Adobe prepping "Creative Suite 5.5 Digital Publishing” for iOS, Android development - Page 2

Yes, I understand......You will like Adobe's app, currently named, "Mashable"....it was demoed at Adobe MAX, you can drop an swf file on it and it spits out all the animation in HTML 5...Awesome!!

No, it is the ads.

Interesting video of Mashable in Flash and Dreamweaver.:

http://mashable.com/2010/10/28/flash...nversion-tool/

Also the HTML5 CSS3 for Illustrator is on Adobe Labs as is the beta for the Digital Publishing Suite.

Somebody needs a fully functional Flash to iOS translator.
AIR on the other hand gets updated seemingly on a daily basis. I have one AIR app and it needs AIR updated nearly every time I launch it.

Adobe feature bloat is worse than Microsoft -- trying to be all things to everyone means you're right for no one.

Does AppleInsider often correct mistakes in their articles? Because it seems that a lot of other sites are picking up on this news despite it being incorrect.

Once again, from Adobe's Flash CS5 support page:

The Packager for iPhone already supports the iPad at full resolution since June 2010. It also always had multitouch support including the pinch gesture. There's already plenty of AIR for Android apps available for the Galaxy Tab which should work fine on other Android tablets.

It's nice to see so many people realize the difference between the Flash Plugin (kinda crap) and the Flash IDE (kinda awesome).

Threads on similar topics have been previously filled with so many "the Flash IDE is a good idea" ... "no it isn't, Flash kills my browser" arguments that they were pretty much impossible to read.

I really hope Adobe push ahead with the export of as many platforms as they can (including HTML5) from the Flash IDE.

Yes they do (Adobe opened the SWF specification in 2008; anyone can make a Flash Player):

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

http://www.osflv.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lightspark/

Yep...as if I'd pay $1500 for a piece of software on a $600 device... Hah!

I agree with your assessment of iTunes (still Carbon after all these years). However this thread is about Adobe.

I just wonder if HTML5 also hogs your CPU even when just displaying static images, like Flash does.

I think the problem with Flash is not that it exists or that it doesn't have any purpose (I think it does), the problem with Flash is that people (probably mainly Flash developers) insist on thinking it is a good solution for cross-platform application/game development. It's not. No matter how great the Flash authoring tools or the runtime are (which they aren't on all platforms), you will always be able to create something better than you could ever create in Flash, if you use the native toolchain and directly target specific devices and operating systems. While it may be easier or faster to use Flash and deploy the same thing to 15 different decvices, the result will not be better than it could have been using the native toolchain. So whether you love or hate Flash for applications and games largely depends on whether you are a developer, and if you are, if you have the skills and resources to use something other than Flash. You could argue that attracting more developers that can create more applications for more platforms is a good thing because users will have more to choose from. You could also argue that quality matters more than quantity, and that making mediocre or time/resource constrained developers lives easier is less important than rewarding developers who try to stand out and concentrate on delivering the best possible user experience for the device(s) they target. I develop for iOS myself, and I'm firmly in the second camp. If this means you have to restrict yourself to a single platform, so be it. If you deliver quality, it will get noticed, and either you will make enough to port to other platforms, or someone else will fill the void and create something similar for another platform. Users don't need more of the same things on more platforms, but better things on the platforms they use themselves. It's a volume/cost of development vs. quality/skill thing.

Flash use should be limited to pure animation work and artistic creations, not for applications or games, better tools are (or should become) available for that. That's my opinion at least.

I agreed with all of your points up to this last sentence.

What tool chain should I use if I am targeting a desktop browser? I write Flash applications in the medical field. The fantastic feature set of Flash makes it a natural choice for our work. I don't give a rat's ass about artistic animations.

I can't judge what you can or can not use to do your work, but like I said: better tools are (or should become) available to allow you to do the same, with better results. HTML 5 should be a good candidate if authoring tools become available that are as easy and powerful as Flash authoring tools. Creating web-based software for medical applications using established standards that are designed with interoperability in mind has many benefits over using a proprietary tool that is mainly designed to interoperate with itself and other stuff from the same vendor. We all know the mess that so many companies made from their intranet applications by building everything with ActiveX and other IE and Microsoft specific tools. Many are now slamming their heads against the wall because they are stuck with intranet applications that are hard or impossible to extend or maintain because the tools they are based on are obsolete, limiting or don't interoperate well with other tools from different vendors.

Exactly. HTML5/CSS3/JS does not interoperate well with other tools from different vendors. It is very unreliable and difficult to develop and also does not have a way to protect the code from theft or modification. For the last 10 years and for the near term future, Flash has been and will be the most ubiquitous platform we have for application development in the desktop browser environment.

Another nice feature of Flash is that once it is deployed all of the assets are encapsulated so nothing gets misplaced unlike HTML5 applications that have a lot of separate parts that need to work together from different locations such as CSS and JS and media files. Flash is very much like your iOS applications compiled into a single executable.

That's just not true, w3c standards and things like JavaScript are about as interoperable as things get, and there are zillions programs and libraries that generate/output/input/display/transform/etc them. As opposed to Flash, which almost forces you to use Adobe products, and can end up a bag of hurt if you ever want to service users on platforms without (decent) Flash support, or want to do stuff that goes outside the sandbox Adobe made for you. For content protection many solutions exist that are just as safe as Flash (ie: not so safe, anything can be hacked if you really want to), applications based on w3c standards can be packaged and encrypted just like Flash, there really isn't a lot of difference in that regard.

