Adobe's Side of the Story: Flash, Air and Mobile Devices
I have been to a lot of roll outs and demos of software in the past twenty years or so. The visit to Mobile Portland by Adobe software evangelist Renaun Erickson was pretty much the norm for these kinds of affairs except for a subtext (or if you want to cliche ridden, an elephant in the room) of the current chilly state of relations between Apple and Adobe. It has been big headline news lately that Steve Jobs is emphatic about no Flash or Air on the IPhones or IPads. What became clear in this meeting is that there is far more to the current world of mobile devices than Apple.
I appreciate and have a lot of admiration for Apple. They bring creativity and a quality of execution to personal electronics in a game changing way, but they have also almost been brought down to their knees by what can only be called hubris, and that flaw of cosmic pride is almost always a cosmic affair, but here the god is named Jobs, not Jove.
Well, enough Olympic ponderings for now. Yet when we have another 35 years to look back on the past 35 years, I believe we will see that the Cupertino crew will be credited with being at the vanguard of revolutions -- personal computers, portable media, feature-rich communications technology. The current revolutionary cycle fountain-headed by Apple is mobile and tablet portable. To my mind, the WebVisions presentation by Mobile Portland organizer Jason Grigsby and the Mobible Portland Adobe Flash and Air demo underscore this notion further.
Probably the most overt reference to the elephant in the room was made by Erickson hen he showed a screen full of logs of the company's collaborative partners. The screen was filled with the likes of Intel, Google, Nokia and Cisco. "Pretty much everyone except one company is on board."
If one was being catty about evaluating professional meetings they could keep score on how well the media presentation was executed. Sometimes such declarations are justified, but this evening's shortcomings were kind of charming. Renaud apparently was in Portland for more than roadshow business and the Portland Incubator Experiment site did not have an Elmo or other doc cam device. So improvisation was in order. He tried to display his phone by holding it up to the presentation Macs camera, but it was nearly impossible to get the orientation and quality correct without a rearview mirror. After a while a member of the audience took charge and volunteered to hold the Mac while Erickson looked at the screen sideways.
Despite this strange looking jerry-rigged presentation method, one of Steve Jobs' major points in April's seemed to be made moot. "Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now." Erickson showed both a Kongregate Flash game and an amazing 3D animation game that Verbatim has on their website, both apparently using Flash Player 10.1 and both looked like they were running pretty darn well to me
As I said, despite some Apple sideshow noise, Erickson's presentation was pretty much a standard kind of software demo one would expect to see with a factory rep or product evangelist. There were the standard product slides illustrating the different types of products that are a part of the Flash platform. The two products that were showcased were Adobe's were Adobe Flex development environment, the new 10.1 Flash Player and latest developments in Adobe Air, which is an environment for developing browser independent applications. He touted the new Flash player's improvement in handling multiple SWF (small web files, the foundation for Flash) and Flash's new improvements in device detection. Erickson also demonstrated with a fair amount of pride work he did on a microphone application for Adobe Air that allowed one to manipulate speed and effects in playback.
The evening ended with Erickson creating a small application in Air and playing it back on a phone he had. Basically it was a couple of buttons and he utilized a library to create it. Since programming and app development is not really a part of my skill set, I found it hard to keep up with all that was happening, but the Mobile Portland crowd seemed pleased.
Here is a link from Adobe Labs that is filled with information on Adobe Airand how it is used for developing Android phone applications. And another from Adobe Labs that features a pre-release download on the latest version of Flash Player and information regarding that software.
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