Mobile Flash For The iPhone In April

[archie]

Just got word that we may be seeing Flash demoed for the iPhone in April.

Hydra is an imaging language being developed at Adobe in conjunction with Apple's advancements in LLVM - yup, Adobe will be taking advantage of LLVM. This imaging language will be used in Flash Player 10. It will utilize LLVM for portability and speed but also to take advantage of both CPUs AND GPUs - just like the software on the iPhone does.

My local Flash User Group has Adobe coming in for the upcoming months. AIR in Feb, RIA in March and something "very hot" in April. There's only one more ActionScript acronym... errr, abbreviation to cover from Adobe and that is AIF so it is looking good for an April presentation.

 

[Rene Ritchie]

Interesting.

Any chance that will lead to a less resource-hogging version of Flash for Mac OS X as well?

I'm still of mixed minds about Flash. The iPhone does a nice job promoting standards via HTML & AJAX, whereas Flash is proprietary and often encourages bloat-dev.

Lastly, it's sad to see Apple's early lead in QuickTime technology whither so badly (only .Mac seems as equally squandered). It would have been fun to see a web where QT interactive had made Flash-like behavior a reality years ago...

 

[Dieter Bohn]

I often wonder what Quicktime would have done.

...Call me crazy, but I'm a huge fan of Silverlight. If it can run on the minor Windows Mobile hardware I've seen it run on, then it can run on the iPhone no problem. It's already on Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix.

 

[Rene Ritchie]

Crazy!

Every time I hear Alex Lindsey (sp?) mention Quicktime and interactivity, you can feel the lament.

It's amazing, with Apple's successes, what they've also squandered. They had a huge lead with Quicktime, and also their original online service (the one with the town metaphor). .Mac could have done a lot of Google/Facebook mojo (which I guess is why Jens Alfke left (http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/01/gone-indie/)

Because of past FUD and vaporware (and even current like Win7, WinMob 7) I believe nothing that I hear from Microsoft, and only half of what I see (and I say that as someone who runs, and likes, Vista daily). Silverlight is again them trying to take over a space they've historically botched and butchered (see the history of how they stole QuickTime to make various, oft-abandoned, video platforms of their own, not to not mention IE and how it killed Netscape and web standards in one foul swoop).

Still, Quicktime, Flash, and Silverlight while proprietary at least give the hope for innovation to balance it. Exciting times!

 

[mikec#IM]

yes

Quicktime, and to a much lesser extent .Mac (on the social network side), had a chance to be ubiquitous, but I think they suffered from the "control everything" model that is prevalent at Apple.

It's too bad in a way...I thought Quicktime was going to be much more.

 

[cmaier]

Apple lost its quicktime momentum back during sculley's time, imho. At the time, they made many mistakes, including allowing their huge quicktime lead to be squandered.

 

[mikec#IM]

Apple lost its quicktime momentum back during sculley's time, imho. At the time, they made many mistakes, including allowing their huge quicktime lead to be squandered.

Agreed; 1984-1994 was the Apple era...and they blew it - Scully had a lot to do with it. So did Jobs, who really was not ready to run a public company.

Interesting, it's this fiasco that led to eventually Jobs coming back - older and wiser.

Without Scully, we would not have the Apple there is today. If Gassee had sold to Apple the BeOS when Amelio wanted to, then "OS X" would've been here years earlier (and more importantly, larger Apple market share.)

It is an interesting world, no doubt.

 

[Rene Ritchie]

I'm not sure if it was the PhoneDifferent podcast (Septimus?) or something on the TWiT network, where they described the problem Apple had getting enough top-level engineers to do everything they want all at once -- that Google and Facebook were sucking the valley dry of talent.

(Certainly the explained 10.5 delay played into that theory).

Apple may simply not have the resources to do QT, .Mac, and everything else all at the same time, which is a crying shame.

(Social looks to be will rather than effort -- As per Alfke linked to above)

 

[cmaier]

Frankly, they should get out of the .mac business, and just partner with google.

As for QT, it is almost too late (or, it may already be too late).