Right now the only problem is developer tools, HTML 5 tools are still far behind because it is still not an established standard yet, and HTML 4 development tools are all built around creating websites instead of whole applications (which is not surprising because you can't do many things with it besides using it as a markup language). In time tools will exist that can do similar things as Flash, but output to HTML 5, JavaScript, CSS, XML and other web standards. I don't see why anyone would still want to use Flash then.

Thanks for your remarks. I am familiar with both programming methods. I am also a registered Mac/iOS dev. One other thing that I didn't mention before that makes Flash attractive is that I can independently test it and send a single deliverable to my client without having to get involved with their whole website architecture, which is often a mess. No worries about sharing a CSS file with the rest of the website. If it loads, it will work as designed, without hidden 'gotchas' where some dependent file is missing. And it works in every browser, especially IE which is the default environment for most of our clients.

We have started building alternate web applications for iOS but not to replace Flash. Mainly because Flash is more advanced than any other browser based language at the present. It is a hard sell though, as the customers are not too eager to pay for the redundancy. This is one of the things that is encouraging about the Flash export to HTML5 solutions that Adobe is working on. We may eventually approach the same level of functionality with HTML but some of the other draw backs are inherent to the HTML language itself.

BTW AS3 is a lot harder to hack than earlier AS. As far as encryption of HTML/JS I would be more concerned about the longevity of any of the small independent encryption companies staying around to offer support than a large company like Adobe who has excellent support.

You don't get it because you are clueless. Flash is a buggy resource hog, not only on our computers, but by choking the internet. You're right, you have to write code to do HTML5 implementations so learn to write code and therefore good elegant solutions. If only Apple would buy this company and nuke flash along with their management team and get the company focused on redesigning their products for ease of use, and put significant energy into developing HTML5 authoring tools!

I have to disagree with you about the Flash IDE. It is HORRIBLE! It doesn't hold a candle to XCode or Visual Studio - not even close. Sure it has some nifty timeline animation capabilities but when it comes to actual coding and application development the Flash environment is complete junk. Whenever I see a semi-complex flash application I actually feel sorry for the developer who had to put up with it.

Imagine building an application with iMovie with some scripting tacked on - that's the Flash environment. Try this experiment - build a simple interactive application in Flash then build the same app using Visual Studio in Silverlight. The difference is mind blowing. HTML5 will most likely eclipse Flash, Java, and Silverlight in the coming years - I will definitely be watching what Apple and Microsoft are doing in this space.

Two good reasons and I'll add a third. Consistency. A flash app works exactly the same whether I use IE, Firefox or Chrome on Windows. It works very well on Fx on Linux. HTML5 on just the 3 browsers on Windows works very differently. It's completely inconsistent. I can't spend oodles of time trying to get it to work consistently. I honestly don't think it's going to improve in the short term. The HTTP protocol and Javascript were never intended for web applications (I used the word application to indicate a flow of web pages). It's really really difficult to try and maintain state using a stateless protocol like HTML on the client. You end up saving state on the server and you have to jump through hoops to try and ensure that the client has not changed the state mid way through a flow (eg. by opening another tab and ended up in a different part of the application). There are really only 3 technologies today that can provide true RIAs - Java, Flash/Flex & Silverlight. Javascript is a godawful bandaid.

Flash seems to be a buggy resource hog on Macs. So I suggest you vent your ire in Apple's direction. It works great on Windows and pretty well on Firefox on Linux. And I suggest doing a little homework on how heavy HTML5 and Javascript is compared to an equivalent flash application.

Why should Apple be held accountable for a program designed and written by Adobe? At least lay the blame at the proper doorstep.

I love how people like this think that Developers are the rulers of the world!

Apple has shown what really drives technology....customers. Just ask Adobe, whose desperately trying to keep Flash's left foot relevant in a right shoe world of smartphones, touch screens and tablets that's exploding...with or without Flash.

So how's that working out so far? Exactly what device is beating the iPhone BECAUSE it has Flash?!

/

I think even Flash's most ardent advocates have mostly conceded that it is not really appropriate for cell phones. Tablets may be a different story. The fact that Apple chooses not allow Flash on iOS devices is their choice. As Steve said, the desktop is like a truck and mobile is like a car. Flash does a nice job for what it is designed to do, much like a truck that is used for heavy duty work.

An iPhone has a lot of compromises anyway and is really awkward for many tasks that are simple to accomplish on a desktop. In my opinion iPhone is a poor phone and mediocre at pretty much everything else except music, due to such a small screen. I still enjoy owning one though, as it is fun to be able to access information on the go.

My one wish for Flash is that developers would restrain their use of it for illegitimate purposes like delivering ads and useless animations. For intelligent interactive projects such as applications for education or business that can take full advantage of Flash's power, there is really nothing that compares to Flash in the desktop browser environment.

I've seen Flash rich web sites working fine on Samsung Galaxy S with Android 2.2 (or was it maybe 2.3?). No Flash games and that kind of stuff, just whole site done in Flash. Animations were smooth, with good responsiveness to user's input.

I actually didn't have it. Now I do and I really appreciate you mentioning it!

yvw. It is brilliant isn't it.