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A few words on the state of current web tech: Apple’s iPhone, the iPad, Adobe Flash, and HTML 5

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Although I’ve been in pretty deep finishing the book Flex 4 in Action, some recent conversations along with Apple’s iPad announcement this morning inspired me to blog about my take on the current state of the web as I’ve been following market trends in media consumption for a little while now.

HTML 5 vs. Flash

For some odd reason, I’m seeing more and more people putting the new HTML 5 spec up against Flash, largely due to the lack of support from Apple with regard to the iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad. As a side note, I love Apple, but did the marketing dept decide to take the year off and leave Jobs in charge of branding? WTF is an iPad? It sounds like a feminine hygiene product. Anyway, I digress.

First, its tough to compare HTML 5 to Flash. To me, one might as well try and argue that eggs taste better in the morning than spaghetti does in the evening… Eggs in the morning makes sense, right? It’s a good breakfast food. Similarly, who doesn’t like a good bowl of spaghetti once in a while for dinner? Seems to make sense… spaghetti = dinner food, as eggs = breakfast food.

To take a more pragmatic approach, this reminds me of Web Designer Magazine’s infamous “AJAX vs. FLASH” issue late in 2009. After furiously trying to find a way to pin the two technologies up against each other in a head-to-head, winner-takes-all, fight to the death; the author ultimately gave up and concluded that each technology had it’s own unique and specific purpose that filled a particular void that the other did not. They same could be said for why we have so many different programming languages and frameworks…I mean, have you seen the number of frameworks for Java alone? I’m not sure how Java devs are able to keep from going mad! And yet, every one of those frameworks has a very specific role and purpose.

Adobe Flash Platform vs. Apple Mobile Devices

The Flash Platform is the undisputed champion in RIA and is continuously running circles around the contenders, the most notable being Silverlight – which has been weak considering the number of .NET shops that have chosen Flex for their client side RIA development. Even more interestingly, the data provided by major research firms suggest that the iPhone will soon lose its dominance to Google’s Android platform, and has been reiterated by a number of different research companies now. WHAT?! ….its true, and the reason is that the public is generally dissatisfied with the full-nelson choke hold that Apple puts on its technologies. Apple lost massive market share last year in Music sales from the iTunes store – primarily to Amazon – because Apple wanted to keep the DRM choke hold on their tunes and Amazon had something else in mind. Even when Apple finally submitted to the pressure and let go of DRM, so many people (myself included) already had a bad taste in their mouth and didn’t really care to go back, and the rest are STILL unaware of the fact that Apple’s tunes are even DRM-free!

The research suggests that we can expect something similar to happen with the iPhone. A massive (and growing) number of powerful and innovative technologies are under development, all on the Flash Platform and all for different media consumption platforms (eg. cable boxes, mobile, computers, etc.) because we have the ability to seamlessly hook a variety of platform-specific client interfaces to the same network data source, which could be providing its data in near-”real time”. Google’s more “open” philosophy will eventually dominate (that is, assuming they can get a better handle on user experience), since developers ultimately decide what stays and what goes, and well, I work with 103 superstar Flex-developing iPhone owners whose patience with Apple’s un-kept promises to support Flash on the iPhone has run very thin.

Where do we go from here?

As far as HTML 5 having any impact whatsoever on the web (let alone on the Flash Platform) in the next two years… all I have to say is – don’t hold your breath. The market is actually in an unusually predictable state right now given the gradual and consistent advancements in technology, the philosophies of company leaders, and what we can derive from the trends of the last decade.

Anyway, that’s my take on things for what it’s worth.

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Posted by Dan Orlando on January 27th, 2010 :: Filed under Flash Platform News
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Adobe takes Flash to the iPhone at MAX 2009

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Monday’s keynote was interesting, but if you ask most people that were there to give you a rundown, they’ll probably only be able to tell you one thing: Flash support for the iPhone is finally here. I can confidently say that I am one of those people, but from a general perspective, I found it interesting that it was Adobe’s end-of-keynote, anticipation building, biggest announcement of the conference. The one that got the throne wasn’t the new CFBuilder for ColdFusion development with Eclipse; not the Beta 2 releases of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder/Flex 4 (which were originally supposed to go to full release this MAX and instead got delayed to 2010), or even the announcement of Flash version 10.1. Nope, the big announcement was Flash on the iPhone. Adobe even created a 4-minute video skit to play at MAX as a precursor to the announcement. In case you missed it, here’s what we saw right before finding out the big news:

I had lunch right after the keynote on Monday with several community leaders and people from Adobe. I thought it was interesting that the folks from Adobe were surprised – almost to the point of being appalled – by the fact that none of the community leaders that attended the lunch even cared about the announcement that RIM (i.e. Blackberry) had joined the Open Screen Project and now fully supported Flash. The only thing that was being discussed on the subject of mobile was Flash for the iPhone.

A number of sessions were also included in this year’s MAX session schedule that were focused entirely around developing for the iPhone. I attended one of those sessions, and considering how skeptical I was going into it, I was seriously impressed by what I saw. The graphics acceleration looked incredible, and the 3D objects moved quickly and fluidly around the screen.

The multi-touch interaction with the iPhone Flash Player were smooth even on a 2nd generation iPod

Multi-touch with the iPhone's Flash Player was impressively smooth even on a 2nd generation iPod

I was quite impressed by the full-fledged multi-touch capabilities and how smooth and responsive the demonstration Flash applications were to the various gestures. Even graphically intensive applications were impressively responsive to multi-touch and gestures, even on a 2nd-generation iPod (above).

Here’s a video of one of these sessions, entitled “Building Applications for iPhone with Flash Professional CS5″ :

Overall, considering the response and the buzz that this one announcement generated, to say that there are a lot of eager Flash developers ready to learn this new iPhone Flash SDK would be an understatement.

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Posted by Dan Orlando on October 9th, 2009 :: Filed under Flash Platform News
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