Today will go down in history as “The beginning of the end“. Adobe undermined their own platform by killing the very technology that (only months before) they claimed made “the full web” possible on a mobile device. That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in their future promises.

To be honest I never really toyed around with Flash on mobile for the very simple reason: I’m an iOS user. Yup, no Flash Player for me on my iDevice. And you know what: The only thing I realized was how many people/companies used Flash where HTML/JS was a valid alternative. This kind of pushed me away from the Flash platform, I guess.
I went to focus my energy on Javascript, Jquery, NodeJS and Objective-C. However I did still keep up with the evolution of the Flash Platform as it was the very reason I got into this industry. I was just waiting for the next big thing in Flash which would make me go back.

What Adobe did today seems to me like proof that they will tell us anything to make us stick around. They now say they’ll refocus their energy on Flash/AIR on desktop and AIR on mobile devices… Sure, but they also told us they’d perfect the mobile Flash Player and bring the full web to the mobile browser. Who’s to say they don’t drop the Flash Platform altogether within the next 12-24 months?

To me, the future of the Flash Platform has become very uncertain. And it seems I’m not alone. That’s why I won’t be spending a lot of my spare time on it anymore.

Thank you Flash. You brought me into this industry, you enabled me to do things I didn’t even know I wanted to do, you connected me with many people and you gave me opportunities in life I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
You were a good friend to me but times change and we all have to move on.
Thanks for the great memories.
Godspeed.

I’m very aware I might be forgetting some tools. However the ones listed here are the only ones I actually used at least once. Feel free to add other tools, the way they work and your findings about it in the comments.

Note: If anything, I consider myself an iPhone developer, not so much an Android developer, let alone a mobile developer. My findings and views on things are based on my preference towards iOS development. I’m not bashing the Android Platform. I just know more about the iOS platform. I just wanted to state that for the record before you read on.

Phonegap

I’ll kick off with Phonegap. Why do I think this is the most simple one? Well, it actually doens’t require the knowledge of anything new to create your first app. If you have ever built a mobile web app, you can create a Phonegap app.

Phonegap is essentially a web app -the same one you built the other day at work- embedded in a native wrapper. You build the app using HTML/CSS and Javascript. You can use plain old Javascript or make your life easier by using jQuery, Prototype, Sencha Touch, MooTools, etc to handle the interaction. Just like any other mobile website.

What the enduser sees is in effect a web app running inside a webview. So what’s the native wrapper for? Well it provides Javascript API’s to give access to the contacts, filesystem, camera, microphone, GPS, etc. Phonegap provides the bridge to the API’s normal web apps can’t get access to. It’s that simple.

Personally I don’t see the appeal; most definitely because the browser performance doesn’t come close to native app component performance. Think about scrolling through a list of 1000 entries.
I know a lot of people babble on about how you can ‘just turn your webapp into a native app‘. But what’s the point!? That native app doesn’t provide anything the web app doesn’t and it’s an app. You could as well make it a full fledged web app which users can just add to the homescreen.

URL: Phonegap

Flash / Adobe AIR

Yea, you didn’t see that one coming, did ya? Yes, Flash can create iOS apps too. And of course you can create Android apps too (and you can even create Flash websites for Android!). Why does Flash come second in this list? Well anyone who can create a Flash app could create a iOS app using Flash. The eagle-eyed viewer has already noticed how I mentioned could in that last sentence. I have tried to create several apps (that actually do something) and every time I ended up realizing the same one thing: It performs like shit.

For those of you who don’t know: I spent the past 7 years being an active Actionscript developer. I’m not what one might call a Flash-hater. I’ve tried to create simple games and apps for iOS using Flash. A game using the accelerometer (which crashed when too much accelerometer data came in simultaneously. Limiting that datastream kind of went in the way of the actual game) and an app using the microphone (processing microphone input on an iPad 1 was so hard that any UI interaction would make the audio playback stumble). Both of them ended up staying ideas until I finally get my head around native iOS development.

