By now Adobe has announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR for Android at the Mobile World Congress (funny, we just completed a web redesign for a client who is a sponsor of MWC, centered around the event, but I had no idea about Adobe’s role there). This demo of using Adobe Connect on the Droid by Kevin Hoyt says something totally contrary.

Here we have a real business case scenario that Mobile Safari can’t compete with. Sure, maybe they will make something comparable to the iChat capability of screen sharing available on iPhone one day, but here it is, Adobe Connect, running on a Droid, now.

Personally, I have always been of the opinion that Apple will allow Flash on their mobile devices when, and only when, it will make them more money. Currently they have pretty tight control (jail-breaking aside) over what can be run on their devices, and all money to be made from application development flows through Apple’s iTunes store. Would having AIR on the iPhone totally upset that? Of course. Until, and unless, Apple perceives they are losing economic ground due to competing platforms, they aren’t going to change their stance.

Overall, I think Apple’s stance is actually very healthy for the market. It has driven Adobe to work really hard to improve the full version of the Flash player (as opposed to Flash Lite), which is great for developers who don’t want to have to develop a separate code base just to support their applications in the mobile world (having to revert to ActionScript 2, which is pretty much a different language altogether, when you have been living in the AS3 world, is uninviting to say the least). By improving Flash, they have made it more viable for running on mobile devices as well as for application development. It has also given an opening to every other maker of mobile devices to step up to the plate and compete with Apple by offering what Apple doesn’t, on their devices.

I think Steve Job’s demo at the January unveiling of iPad said it all…throughout the demo, he kept hitting those blue lego boxes due to lack of Flash support, and you can hear the audience laughing out loud every time. I couldn’t resist putting together a few screen shots.

So here’s a list of some solutions for client-side PDF generation from AS3:

Back to the topic of Balsamiq – one feature I found I would have really liked would be the ability to create my own components – currently you can only use the ones that are given by Balsamiq – or even to have more control of the customization of the existing components. To their benefit, though, they do offer to make more if the use is general enough, if you just ask, and they say they update the application (which is an Adobe AIR app, btw) on a weekly basis. I think I would have also liked a freehand draw tool – I use a Wacom and would have liked the luxury of being able to write on top of the mockup as I wished. On the other hand, Balsamiq exports and saves to an XML format – so I can see the need to limit components to a pre-defined set of components. You can also re-use user defined components, which are really just Balsamiq Mockups themselves. The place to get those is Mockups to Go. I’m not sure if it was just the time I happened to be trying to access that site, but it seemed incredibly slow to me. Three of the ‘portlets’ on the right side of my wireframe are sourced from there…that definitely saved me a bit of time.

The best intro to Balsamiq I can recommend is to watch the intro video on their site, where they quickly make a mockup of iTunes. There is also an application called Napkee that lets you turn your Balsamiq Mockups into an interactive flex app – I guess that would kind of be on par with Catalyst, except you wouldn’t get the kind of round tripping you get between the CS4 suites and Catalyst. I didn’t play with Napkee but I get the impression it can’t export to the FXP format that is standard in Catalyst, Flex 4 and CS4.

Other features I would like to see implemented in Balsamiq:
-double-clicking on a group should let me edit the group. I guess that’s something I’m used to seeing from some of the Adobe apps such as Flash. A little irritating to me to find that doesn’t work here
-ugh! that purple color when I select a group – is there a way to customize the color prefs? It hurts my eyes…
-I would like the ability to zoom in and out of the mockup. There are no resolution settings, rulers, or guides. So you can imagine that a wireframe done quickly on a 30″ cinema display doesn’t always make for easy viewing on a 15″ MPB screen…or in an Adobe Connect Session, for that matter, where everyone’s got a different screen resolution
-’icon’ assets in Balsamiq can’t be resized by dragging resize handles – they can only be set to one of a few preset sizes (L, M, S, XS…). This really breaks when an icon is in a group – if you resize the group, the icon doesn’t resize with it.

Finally, I found this review of Balsamiq was also helpful. Coincidentally I reviewed iPlotz a while back here

Creating New Components in Flex 3 and Beyond with Deepa Subramaniam: I was afraid I’d be bored in this session, because I thought I had component development pretty much figured out. I was wrong. In the first half of the session, Deepa covered a lot of things I didn’t know about developing components in Flex 3. There was so much new info for me in the first half, I almost wasn’t ready to absorb the second half, which was about developing components in Flex 4. If anything, the material in this session could have been spread across two full sessions with no time wasted.

Understanding the Flash Player Security Model with Deneb Meketa: This one had lots of good info about why the Flash Player permits or restricts various security-sensitive operations.

Building High-Performance Applications with Adobe AIR with Oliver Goldman and Optimizing Adobe AIR for Code Execution, Memory, and Rendering with Sean Christmann: These were back-to-back sessions on Wednesday afternoon and they complemented each other well. The first session dealt more with the process of optimizing an app, and the second session focused more on the code-level details of speeding an app up. Both sessions also had good info for anyone who does good old Flex without AIR, too.

What’s New in Flash Player 10 with Emmy Huang: Lots of Flash Player 10 features were introduced in the conference’s general sessions, but this late Wednesday session gave us a chance to see them again, and in more detail, and ask questions.

Testing Your Flex Applications with Michael Labriola: This session gave a great overview of the different types of testing (unit vs. functional vs. integration) and the tools out there for each type.

Introduction to BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES with Christophe Conraets: This session gave a good overview and helped me clear up a few misconceptions I had about these technologies.

Of course, I only attended a small fraction of the sessions and labs available at MAX – there were so many choices for each time slot. If I had to do it over, though, these were the sessions I wouldn’t dare miss. YMMV!

Lots of thanks to everyone who participated in the alpha release.

We decided to deploy in phases…so stay tuned for lots to come still.