Anaara Media LLC » iPhone

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.

takeaway from MAX: iPhone & Mobile development from Flex and Flash

Fuad Kamal — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:29:10 +0000

There were lots of news and sneaks at the Adobe MAX conference this week, and fortunately a lot of it is available in a couple places:
a) Adobe MAX Online Site
b) most of the sessions are now available on Adobe TV

Some items of very specific interest to mobile developers:

-Flash Player 10.1 was announced, which has been greatly optimized for running on mobile devices – no more flash lite, we are talking about the full flash player on mobile phones, and quite a few of the leading mobile phone manufacturers have joined the Open Screen initiative as well as announced phones that are being released with Flash Player 10.1
-Flash CS5 was announced with compiling direct to iPhone native applications. Flash CS5 will be available for public beta later this year on Adobe Labs
-several games are already on iTunes store that were developed with Flash CS5, including these free ones:

Little Red Riding Hood, a Post Apocalyptic Adventure (iTunes link), by Difference Games. This is a ‘find what’s different between the two pictures’ game.

That Roach Game (iTunes link) by Break Design

Adobe Live Cycle Workspace Mobile

-Shibuya try and buy service was announced, which, to me, seems like a big, big potential competitor to Apple’s iTunes store, and from all the complaining we’ve heard from the iPhone developer crowd, it seems a LOT more developer friendly than the iTunes model

and here’s more on the iPhone development thing from Adobe Labs

-this talk goes into depth on using the newly announced Flex mobile framework to develop mobile applications with Flex (yes, for iPhone, too):

Whew…iPhone development with Adobe Flex…something we have been asking for, dreaming about, and eagerly wishing for (all the while thinking the only way to get native apps on the iPhone would be to code in Objective C)…now it looks like it is a reality. There is a ton more that could be said on this topic, and definitely on Adobe MAX ’09 in general, but you can dive into the above links for plenty of that first hand. One last thing…the Max ’09 Flickr group

Anaara.com just went LIVE

Fuad Kamal — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:01:07 +0000

Well this has been a month of new things being implemented; Barack Hussein Obama won the presidential election, Adobe MAX SF is around the corner, and our web site is finally live! For ages now we have only had our blog on the site; our workload has been such that getting a decent site together has been beyond scope…but a little over a month ago we finally put our collective feet down and declared, enough is enough! Developed with Adobe Flex, of course…enjoy!

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.

switching between flash versions…and dashed hopes of iPhone flash player

Fuad Kamal — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:18:54 +0000

We are compiling the new Anaara web site (soon to be live) for flash 10 but one of our client projects is being compiled to flash 9. I have a demo in the morning for the client but had updated to flash player 10 when running our web site project…checking the demo I found that one of the games (its a mini universe filled with various games) was hosed. Luckily I found this post by Ryan Stewart on switching between the player versions. Pay attention to the comments…they are even more useful than the original post.

On another note, I had heard that one of the reasons why they couldn’t port the Flash player to the iPhone was that as of version 9, the performance of flash player on MacOSX was horrendous compared to on Windows. Funny, I never noticed (I switched from PC to Mac on ver. 9). I also heard that Adobe had been working on improving this issue, as a first step towards getting Flash on the iPhone. Guess those improvements aren’t part of the FP10 release. Too bad… (also still waiting for C library support in Flash…what version will that be available?). Its also a little sad that the hardware acceleration features of FP10 are Windows specific as well. Maybe the Flash Player dev team at Adobe needs to be forced into switching to developing on MacOSX…but at least it seems they are trying to improve.

Mercedes Benz USA Flex 3 Site Launched

Fuad Kamal — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:31:02 +0000

It’s an ecstatic day for us here at Anaara Media as mbusa.com went live this morning. It has been a tremendous effort for our team, the in-house team at Mercedes in New Jersey, and also Yakov Fain and Valerie Silaev over at Farata Systems in Russia. We had been working around the clock on this project since January. The presentation tier is Flex 3 using the Cairngorm framework, on the back end they have a robust CMS talking with Java, and in between it all is Adobe LiveCycle Data Services.

It was great to finally see our efforts on this project go live, but things are only ramping up here as we begin work on an iPhone application for a major telecom and we are also wrapping up on a DOD e-Learning project done in Flash with four million end users…

In short, the RIA space is still in the supernova phase.

useful iPhone links

Fuad Kamal — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:21:57 +0000

After dropping my much beloved Sony Ericsson 790a into the Arabian gulf, I took the phone apart and let it dry out for quite a few days. After reassembly, it worked great for a few days until back in the States, the bluetooth and antenna seemed to fizzle out suddenly. It appears that the battery may be leaking. Anyone in the market for a 3.2 MP Sony Cybershot camera that used to be a mobile phone? Anyway I needed another phone fast so I broke down and got an iPhone. Turns out the iPhone is actually better than expected, even for a skeptic like me. Since then I have come across a number of useful iPhone sites, so I thought I might share:

The Apple iPhone Page from TUAW

Note there are a number of customizations that can be done to the iPhone without JailBreaking it. That being said, I take no responsibility whatsoever if you should screw up your phone.