Flash can compile native iOS apps. Those apps are not interpreted at runtime. Adobe says they’re actually generating the native binary that you would get if you built it using Xcode. Seeing how the performance of several natively-built games is perfect and Flash-generated apps (not even games) perform horribly, I’d say Adobe has quite some work before making Flash a viable tool for (at least) iOS development.

And I know what you’re thinking right now: “Dude, what about that Flash game that made #1 in the app store, not too long ago?“. Yea… Let’s talk about that… Why didn’t it run on my 1st generation iPad? Did the app need a camera? No. Then what else does the iPad 2 have, that iPad 1 doesn’t? Yes: CPU/GPU power. Let’s face it: It’s not an overwhelming 3D game. It’s a 2D game. It should run just fine on the 1st generation iPad. In comparison: The Back To The Future game (which is completely in real time 3D) runs just fine on my iPad 1. And so does the (rightfully named) Epic Citadel demo featuring the Unreal engine for iOS.

And if you have ever created a Flash app, you know how annoying debugging can get. Well debugging a Flash app on a device isn’t exactly what I’d call fun.

URL: Flash CS5.5 – Flash Builder 4.5

Titanium

This is actually my favorite. It gives best of both worlds. Titanium provides close to native performance (by using the native components) whilst  having a simple and powerful API that gives access to just about any interface either iOS and Android has. I created a few apps using Titanium and all I can say is: It’s the fastest iOS app development tool I’ve seen yet. You can create great looking and feeling applications in very little time.

You create the app writing Javascript and calling Titanium’s APIs. “How is this different from Phonegap” you think? Well, the Javascript you write is interpreted at runtime (I’m guessing a WebView). However this webview is invisible and ONLY does business logic. In fact: It only does custom logic. For example: When you create a TableView, you call Titanium.UI.createTable() in Javascript. This calls a Titanium API that runs native code in the background and returns a native iOS/Android component with native performance. You populate the table component using more Javascript. Once the data is in there, the table behaves exactly as fast and smooth as any other tableview in iOS… Because it is a tableview in iOS. (Or in Android… You get the point)

The Javascript calls to the Titanium API are mapped to native code in the Titanium framework and generate native components. Events in those components are sent back to your code in Javascript where you can handle them. The end result is very fast performance. The slowest part of any Titanium app is app logic/handling events in Javascript (and let’s face it: That’s still faster than you can blink). The UI interactions, UI animations, UI effects and some platform specific calculations are completely native. Yes, native is key here. It means performance. Better performance means allows better user experience. (Some people still mess it up, even if performance is as good as it can be).

That native performance is wonderful. That’s why I love Titanium. The only bad thing I’ve come to notice. You can’t do any kind of image processing. So if you’re thinking about building the next Instagram, don’t use Titanium. Even though you have complete access to iOS’/Android’s camera API, you can’t heavily edit the image… And the same goes for editing audio/video. So in the end: Titanium can only create data-driven applications.

Oh btw: Titanium is free. It comes with a lot of luxury, some great tools, good debugging and access to everything native on iOS and Android! All that, for free. And open-source!

URL: Titanium Mobile Application Development

Corona

I first heard about Corona about a year ago. When I checked it out back then, I didn’t seem all that convincing and I didn’t spend much time exploring it. However when I was writing this blogpost I gave it another glance and I have to say: A lot has changed.

It looks like Corona has truly grown up and provides a massive API to create 2D games for iOS, Android and others. You write your code in Lua and when done you create a game that runs at native speed. Since I haven’t tested this myself, I wasn’t really convinced at first… until I saw the demos that were created in only a few hours and performed exactly like the blockbuster hits in the App Store. That’s immense!

Yea, remember those ideas for Flash games I had? I might just give Corona a run for it’s money. Again: Might just. If I spend 200$ for an application that should replace my free tools (Titanium & Xcode), I’d better really build a game with it.

URL: Ansca Mobile – Corona

Unity/Unity3D

This is by far the most exciting tool of all. One problem: Unity is designed to create 3D games. If you want to create a todo-app, this isn’t what you’re looking for.

