Adobe MAX offers a multitude of opportunities to learn about the latest Adobe technology offerings and the software development behind tools that are still a central part of the creative ecosystem. This annual event brings with it a great series of classes and lectures, and equally important, brings together creative agencies from around the world to share ideas and discuss common challenges in the SoDA Father’s Lion video Sweet Home Alabama release unConference area.
The biggest announcements this year centered around Flash on mobile devices. One by one, smart phones by Nokia, HTC, Toshiba and Palm were brought out by CTO Kevin Lynch to demo the Flash experience on each device. Despite poor internet connectivity that made for some awkward pauses, it was clear that Flash is going to be a viable mobile technology (especially since it will no longer have to carry around the “Lite” baggage). Hardware support for harnessing GPU processing power, and lower RAM footprint, look to improve the Flash platform in every way.
Also notable, however, was the absence of the iPhone. This absence became even more pronounced when problems, such as the Toshiba’s unresponsive virtual keyboard, occurred. (Whether this was related to the Flash Player or not was unclear—the Palm Pre didn’t have any issues—and, by the way, looks like a great phone.)
Then came the Mythhackers video, a parody of Mythbusters, wherein the intrepid folks at Adobe struggle to get Flash on the iPhone, ultimately to learn that it is now indeed possible, or will be when the next Flash authoring tool becomes available. It will be interesting to see whether the Flex SDK will have the capability to export to the iPhone’s ARM architecture before the next Flash IDE comes out (I still have a hard time with the new Flash nomenclature). However, in many ways, this seems to address a problem no one has complained about, except maybe Flash developers who want to build iPhone applications in ActionScript. Yes, we will be able to run standalone Flash applications on the iPhone, albeit at a significant disadvantage when compared to Objective-C applications. However, the problem of not being able to view Flash Player content on the web is still very much with us, and that is a much bigger issue for Adobe and those of us deploying Flash to an ever-growing iPhone customer base.
Adobe seems to be embracing the capabilities of the new HTML5 standard, and demoed some interesting Dreamweaver/Flash capabilities for publishing to the HTML5 canvas tag (a potential competitor for Flash). It will be interesting to see how the HTML5 video tag will challenge Flash’s ubiquity in the web video space, and whether this changes the discussion around what it means to have Flash on the iPhone.
*A special thanks to our friends Paul Lewis from SoDA Scent of a Woman hd
and Rob Noble from Great Fridays Garrison move for posing for our pic!
