They were hinting at a big announcement, and I was secretly hoping Adobe would announce the launch of their own “Flash Tablet” at this week’s Mobile World conference in Barcelona. That would have made for lots of fun rants ahead. Too bad, it’s just AIR on Android.  TechCrunch reports optimistically:

Apple might eventually have to cave if Flash becomes a standard feature of all other smartphones.

We’ll just wait for New York to wake up and find out what John Gruber has to say about it – although he probably couldn’t give a monkeys – but it is sure to be entertaining reading if he weighs in.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a great idea and a terrible idea. If this is a backdoor for poorly designed and poorly developed Flash Apps and advertising banners to dominate our interactions, then it will do none of us any favours. I think the same about Flash CS5 export to iPhone. But if AIR is another option to distribute apps then why not? (remember, AIR has a great HTML5 rendering engine in WebKit too). This is obviously not going to be subject to the same UI standards that make the iPhone so universally usable, but the reality is we live in a plural world, and the monoculture of iPhone UI specifications cannot possibly last forever, and nor should it. These platforms and devices all need to let go a little to allow the innovators and expressive interface designers experiment a bit.

Interesting times ahead.

• A Story Before Bed
  As a developer of online and interactive media, this interests me. As the review notes: “This is how publishing is going to make a real move to the web — not with DRM and lawyers but with beautiful new ideas for how to share stories.” As a dad with a 2 year old daughter and across the globe from her grandparents, the subject of this review looks brilliant. Can’t wait to try it out.
  (tags: narrative web storytelling kids)
• HexoSearch – The World’s First Search Engine Dedicated to Actionscript
  A niche search engine for ActionScript resources. This looks like it may be useful in narrowing down those 2am wtf moments one has with Flash development. A quick test search I did found many of the same resources I eventually found through google, but the signal to noise ratio seemed better. Worthy of further testing I think.
  (tags: flash search actionscript resource)

I recently helped Trevor at Sploosh, an old friend and collaborator from Cape Town days, with the development on a new Flash website he designed for Pod, a “luxury boutique hotel” in Camps Bay, Cape Town. Took a few late nights to fit around my London remoteness, our respective dad duties and my day job, but the end result is a satisfyingly smooth mood Flash experience. read on…

In a recent email conversation with a designer/client manager friend/collaborator, I wrote the following about a process for Flash development. I think there is something in this… read on…