The development environment is great, you can write the code in Javascript, CSharp and a handful other languages. The components can be put together using drag & drop. There’s an insanely extensive debugging environment. And when you feel the need to change some of the generated Objective-C code… You can. Unity generates an actual Xcode project before compiling the final app. You can access that project and change things according to your needs.

The 3D assets can be created with almost any 3D modeling application out there: 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, Blender and a few others. Unity even provides ways of nicely importing them. There’s also a 3D modeling feature in Unity itself, however I don’t know anything about it.
Soundscapes for the game can be created with any application you like and then imported into Unity. Again: there seems to be a sound editor/creator inside of Unity which they claim is pretty complete.

The one thing that I really love about Unity is the debugging features. It’s just brilliant. There’s several levels of testing your app.

1. In-IDE testing: Just hit the play button and you can run the game inside the development IDE using the keyboard and mouse.
2. Everything working fine? Okay, but now you’d like to test how the input with the iPhone or iPad work: Touch and accelerometer-based input. Well… There’s an app for that. The Unity Remote connects your iPhone/iPad over Wifi to your Unity IDE and sends the relevant input to the game running inside the IDE. At the same time you can see the game output (game UI) on your iPhone/iPad. The result is quick and easy testing of the game ‘on the device’ (since both input and output are both on the device) without installing it on the device.
3. Okay: Now we want to really test on device. You know, the way you’d do it in Xcode for example. That’s possible too: Just run the app on the device and have full on-device-debugging power. It’s just a few clicks away. The full debugging power comes straight out of Xcode. There isn’t any other tool that comes close to Xcode’s device-debugging. At the same time you can see all your logging inside the Unity IDE too. There’s actually multiple ways of debugging depending on your personal preferences. How’s that for 1 tool… Some creative suites don’t offer this kind of debugging choices.

When you’re ready to deploy your app, Unity creates the actual native app. Android, BlackBerry or iPhone (or desktop)(and soon Flash!!) are supported. And if you think the performance of this will be horrible since you’re creating a massive 3D game without writing native Objective-C: Nope. The performance is off the hook. It’s insanely good. Don’t want to believe me? That’s okay. How about Electronic Arts? Yea, if one of the world’s most famous game developers choses Unity, there is probably something to it.

URL: Unity3D

Xcode / Native iOS Development

Xcode is the official toolset provided by Apple for any Mac and iOS development. And yes: This one is last in this list since, in my humble opinion, Objective-C is hard. I learned a way of implementing MVC at school but as it turns out, the one used in iOS development is very different. It requires quite some adaptation. There’s lots of strange syntax I’ve never seen. The development environment is pretty big and complex. Then there’s the .h and .m files (“What’s the difference…?“). There’s something called storyboarding that seems insanely weird at first, but actually makes total sense once you get what it’s for… Etc. Yes, Xcode is definitely the hardest tool of them all to get started.

However I don’t think Xcode needs a lot of explanation. It’s the tool provided by Apple. It’s what Apple considers the best tool they could get in the hands of their developers. And to be truly honest: It’s a pretty complete suite. It creates a native binary. There’s nothing more close to home than this.

URL: Apple Developer Tools

Conclusion

Conclusion? There’s no conclusion! This was supposed to be a list of different tools to create apps for iOS (and Android and others) and explaining how they’re different from their colleagues/competitors.
But since you’re asking for one: I’d say depending on the kind of application you’re looking to build there’s a tool for you.

• For 3D games: Use Unity. It’s powerful, it’s specifically designed to help you create games and you can create for multiple platforms.
• For 2D games: I’d recommend Corona. It looks pretty promising. The API provides quite a lot of preinstalled game features (e.g. physics with Box2D). I’m pretty sure you can create a decent game with this, faster than you would in Xcode with Objective-C.
• For purely data-drive apps: Use Titanium. You get the best of both worlds. Fast development & native look and feel.
• For heavy calculating apps (e.g. Image/Video/Audio processing): Go native. It’s the only way. You could create a Titanium module which does the heavy lifting (using Objective-C)… But what’s the point. You could as well just create the entire app in Xcode then.
• I don’t know when I’d ever use Phonegap to create an app…
• Don’t use Flash.

