No Boundaries

I must admit that I’m getting more and more exasperated with the Apple v Adobe war that has been raging for about a half of a year now. I’m sure that I don’t have any idea as to the direction that the Internet may be taking in the near future and I’m equally sure that no-one else does either. I think that the original scheme was that the internet would become a set of pipes which delivered expensive curated content to a few walled-gardens where those loyal to the particular hotel-keep would consume in contented oblivion while shelling out a considerable sum on a monthly basis for devices, connections, apps, emags and eshows, bumpers and all other necessary appurtenances. Beyond the walled gardens would be a virus-ridden, porn-infested, aesthetically-unappealing hell that best be left alone by any of any common sense. The internet would be third-world in character, as if crafted by the likes of Joan Didion or Somerset Maugham.

Google and it’s Android have busted this all wide open, sending Palm into the arms of HP and everybody else back to the drawing board. Long live liberation.

This would be good and nice, were it true, but it is complicated by Apple’s success in widely distributing both the iPad and the iPhone, the failure to launch, thus far, of all but a few Android devices which can hope to rival Apple’s creations, and Adobe’s failure to fully grasp the true condition that it’s condition is in.

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Here we are again. Sorry. It is a hot topic that has already warn thin to those who are less intrigued by all things digital. I just have a few thoughts about it, which I must spew, and then I will leave it be until the next thing happens. I’m tempted to promise that I will drop the subject entirely. But I cannot. Like a hardened viewer of Lost or the Celebrity Apprentice, I have no free will in the matter any longer and must only follow the “story” as it unwinds.

Since my last post on Flash and the Ipad a few things have come up. First I’ve spent a fair amount of time working in the Adobe CS5 environment and am prepared to declare it a success, if not a riotous success. The changes from CS4 to CS5 are substantial compared with those from CS3 to CS4. Second, I’ve spent several hours in the Adobe developer week online seminars which mainly pertained to all matters of Flash, Flex and, in my case PHP.  Third, and most importantly, I’ve watched the Google IO developer conference both via the two keynote addresses on YouTube and through zeitgeist monitoring of the phrase Android in the twittisphere. All of these lead me to believe that Flash is off-the-mat and in a much stronger position than I had formerly thought.

Regarding CS5, there are major improvements in every program and the new Flash Builder would be an enormous success if it weren’t for the Apple debacle and the inability of many other devices to handle the bulky files for which Flex is famous. Also the InDesign features which enable Flash handling of interactive InDesign documents work. This is a big deal because it opens the web, or at least the portion of the web which is open to Flash, to a myriad of print designers. The feature was promised in CS4 and was bungled severely. Flash Professional/Flash Builder integration is also happening. Though I’ve encountered a few serious glitches in the hand-off between programs. This is probably me just stumbling about without an appropriate reference book.

Regarding the Adobe developer week seminars, I left with a sense of the power of the Flash Professional IDE in particular for the development of mobile applications.  The oft-repeated statement that Flash is a non-starter for mobile devices because it is dependent on the mouse-over property is patently false. The opposite is, in fact, now true, where Flash is a much better platform for programing hand gestures and so forth than are other approaches. The only potential barrier to this is the possibility of Apple litigation — Apple recently patented a large number of hand gestures used on mobile devices and the Adobe methods for programatically implementing these were developed with the iPhone in mind. I left the seminars generally joyous but disappointed in two major areas: one was that a rumored feature for copying Flash files as HTML5 for pasting into Dreamweaver isn’t present.  The second is that PHP support remains poor, or at least confusing, particularly in the case of AMF. I found myself chasing the same 2.0 version of AMFPHP that didn’t exist a while ago and doesn’t appear to exist still today.

I watched the two Google keynotes with a growing sense of horror — like watching a huge, all powerful Oprah capable of devastating everything in it’s path, but, because of general benevolence, not doing so. These are, without question, the smartest guys and gals in the room. I could go into a lengthy outline of what they are working on for Android, their alternative to the Apple OS for mobile devices, but it would be better to direct the reader to both keynotes on YouTube ( the second being the more significant). The thing that I find most shocking about Google is the amount of progress that they have made in only a year, and the breadth of areas in which they have made progress.

The big take-aways, in my opinion, beyond the simple one that Google is really very scary, is that Android will become a dominant player in the mobile space, that it runs Flash extremely well, and that Flash will almost certainly be the dominant development environment for both sites and apps optimized for Android. The second Google keynote concluded with a confab of CEO’s (Google, Adobe, Intel, Logitech, Sony, BestBuy and DishTV). They collectively ridiculed Apple’s closed-garden approach and laid out plans for  Android-driven Google TV and the coming interplay between web, tv and mobile Android environments. Given Apple’s current litigation with HTC and Nokia, the battle lines in the mobile wars are now drawn: Apple versus pretty much everyone else with the exception of a Switzerland in Microsoft.

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