Flash 10 on smartphones
The apparently inexorable march of Flash on its way to becoming the default interactive platform continues.
BARCELONA–A full-fledged version of the Adobe Flash player is coming soon to a whole slew of smartphones. Unfortunately, Apple’s iPhone isn’t one of them.
Adobe announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress here Monday that Flash Player 10, which is the full version of Flash that runs on PCs, will be available on smartphones running Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, Nokia S60/Symbian, and the new Palm operating systems. Devices with Flash Player 10 are expected to hit the market starting in early 2010.
via Flash 10 coming to most smartphones in 2010 | 3GSM blog – CNET Reviews.
Not sure there is any analysis here I can offer that I haven’t before: unless a competitor steps up their game faster, Flash is going to be the default renderer for the most commonly required forms of interactive graphics. And it’s going to continue getting better.
15 Responses to “Flash 10 on smartphones”
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The HTML5 canvas element combined with SVG, may be the competitor you are talking about.
By “competitor” do you mean Silverlight? 😀
I’m rather annoyed by Apple’s stranglehold on their device, which IMO is the reason they don’t want a legion of free Flash web games and apps available. At least there’s the new WebKit CSS animation stylings to give SOME interactivity to Mobile Safari.
IE has a stranglehold. It wraps around their own throat. IBM had a stranglehold. It wrapped around their own throat. Ford had a stranglehold. It wrapped around their own throat.
Maybe it feels good to wrap ones hand around ones own… throat.
Given how poorly the OS X version of Flash runs on even a quad core Mac Pro, I’d hate to see what it would look like on the iPhone/iPod Touch (which also runs a version of OS X). I suspect that part of why Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone is because Adobe has yet to prove that it won’t suck. If they do the same sloppy job with the iPhone version as they’ve done with the mainline OS X one, then people would try to target the iPhone with Flash apps and then blame the device when they run dog-slow.
Wow. Full Flash is a huge step forward and having it available on the very widely available Nokia Series 60 phones is significant. This is a big step up from “Flash Lite” – very important.
So, just to get it out of the way, I have specifically cited
– canvas
– Silverlight
– X3D
As the primary likely competitors multiple times in the past! So yes, those are who I was thinking, and no, none of them are moving fast enough IMHO.
I feel justified in my choice of career as a Flash Developer still…
Uh, been playing Flashes on my OS X machine for years, no problems.
Getting anything interesting to run with a decent frame rate in Flash projects, that’s another dilemma.
Strange that you say flash will “continue getting better”, Raph. Flash 9 and Actionscript 3 left a lot of capable developers i know in the dust. Being from a design background, i had to take two months out to research and learn it, and even now, i struggle with it. Tasks that used to take (no exaggeration) three minutes now take (again, no exaggeration) three days.
With our latest project, codenamed Fingerprints, i’ve spent about four weeks coding just the UI – buttons, dialogues, a screen/state manager. Forget about the game part. i don’t have time to program that.
With AS3 and its frame_constructed bug, Adobe has essentially rendered the timeline completely useless, which is a shame – the very reason the timeline existed in the first place was to make things easier, and to put rapid rich media development in the hands of artists, rather than eggheads.
Congrats on botching it, eggheads.
I meant “better in rendering capability” not in usability.
There’s no doubt that Flash has moved, with AS3, closer to being a programming environment than an artist’s tool. The timeline itself was the biggest “bug” in using it as a programming environment, but it was a great enabler for many people.
I’m not saying the competitors aren’t behind in terms of installs. I’m saying such defaults don’t last. King of The Hill is a percolation challenge. Sorry if that sounded like a raspberry at the platform itself.
I don’t think of X3D as a competitor to Flash. The X3D vendors aren’t competing for the same market slots although the signal that mindshare for the standard itself as a preferred interchange format is increasing. As for Silverlight, I haven’t paid much attention to recently. As a hobbyist, there aren’t enough hours in the day and as a development manager, we don’t do that kind of work. One of my developers was very excited but in the day to day mapping work, there isn’t much use for any of these. If I were ESRI, I’d be more than a little paranoid about the Google/TeleAtlas partnership.
Truth told, I’m back to music for most of the spare hours. There is a lot more local demand for soundtrack and choral work, so I just finished up the pieces for a local play and a Domine Iesu that I’ll have to find a choir that can perform.
@len – The world of browser plugins has been largely static for more than 5 years. There is a notable barrier to entry when a person is required to even “click to install” anything.
Flash has sat on top of the heap for quite a long time… any new entrant will require something significant to push it.. this is the only advantage Silverlight has courtesy of MS.
Java could be a contender at 80-odd percent market penetration, but Sun hasn’t done anything with the browser version in quite a while (at least that anyone cares about).
After that, things slip quickly, back to Adobe with Shockwave.
Flash is winning because it has won. Even a perfect, wonderful, free application with an amazing development environment would have a hard time because of the action required to “Click to Install”.
@Ryan Henson Creighton, before AS3 I’d never have dreamt of touching Flash. Flash was pariah. So it was a good strategic move in my opinion… Though, they should have ditched all the dynamic crap completely and gone for more effective code optimization. They should have botched it harder!!!
An application and a language are different things.
But as for rendering, I’ll put Bit Management up against the Adobe teams anytime. I don’t believe in the click barrier. Put anything up there worth getting, and the user will take the time to get it. Getting Flash is automatic and so are most plugins. Anyone who endures the time it takes to download porn to praise has the time on broadband.
At this point, it isn’t the platform that makes the difference. It is the artist. An artist cares that their art is not lifecycle-bound to the platform.
OTW, platforms is tools. Tools is tools.
But awareness of the foolishness of binding content to one platform only is realized. A platform or site-hosting-platform-tools-to-generate-user content without a standard import/export solution is yet another cell phone charger.
moxie mo has a report on the major mobile platforms adopting flash 10
raises the question of where this leaves the iphone