Anyway, the point: This is Preso! It’s kind of an Adobe Connect clone, built with Flex 4 and Red5. It allows you to have a presentation online.
You start a room, upload some images (that go with your presentation), start the webcam/audio stream and share the direct link with your friends or your audience and go! Here’s a little demo that should give you an idea.

Feel free to check it out! Let me know what you think of it!

I think it’s a creative idea… However their complicated way of explaining what they did kinda makes it look harder than it actually is (which is never a good thing).

Anyway: seeing the above reminded me about a little experiment I did about a year ago. I created a Flash movie that accesses the webcam and does some bitmapdata magic. The result is realtime light painting!

“What does that look like?”
See below!

“Can I try?”
Yes you can! Just make sure you’re in a dark room.

Feel free to show some of your results!

Update:

A friend of mine asked me to share the source, so here goes! Click!
(I really should start sharing my source right away… I’m way too lazy)

Well, this time it’s for real. It isn’t powered by Adobe or supported by Apple but the fact is: Flash is now running on the iPhone. I said ‘is running on’; I did not say ‘is running perfectly smooth’.
There’s still a lot of work but this first step is a very good one, and everybody should be excited about this!

I took the time to test a few of the experiments I made over the past years on my iPad. I am pretty surprised about how well everything is going. In the following video I’ll show some of the tests I did.

About the ‘Red5-Letter-demo’: For some reason I wasn’t able to drag and drop during the demo. However it does work from time to time (still buggy as explained in the video though).

After seeing this video, you’ll probably wonder why I didn’t just give ‘real Flash sites’ a run for their money. Well, I already did. I tried DerBauer.de and 2Advanced.com. I saw intro screens but that’s it (site died after I tried clicking stuff). For the sake of making this thing look good, I prefer not to show how bad it performs on ‘high-end production‘ sites I mean, it’s still an alpha version. Give him/them a chance of getting there before saying it’s performing poorly

How to install Flash on your iDevice?

1. Make sure your iDevice is jailbroken. If it’s not you won’t be able to install Frash on your device. If you want to jailbreak, the simplest way I know at this point is by visiting jailbreakme.com using your iDevice. (Works for most iOS’s and devices). Other ways of jailbreaking can be found on the internet. (I will not assist anybody, just saying…)
2. Open Cydia on your device, go to sources and add ‘http://repo.benm.at‘.
3. When Cydia’s done adding the new repo to its database, go to the ‘Search‘ tab and look for ‘Frash‘.
4. Install it!
5. Go to Safari and visit a site using Flash. You should see a ‘Click to Flash’-like space where the Flash object should be. (If you don’t, you might want to try rebooting your device. It worked for me straight away) Click it and enjoy!

As it turns out I happen to have no life at all, so I went for insanity when I decided trying to get enough images for a 60 seconds sequence (Generating those images took a whole afternoon… I ended up having ±15GB of HQ PNG files).

Anyway, long story short: I’ve got this video I wanted to show you.

You know: Afterwards I realized this could probably be done using After Effects right away… (I wouldn’t know to be honest). But in the end, it’s proven again: Sometimes not knowing how crazy something is, is actually a good thing.

PS: I would share the AIR app, but right now it’s buggy as hell and somehow memory seems to be an issue. Will need to address those first. I promise I will release it sometime soon

However: since Adobe released Flash CS5 with the iPhone packager anyway, we can actually deploy iPhone apps created in Flash CS5. The only thing we can’t do is to submit these apps to the Apple App Store (in fact we can, but they will reject them anyway, so why bother?)

However: We can distribute our apps using Cydia! Okay, it’s not the same, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Setting up a Cydia repository is actually pretty easy. There’s a great tutorial right here!

