Maybe - just maybe - Adobe will be delivering on its promise of Flash on mobile this time. If videos such as the one below are anything to go by then now would be a good time to get excited - I know I am. Whether you like Flash or not, it is an integral thread of today's web's fabric and those platforms that try to exclude it are missing out on some great experiences.
I'll be ordering my HTC Desire later this month when I'll be saying: Bye bye iPhone and walled garden OS, hello Android.
Thanks to Jens for the video.
#1 by Doug on 4/16/10 - 11:16 AM
Well looking at the above clip i can confirm it already exists in consumer devices now.
I have recently installed SkyFire browser on my Nokia N97 and been running both Flash 9 and 10 apps written in AS3 seemlessly.
Two issues i have come across are text input and actual html sizing of the flash swf.
Other than that i have run several of my apps that handle live and ondemand audio and video streams without problem, a couple even use complex visualizations that run as fast as on my pc. I can even embed apps in Facebook and play the swf from within a profile page exactly as i do from a normal pc.
On weds this week i was watching D&BTV from within my Facebook page whilst on the train home from London. Only issue was logging into the chat - because of the text entry issue.
Two demo apps you can try are:
D&BTV Live - http://live.breakbeat.co.uk
SoundCloud Stimuli - http://soundcloud.stimuli.tv
Check out Skyfire - http://www.skyfire.com/
#2 by Doug on 4/16/10 - 11:20 AM
#3 by Jodie O'Rourke on 4/16/10 - 11:52 AM
* The accuracy of the touch screen with browsing seems quite a bit worse than the iPhone, sometimes I'd be touching a part of the screen, yet a button a large distance away from where I've pressed would end up being clicked?!?
* I found that dropping the frame-rate of a video app actually caused a drop in the frame-rate of the video that's playing... what gives there? I'm hoping it's just a quirk can we can workaround, but I've not seen video playback affected by a change in the Flash FPS.
Aside from that I was thrilled to see it working as well as it was at such an early stage. I for one don't care about the iPhone when there are devices like this coming onto the market. Time will tell Apple that consumers don't want boundaries when they pay so much money for these devices.
#4 by mimmo on 4/16/10 - 12:04 PM
#5 by Brad on 4/16/10 - 10:24 PM
In the interest of full disclosure, I have been an iPhone user for a couple of years now. I would not be heartbroken if I had to make the switch to an Android powered phone. It was, for lack of better words, liberating to see an app that I wrote and tested in my computer's browser, "just work" when I opened the same webpage on my mobile phone.
#6 by Jens Loeffler on 4/17/10 - 12:11 AM
Here is a video showing the battery consumption:
http://www.flashstreamworks.com/archive.php?post_i...
It's actually very decent, and can be further improved by serving the in most cases already existing mobile version of the video (simple detection in the Flash application).