Flex language is "ok" (basically just ECMAScript), the libraries, tools, frameworks, and most everything else that goes with it are just abysmally bad when compared to any other modern language (Java, Obj-C, Python, C#, etc).
The Flex Builder plugin for eclipse only supports Eclipse 3.3, which means modern plugins won't work. The flex compiler itself is slow and hard to setup. Oh, and the tools only officially support Windows and OSX. The documents are horrible and only give you most simplest of use case examples, but this might be because most of the frameworks breakdown when doing even remotely off the "rail" they have defined.
Just as a quick example of something inexcusably broken, the ComboBox that comes with Flex doesn't have a set selected by value function. You can only set by index and by label... which is just crazy when you consider most ComboBoxes contain localized strings order alphabetically in that local.
As a development environments go, I think you would be hard pressed to find something worse for development than flex.
And I could go on about how bad the user interaction is by default. But you really have to see that one to believe it.
Re:they should totally use arm (Score:3, Informative)
No, it doesn't.
There are basically 4 cores that ARM Ltd. sells - the ARM9, ARM11, Cortex A8, and Cortex A9. (I'm leaving out the various little features of each, and going with general family). It's an easy mistake to make, but an ARM9 doesn't hold a candle to the Cortex A9.
The Cortex series of cores are the latest and shiniest, being that the core difference between the A8 and A9 is that the A9 supports symmetric multiprocessing. Note that many chips on the market today already have multiple ARM cores, but they are not setup for SMP - the secondary ARM core is often a coprocessor to do certain tasks. Common examples are multi-core SoCs used in cellphones - you have a powerful ARM core powering the general OS, and a lighter-weight one for the baseband side. Or an iPod, where you have one core powering the UI, and another doing the AAC/MP3 decode.
Still, I hope devices with embedded flash use something like FlashBlock. Nothing sucks worse than surfing freely then hitting some crappy flash ad that causes the whole system to virtually hang as the CPU is spent doing the ad and no CPU is left for the UI...
Re:Seems like Adobe is waking up (Score:3, Informative)
So, what you're actually saying is that most people on the net will only be able to watch these videos if they install something they have been told isn't safe?
The problem is obviously not a technical one - I would assume the only people who use IE on this site are forced to by a workplace where they don't have admin permissions - but a simple statement that things generally take a very long time to succeed if they have to fight against the looming behemoth that is Microsoft.
Re:perhaps, but if not flash, Silverlight'll do it (Score:3, Informative)
Android apps are all pretty much Java-only.
Android's development kit re-encodes the standard Java class files for the Dalvik virtual machine [wikipedia.org] which makes them smaller and faster. The standard Java VM has stack based parameter passing, but Dalvik's format recodes it to use registers for parameter passing wherever possible. It also makes constants much smaller - if you're only using numbers from 0-255, why store them in 64 bits?
As for the standard class library, Android implements a custom subset of the Java system classes that is smaller than Standard Edition but larger than Micro Edition, and doesn't either editions' frameworks for application development but its own custom one.
Dalvik is also ready to fire up a new Java VM at any moment, because it has a special VM that's pre-initialised and fork()s on demand - so you get an instant new Java VM instead of a several-seconds-later Java VM like you would on a regular computer.
So Android is really its own platform, which happens to use Java as the main way of doing things, and it does things really quickly, efficiently and safely. And most of your existing Java code will work provided you write an Android user interface for it.