There’s a little problem though: Flash CS5 creates an .ipa file. In step 3 of that tutorial you’ll need to put your application in the Applications folder. That application is actually an .app file, not an .ipa file. (I’ve tried it using the .ipa file; it doesn’t work )
Getting the .app file is pretty easy:

1. Rename your .ipa file to .zip
2. Unzip the archive
3. Your .app file is in the extracted Payload folder

That’s it! You can now create your own Cydia repository and distribute your rejected iPhone apps to the (jailbroken) masses using Cydia.

Have fun!

That error isn’t saying much, so if you have no idea what is going on, this might take a while to figure out… (took me about 2 weeks…).

A few months ago, I was having trouble with a JAVA applet not working correctly in my browser so I changed a few settings in the JAVA preferences. Apparently that was a bad idea. When I set everything back the way it was, the error was gone

This is how the settings look now (in case anyone was wondering).

After the keynote, developers were enabled to get their hands on the iPhone OS 4 SDK. That’s when they had to agree to the new PLA (programming license agreement) which stated the following at some point:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

If you’re not into reading legal stuff or long and very boring statements, let me translate and summarize it for you.

Hey you non-Objective-C writing prick: Fuck off. Go play somewhere else.

What Apple did here is not to make sure the apps on the app store are of a good quality. They literally told every creative Flash/Unity3D/etc developer to either learn Objective-C or to sod off and create apps for Android.

I don’t really know why Apple is doing this, other than to piss off Adobe (in particular) and make sure every developer thinks twice before even considering building apps for the iPhone platform.

Some people on Twitter suggested for Adobe to postpone the Adobe CS5 Mac release.
I’m sorry: What?
What good would that be? Nothing. Seriously: the only thing Adobe would do, is to kick their own community when their already down. The only ones ending up being hurt would be the very people that are still awaiting CS5 in order to create great new content for platforms where developers and designers are still wanted and welcomed with a warm cup of hot chocolate.

If anything: I think this is the ultimate opportunity for Adobe to kick Apple directly in the nuts. Apple says no Flash devs using their known tools to create content? Well Adobe is just been given a challenge. They’ve only got a few days, so I kinda doubt they’ll make it…
But what if Adobe is to launch CS5 in a few days with a counter-attack?
What if Adobe would be able to launch CS5 with an updated Flash CS5, able to comply with the new agreement? How much of a comeback would that be?

I’m sure the people at Adobe are hard at work to somehow figure something out. And I’m sure that, sooner or later, they will come up with a solution. I know that because Adobe actually cares about their developers.

In the past 2 years there have been numerous times when people expected (and were insanely excited about) a full in-browser Flash Player on the iPhone and while I was one of the people hoping it would happen only a few months ago, I’m not so certain anymore.

Everybody is saying that once Flash Player 10.1 will run in the browser on the iPhone, you will be enabled to have a ‘full web browsing’ experience. But how do you expect the ‘full experience’ on a mobile device (in this case the iPhone)?

Do you remember the insane intro’s without a ‘skip intro’ button?
Do you know about blogs embedding autoplay-enabled videos from Youtube and siblings?
Haven’t you ever run into sites starting to play annoying jingles in the background?
Don’t you ever think about battery usage (read: battery-mass-destruction) due to the countless (and sometimes intense) ENTER_FRAME events that will most likely look like a slideshow, rather than a slick animation?
Have you heard about the thing they call Papervision3D?
Ever considered screen-size and proportions (Just read this post concerning screen-sizes on different devices by Aral Balkan)?

Seriously: all that on a little device, serving the web from a (rather) slow (and to most of us limited) 3G connection that handles itself like a Pentium 3 on speedballs… Personally: I’m not looking forward to it at this point.

I do look forward to being able to compile IPA files from the Flash IDE. And not because I’d be able to create Flash Applications on the iPhone, but because I can create applications on the iPhone. The fact that I can create it in Flash only is appealing to me because at this point I just don’t have the time to get my head around Objective-C yet, and that is a completely different topic!

There, I’ve said it.