subvisual

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.

AIR For Android, And Adobe’s Plan To Deliver Apps Across All Mobile Devices.

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.

I’ve been reading every opinion in my feeds following the fallout of the iPad launch. I think it’s fascinating to see how quickly people are polarised. There are a lot of angry Flash developers out there, and a lot of smugness coming from the other side.

I will admit that I like developing with both ActionScript and JavaScript/HTML.  I think both the Flash Platform and the Browser show great potential for different purposes. And each has its problems when misapplied. So what’s new? As developers we face these choices with our technology every day. So Flash isn’t on the iPad or iPhone. Does it matter that much? It’s a single device platform with a visionary design. It should be applauded. But we are not creating interactivity for a monoplatform world. Innovation will mean there is something that outwits the iPhone OS. Necessity will require us to adopt new, unchartered and non-standard solutions. Interaction design and communication technology is not all about LED screens and input devices.  Principles will still be the same: make things for people not for technologies.

There is so much to say on this subject, it opens up so many juicy channels of opinion, debate and evidence. Is this about openness? Is it about innovation? Is it about standards? Is it about winners or losers? Ultimately the debate is good for the web development community, and it’s time we all had a chance to define some thinking about these issues in this landscape. The launch of the iPad may be a watershed moment for more reasons than innovative touchscreen technology and eBooks saving the publishing industry.

I think the ball is in Adobe’s court right now. They could really turn this around to their favour. Open source the Flash Platform completely? Support the development and adoption of the HTML standard by giving developers more great tools? Make Flash  better and more essential to everyday browsing? Make a FlashPad device?

Ray Valdes on Gartner probably offers the best and most balanced overview of the issues that face us as media producers for these platforms.

• Daring Fireball: Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in the Browsers Which Support It
  John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has high standards. He talks about how he prefers to embed video in his web pages, and how he ends up doing it. He refuses to use Flash, and seeks a neat embed only solution that doesn’t autoload, but loads a poster image. Here he talks about the best solution he could find using the <video> tag in HTML5 and some JavaScript, because of what he sees as a shortcoming of the defined standard.
  (tags: video webdev article html5)
• FT.com / Technology – Games guru puts his finger on chart success
  “…across from the Giants’ baseball stadium, the forces of modern games are colliding…” Joseph Menn for the FT is certainly not my favourite tech journalist.

  What I don’t understand about this article is it talks about the financial advantage social games have over console games, which may be true in terms of agile responses to gamers’ feedback. But the article is a profile of iPhone game app developer, Ngmoco. And the App Store is notorious in the way it slows down the agile process because of the approval lag.

  (tags: iphone, apps, games, business)
• FT.com / Technology – App army promises new tech revolution
  Social gaming and iPhone apps are turning big business apparently. Now there’s some news. Not sure what this article is telling us other than the FT is looking at this sector and probably like most of its readers, trying to fathom it.

  “The business models are changing so rapidly, though, that it is hard to make firm predictions.”

  (tags: games business socialmedia)

• The Font Game for the iPhone and the iPod touch
  This looks like it may be a good way to pass the hours on public transport. Someone ought to do a mashup with What The Font? and make it a social app where you can snap and upload fonts from signage for the community to identify.
  (tags: iphone typography game apps)