Anaara - Vision to Reality » iPad

Why Adobe should develop Flash Player for Jailbroken iOS devices

Fuad Kamal — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:01:41 +0000

It seems a pretty consistent trend that Apple incorporates features developed on/for jailbroken devices into future versions of iOS. It’s almost as if they actually monitor the jailbreaking scene and say, ‘hm, folks seem to want these features enough to jailbreak their devices for it’ and voila, next thing you know, they are announcing, for example, folders on iOS. The fact is our iPad is extremely more useful with Frash running on it, even though Frash supports only a tiny fraction of the flash player functionality…mostly it seems, only stuff that is timeline based although we have seen some limited video functionality.

Imagine if Adobe officially developed and supported Flash player on iOS. Sure, it wouldn’t be on the vast majority of iOS devices or in common use as it is on the desktop browser. Then again, I think you would see a much larger segment of the population jailbreaking their devices specifically just to have the benefit of Flash player.

We saw that with Epic’s demo of Unreal Engine on iOS, Apple suddenly relaxed the third party development tool restrictions for developing on iOS. Did Epic wait for Apple to give the green light before putting serious development effort in developing Unreal apps for iOS? How about Open Plug – did they wait on Apple’s approval to move full speed ahead with developing iOS features in ELIPS Studio? I hope Adobe is at least secretly moving full speed ahead with developing a Flash player for iOS regardless of Apple’s stance on the matter…but I would hope they would make versions of such a player available to the community…

In the meanwhile I guess we have to make do with the Frash port of Flash on iOS…

review: TwelveSouth BookArc for iPad

Fuad Kamal — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:28:09 +0000

I just received and started using TwelveSouth’s stand for the iPad, BookArc. In short, it looks really cool, which is an obvious selling point. In use though, at first I was a bit dismayed, as when the iPad sits up straight in the stand, it’s at a pretty awkward angle if you’re sitting at a desktop and trying to view the screen. It does have an alternate angle, though, but it took quite a bit of figgling with the stand to figure out how to get the iPad to sit in it properly. The slot for the iPad is a very soft rubber, so it’s definitely gentle on the iPad, however when you touch the screen (as per normal interactions with the device) the iPad shakes quite a bit…just a bit annoying. I had to make sure I touched the screen gently to minimize the shake. With a bluetooth keyboard and mouse (see this hack for getting the mouse to work) though this setup seems to have quite a lot of possibilities…
Oh, and if you just recently updated to iTunes 9.2 and found out that if you want to jailbreak your iPad you’re outta luck…here’s how to downgrade iTunes to a previous version.

would the REAL iPhone killer please stand up?

Fuad Kamal — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:38:13 +0000

Certain defenders of Apple’s stance on excluding the Flash platform from Mobile Safari, such as Daring Fireball have been trying to flip the argument, saying that Flash is an outdated technology, the concept of browser plugins is outdated, and that HTML 5 has all but deprecated any need for Flash. They also argue that the only use for Flash is for playing silly games that would be better rendered as native applications, anyway (obviously they have never heard of Rich Internet Applications).

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.