March 5, 2008

No Flash Player for iPhone?

Filed under: Flash,Flex — Steve @ 11:11 PM

Writing about web page http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/05/steve_jobs_pans_flash_on_the_iphone.html

It looks like the iPhone won’t be seeing any Adobe Flash action anytime soon if Steve Jobs’ recent words are anything to go by – I’m not expecting to see any support in the iPhone SDK announcement. Battery life and performance are valid concerns of course, but there many ARM devices available that offer FP9 already (many with lower core specs than the iPhone), and I think there are other factors at work here – one reason might be that because Flex delivers rich applications, enabling Flash Player would essentially enable ‘unsigned’ RIAs to run via the Player. I can’t imagine applications designed for the web scaling well on an iPhone anyway, but you could imagine Flex apps designed for the iPhone screen that offered a similar experience to the native UI. Shoring up Quicktime, HTML5 (when it finally gets here) and WHATWG all probably play a part too, but I think for iPhone users it’s a shame Flash isn’t there – advertising aside there are many great games, application and video sites iPhone users can’t access.

March 1, 2008

AIR vs WPF: Fight!

Filed under: Adobe,AIR,Flex — Steve @ 11:27 PM

Writing about web page http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/02/adobe-air-for-cross-windows-development.php

Gotta love corporate rivalry, especially when it’s between Adobe and Microsoft as both attempt to outgun each other in the RIA space. Up until now it’s been the odd blog post and counter blog-post between platform evangelists which is sometimes entertaining, but this recent post by Adobe’s Ted Patrick made me smile:

Developing native desktop applications for the many permutations of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system is a really difficult problem for software developers and corporate IT. In many cases applications have migrated to the web browser to simply avoid the fragmented native API’s of the operating system. Microsoft deprecates support of certain operating systems as they push new operating systems, tools, and dependencies…even Microsoft® Silverlight only supports up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 or higher for browser based applications. Adobe AIR supports the following Microsoft® Windows® operating systems today with 100% feature equivalance: Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Microsoft® Windows® XP, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Home Premium, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Business, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Ultimate, Microsoft® Windows® Vista® Enterprise.

Basically if you are thinking about building an native desktop application on Microsoft® Windows®, you might want to take a look at Adobe AIR. You will get more reach with existing operating systems and you get full Apple OSX and Linux support all for $0. I think it will come to pass that AIR really is changing the game in terms of software reach.

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