But with a poorly handled announcement by Adobe regarding the Flash Player plug-in for “mobile browsers” it really caused quite a stir. Unfortunately, the intent of the communication was not clear enough for most people. Including most of us in the community. Adobe can only blame themselves for this.

What was lost in the message is that, although they will not be actively adding new features to the mobile browser Flash Player, they are continuing to support the mobile plug-in.

So what does this change? Nothing.

The Flash Player for mobile is already NOT on iOS devices. That is not changing that we know of. Flash Player 11 for mobile is already on Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry and others.

So again, what has changed? Nothing.

What made Flash Player dominate the desktop was its ubiquity. You could count on it being there. Unfortunately, that isn’t that case for mobile.

And for all the haters, this is by no means throwing in the towel or admitting defeat. Flash Player for mobile is already on 80% of mobile devices. iOS market share is still dropping. Just say’n.

But the key thing for Adobe was that without the ubiquity that Flash Player has on the desktop, it’s hard to make the same claims of rich interface consistency across platforms. Without the consistency across platforms, you might as well use HTML 5 which is supported as best as possible by all smart phone browsers. And as a tools provider, there resources are better spent where they will make the biggest impact.

You do have to take this decision with a grain of salt. HTML5 is still a specification that is being worked on for a couple of more years. Yes, YEARS before it will become a standard. See some of my points regarding HTML5. We, developers, will have to live through browser compatibility hell again as we did for a decade with JavaScript. yeah.    Since HTML 5 still needs work to get to its promise (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5), it makes sense for Adobe to put more resources into HTML 5.

Flash Player is not going anywhere, for now. Flash Player for the browser and AIR for Mobile and Desktop at still the easiest and most consistent way to put consistent cross platform engaging experiences in front of users.

As an aside, I still think that it is a huge mistake by Apple to not allow users to install Flash Player on their tablet. I can care less about phone browsers, they are simply too small. But I am always using the “full site” option when browsing on my tablet. And because I’m on a Galaxy Tab, I get to enjoy all sites as they were meant to be. I do give Apple credit for their impact on the mobile phone world, but I don’t think it will carryover as well on tablets. The competition in the space has already caught and passed them from a quality product perspective. They may have the tablet market share currently, but just like the PC and the phone, they will eventually be swallowed up by the flood of less expensive options that are as good as or even better.

The core of Flash Player is the Tamarin Virtual Machine, which is an open source project under Mozilla. While the SWF file format is not fully open, it is documented by the community on osflash.org. Additionally, there are numerous open source products that read and write SWF files.

The Flash Player’s product direction has traditionally been heavily influenced by the community and their needs. The core language for Flash Player is an implementation of ECMAScript 262, which is the same specification for JavaScript. Flex also uses CSS for styling of components/applications.

There are also several libraries included with Flash Player that are licensed through other parties (i.e. h.264) that are not open. Thus, preventing Adobe from making the whole thing open source if they wanted to. Not sure that they would, but this definitely kills the idea.

Come save us HTML5 in 2022 AD

HTML5 has been in the works since 2004 and is still in “draft”. Its primary intent is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-ins (like Flash Player and Silverlight).

I can definitely see the benefit of not relying on a plug-in for multiple reasons. There is a concern if users will have the plug-in, but the bigger concern is vendor dependence. I think Adobe has the install base issue covered fairly well, yet it should still be a concern for locked down environments. To the bigger concern, I’d say that we already depend on companies like Apple and Microsoft quite heavily and that Adobe is far from a fledgling start-up that would be considered very risky. Naturally, I understand to the concern and will help my clients choose the appropriate technology.

The reality is that HTML5 is not coming anytime soon

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, claims that “the world is moving to HTML5″. How is that going to happen Steve when Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later?[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5]

Should we hold off development for a few years while Google (Ian works at Google) finishes the specifications?

Finally, how many different implementations of HTML5 do you think there will be?. There will most likely still be cross browser compatibility issues to deal with.

Flash Player and Silverlight

I’ll sticking with vendor dependence that I can use now over incomplete technology with potential compatibility nightmares any day!

First, yes, screen readers can read Flex applications. And yes, its fairly easy. But, I’ll discuss how in a future post.

But, if you’d rather send people to your old HTML version of your site when using a read, there is good news. Flash Player has the ability to detect if a screen reader is running on the client machine, even if JavaScript is disabled and/or the Flex application is not compiled as an “accessible swf”. This is possible with the Accessibility class.

