Why Apple is doing a good job not allowing the Flash Player to be on the iPhone

I’m going to get shot down for this. I can already feel the finger on the trigger of the sniper on the roof across the street, aiming at my head… I love Flash, I have been playing and creating with Flash ever since I was 17 years old. But…

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)? Read the rest of this entry »

Open Microphone PT 2

Only a few weeks back, Mike Chambers demonstrated the open microphone at FOTB in Brighton. At the time him and Lee weren’t allowed to say anything more specific on the topic, regarding if this will be available in the Flash Player as well. Most of us kinda figured and Adobe didn’t disappoint. At Adobe Max it was made official. Flash Player 10.1 will support the open microphone.

What is Open Microphone??
‘Open microphone’ is the term used to refer to the ability to access the raw sounddata recorded from a microphone instance in the Flash Player. Untill now this was only possible if you bounced the soundstream off the server (using Flash Media Server/RED5).

What’s so special about this?
You’ll be able to draw the soundspectrum of the microphone, you’ll be able to record the data as a bytearray and save it as a MP4 files / WAV file / whatever file to the server, you’ll be able to analyze the sound for specific words an build a Flash-driven droid that only listens to your voice and help you take over the world. Anything you want. Sky’s the limit. Go nuts.

More info: Click

Flash on the iPhone? Orly…? Ya. Rly.

Well… Actually not…

But: If you are a Flash developer and you know how to compile a SWF then as off today* you can build native iPhone applications using your current AS3 knowledge. Does that sound familiar to you? Well it should because Adobe did the exact same thing when they first announced Adobe AIR.

Adobe just showed a Flash CS5 preview featuring a ‘compile for iPhone’ demo. (Watch a similar demo here) Read the rest of this entry »

Open Microphone pt 1

If you’ve come by here a few times you know I have been experimenting with computeSpectrum and webcam motion detection. At a given moment I wanted to combine the 2 of them in order to use voice commands in order to make stuff happen on the screen. That would be pretty badass, right?

However I soon learned the microphone feed didn’t go through the SoundMixer of the Flash Player, therefor would would not be able to be analyzed. There was a workaround with FMS/RED5 and bouncing the stream off the server but that’s rather overkill (not to mention the lag). Read the rest of this entry »

Flash vs HTML? What is wrong with you people??

And I’m dead serious.

Let me start by saying that I am a passionate Actionscript Creative (if someday I might grow up, you can call me a Flash developer but not just yet) and I absolute love the web as it exists today. I love HTML and CSS. I even like Javascript (a bit) (it’s not my favorite, but we get along pretty good). So don’t go off thinking I’m taking sides.

What are we talking about today?

Earlier this week, Serge Jespers wrote about Adobe vs the open web, which kinda looked like a Flash vs HTML5 article from a distance (because let’s face it: The Adobe platform on the web is mainly the Flash platform). I had a lot of conversations about that in the past and the one thing I have come to conclude is that you can’t actually compare those to each other.
Not even remotely.

So to what should we compare it then?

People keep referring to the features that the Flash Player offers and which the developer might want to use. And then their statement goes on with ‘You can’t do that with HTML!‘
Of course you can’t! There are thousands of things you can do with Flash, which you just can’t pull of with HTML, CSS or Javascript. But if you really want to compare Flash and HTML, you gotta do it right:

Flash Player vs FireFox ( or IE or Safari or Opera or any other browser)
Timeline and Actionscript vs HTML and Javascript (and CSS if you really want)

(Please, stop throwing those vegetables at me… Thank you.) Read the rest of this entry »