This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

firstly i never intended a call to open source Flash. we’ve been through that a few times and both sides have FAQ t-shirts at the ready. I really do understand your reasoning.

secondly i may not have made clear that I actually think it make senses to target specific platforms other than Flash – Adobe is a company that makes money selling tools, not Flash runtimes. Whether or not one thinks Flash is essential to a “proper” web experience, the Web definitely needs to be at the heart of the platforms Adobe builds, targets and supports. As Peter Elst, Flash guru but non employee notes – HTML5 support has to be built in.

thirdly – I think your answers acknowledge that this question can be viewed at from a couple of perspectives. Breaking Flash Platform? No. Breaking the runtime. hmmmmm… Saying to your development community- go ahead- take the red pill, i mean tick iPhone deploy, no Flash player required. That’s a big change which will create new challenges, and acknowledgment of what we might call market realities.

Flash-like is going to be interesting. And now maybe Adobe can stop worrying about the iPhone question. That has to be a good thing,

There are plenty of other challenges out there for the company. And some really solid work in back end data services to invest in, where the enterprise money is.

Duane- can you think of any other Adobe technology ares worth investing some more resources to?

I am interested in a lot of stuff but at heart i am an enterprise developer advocate – lets just say the ones that came to MAX will not have told their boss the big news was about the iPhone, or probably even mobile generally, as I laid out above.

But as an industry watcher the iPhone is a fascinating, market shaping phenomenon – thus worthy of comment. And of course worth Adobe’s investment and support.

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Also, the bytecode that runs on the iPhone is not running in the FlashPlayer so it does not impact Flash. True that it will allow developers who use flash authoring tools (CS5 timeframe) to build apps for the iPhone. I hope Apply really opens up the iPhone.

Glad to see PhoneGap get their way. Awesome community work!!!

Duane

I’m not sure if I can agree with you here, don’t see the Flash CS5 export to iPhone ARM binaries as in some way breaking the Flash Platform.

We’re not talking about having Flash content run in the browser on an iPhone (which could cause incompatibilities) but rather being able to have full fledged standalone applications.

In that sense its not different from other export options, though those are less impressive like exporting to a quicktime movie, image sequences etc.

With Adobe focusing on mobile, and cross device deployment as a major driving factor for them, something had to be done about the iPhone with Apple holding things up.

Also worth noting from the sneak peeks is the ability to use FXG (new declarative graphics format used in Flash Platform products) and render it in HTML5/Canvas.

In that way they are breaking through the confounds of Flash content deployment and no longer focusing solely on the Flash Player as a delivery mechanism.

With AIR 2.0, while they still strive for apps to be cross-platform compatible, the ability to create native executables for a specific platform (.exe, .dmg, …) and bundle native code no longer enforces this.

(Adobe pays big bucks for high-performance audio and video codecs, and we don’t have rights to give away their source code and patents, so (aside from Tamarin & frameworks & all) “completely open the Player” is still logically difficult.)

jd/adobe

Portability isn’t a problem either. I built Chroma Circuit, one of the first apps unveiled at MAX, and I used existing ActionScript from an earlier version of the game for the web, with some tweaks here and there to support new APIs and to optimize my code better. It appears to me, based on what Adobe showed at MAX this last week, that they’re trying to keep the APIs generic to avoid portability problems. For instance, I know that the new multi-touch events aren’t iPhone specific, and all these new device capabilities are exposed as flags if someone wants to build an app that could run in more than one place. In theory, you should be able to use the same code to target future versions of Flash Player and AIR.