It is important to note that if the Flex application is compiled as an “accessible swf”, the screen reader will also be able to read content in the swf. If not, the screen reader only reads the words “flash movie start” whenever you interact with it. Talk about a usability buzz kill.

So, here is the code to see if a screen reader is currently running (not just installed) and then adds a LinkButton that calls a navigateToURL on click.

private function init():void
{
  // this is the only thing you need to do
  if( Accessibility.active )
  {
    var linkButton:LinkButton = new LinkButton();
    linkButton.label = "Click here to go to HTML site";
    linkButton.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, goToSite );
    this.addChildAt( linkButton, 0 );
  }
}

private function goToSite( eventObj:MouseEvent ):void
{
  navigateToURL( new URLRequest("<screen reader friendly site>") );
}

There are more properties available on the Accessibility class, but this is all you need to give accessibility an option.

But no matter how many applications or who I’m talking to, I always stress the importance of securing proprietary information. By securing, I mean don’t put it in your application. Unless your are encrypting your application and decrypting at runtime, you are subject to a decompiler exposing your secrets.

There are Flash decompilers that will take any SWF and give you the source:
Trillix Flash Decompiler is one of the best commercial tools I’ve found.
I’ve even seen guys decompile, make changes and then recompile a Flex app. This is scary! Say goodbye to licensing software in Flash.

But HP just released a tool that has caught my eye as well. (Note: I have not tested this tool) It claims to decompile and test for security weaknesses. It’s called SWFScan and it’s a free Windows based tool from HP.

If security in a Flex or Flash based application is a concern for you, you must look at these tools. If security is not your concern, look anyway.

“Adobe’s Flash Platform is a powerful tool set that spans digital disciplines such as application development, media production, and eLearning. Join us at Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp on June 22, 2009 in Denver for in-depth presentations and unique hands on activities for everyone from newbies to gurus.”

It sounds like a day well spent. See you there.

Once again, Adobe is reaching out to the community by giving away free licenses to their RIA development tools. Free Flex Builder licenses to academia and to the unemployed. And now, free ColdFusion licenses to academia.

So, if you had your choice of using the best RIA development platform (for free) or any of the up-and-coming tools, which would you choose?

Check my post on On3 for information about free Adobe licenses.

I was working on a JavaScript-based AIR application (some refer to this as an AJAX-based application) recently where they wanted to use AMF, but didn’t want to hide a SWF in it to facilitate the AMF communication. Since there are other Flash Remoting gateways available, like openAMF and AMFPHP, it would be great if I could just use a JavaScript library to do the communication with those gateways.

If you look at examples in Flash that do this type of connection, you’ll notice that they use a NetConnection class. Guess what?! That class is also available in the JavaScript API for AIR. Yes, its that simple!

So with a simple refactoring of the same code from Flash, I was able to get my JavaScript-based AIR application to communicate with a Flash Remoting gateway. This example assumes you have installed a Flash Remoting gateway somewhere, that you replace [my_flash_remoting_gateway] with the gateway root and you’ve created a class with a method that you can invoke.

<html>
<head>
<title>JavaScript-based Flash Remoting</title>
<link href="sample.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="lib/air/AIRAliases.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="lib/air/AIRSourceViewer.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function doAMF()
{
var netConnection = new air.NetConnection();
netConnection.connect("http://[my_flash_remoting_gateway]");
var responder = new air.Responder(onComplete, onFail);
netConnection.call("HelloWorld", responder);
}
function onComplete(results)
{
alert( results.length );
}

function onFail(results)
{
alert(results)
}

</script>
</head>

<body>
<h3>Get data over AMFPHP</h3>

<ul>
<li>Has access to AIR APIs:
<input type="button" onclick="doAMF()" value="Make AMF call"/>
</li>
</ul>

</body>

</html>

Here is an example class in PHP:

<?php
class HelloWorld
{
function HelloWorld()
{
$this->methodTable = array
(
"say" => array
(
"access" => "remote",
"description" => "Pings back a message"
)
);
}
}
?>

There is also a tutorial by Lee Brimelow, Adobe Platform Evangelist, that covers how to get started using Flash Player 10 (code name Astro).

By default, Flash can save locally persistent SharedObjects of up to 100K in size. When you try to save a larger set of data, Flash Player displays the Local Storage dialog box, which lets the user allow or deny local storage for the domain that is requesting access.”