I just posted a joint article authored with Erik Peterson there outlining key differences between AIR for Android and the iOS packager created applications. Capabilities of AIR for Android, the limitations inherent in using cross platform toolsets and some of the ways we would like to see the iOS packager and the AIR for Android tool.

If you are working in this area, you should probably check it out. We’ll try to keep the list updated as things change, and with MAX just around the corner, we all know it will change!

Lovely. Can’t wait until AIR for Android’s formal release and all these awesome AIR for Android apps to start coming out!

I’m not putting together a prediction list, but rather a wishlist… Will any of these happen? I dunno, but I do know they would make my life in the Adobe universe better and more productive.

1. AIR on iPhone – It’s unlikely that I am going to be learning Objective C anytime soon. And while I would love to take a stab at creating an app on the iPhone, this is really about the only way to do it. If I could compile an AIR app for the iPhone, this would help bridge that gap.
2. A release date for Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst – Believe it or not, I’ve been using these tools for some time on real work. Flash Builder a bit more, but I have been able to get some nice stuff out of Catalyst from time to time. I’d like a formalized release schedule and a price so I can put it in my budget ASAP and get it on my team’s desktops for real.
3. Some word on what the Omniture buyout means for Flash platform analytics – Is it going to be a LiveCycle product? A Flash Platform SaaS? What? How can I get integrating this into my experiences and RIAs?
4. A bit more concrete info on AIR 2.0′s deeper features – FOTB leaked that C++ and other API integration was coming, but what about Google Earth? Open GL? BYOAPI (Bring your own API)
5. More Hardware acceleration control and/or better threading/CPU support. – Building 1080P+ experiences on Flash sucks. There I said it. I’ve been burned enough over the last couple of years to know this. At The Iona Group we often build large HD resolution kiosks, presentations, installations etc. We prefer using Flash for our rich media development. These two things collide in unpleasant ways more often than they should. In many ways, Director is still more capable at performing in world class fashion at high high resolution. Processing is too. This could be for Flash Player 11, AIR 2.0 or whatever… Just the sooner, the better. Grant Skinner has made pleas to Adobe to improve CPU usage and performance, so maybe that will be enough.

So there you have it… not sure if any of these will happen, but it sure would be grand if they did. What are you putting on your MAX Wishlist?

1. The Flash IDE wasn’t really improved – Now a thing of comic proportions, Flash CS4 Professional has all been but abandoned as a code editor by most professionals I know, respect and follow in Flash platform blog world. Flex Builder, FDT, Flash Develop and many others out there fill the function better. Adobe missed a huge boat by not enhancing this much begrudged part of the IDE. I mean, the autocomplete is dopey, the need or (un)need of import statements is erratic, and on and on. The language has evolved, with AS3 forcing you to write better structured code, but the editor itself is pretty much still a scripting sketchpad. It’s obvious this is an impediment to users learning AS3, as it seems to pop up as a topic on blogs a lot. Case in point (read the comments on Mike Chamber’s post).
2. The Flash Mobile Platform is still pretty much a mess – Now, I might take some heat for this view from some evangelists and others in the mobile trenches, but I don’t see a game changing strategy here. With Blackberry, iPhone and Android all out, all popular and not able to play Flash content yet (I hear Android is coming soon, though), it sure seems a bit disjointed to me. Some phones may use openscreen Flash players eventually, some Flash Lite, some Flash. It’s a bit of a mess, IMHO. Furthermore, when I visit Adobe’s Flash Platform page, I see no mention of Flash for Mobile, you have to dig a bit. I just think we need a concerted effort to put Flash mobile devevlopment front and center on Devnet, and make Flash part of mobile vendors lexicon in their sales pitches, i.e. “Did you know you can play Flash games and watch Youtube videos on this Phone because it has Flash?”, etc.
3. No standard animation syntax across Adobe products – Flash, Flex, After Effects, Spry Framework, Director, heck, even Photoshop are capable of producing animation. All use their own syntax. Some of it is due to mergers and tech acquisitions, some is just due to lack of a “motion czar” at Adobe. Sounds ludicrous, I know, but why should a CS4 user need to know so many syntaxes to make things dance around or produce transitions? Moses supposes propsed this over a year ago, and no movement has taken place on this AFAIK. Dont’ think its a big deal? Look at this diagram. Then look at this one. Which world do you want to work in?
4. Flash Player 9 never got it’s garbage collection issues patched – It’s a bit disconcerting that such a huge bug never got patched as a revision level thing and they waited to completely update the player to fix it. I’ve written about this in the past, and Grant Skinner has a great series of posts about it on his blog, but really when it comes down to it, the poor audio handling in Flash player 9 (also a well documented bug) and lack of a true unload and cleanup mechanism among other things illustrate to me that maybe a 12-18 month revision cycle is just madness. I’m sure it’s half marketing, “Well, Silverlight just bumped their number, so we have to do it for our player, too”, but that doesn’t make it right. Patch and update the software you have, save the revision number changes for big big revelations and allow your devs to sleep at night in stead of updating their code.
5. Ever Diverging APIs – I’ve mentioned this issue on this blog before as well… With a “platform”, it’s apparent that some features that Flash IDE can produce aren’t readily apparent in Flex and vice-versa. Add on top of that the AIR APIs and you start to get a LiveDoc soup. What can one do that the other can’t? What are the dependencies? Etc, etc. Flex’s Framework has some hot stuff in it, and, if you chance upon the docs from a Google search trying to do something in Flash, it may not be clear until you’ve read practically the entire class description and gotten your developer hopes dashed on the glacially slow LiveDocs frame based UI website.
6. Adobe still really doesn’t show the Mac much love at all. – Seriously. Not going to spend much time on this here, but Adobe products just run better on Windows. This pains me. I hate Windows and simply will not switch. Please
7. Death of Flash Paper with no successor in sight – This is a perplexing move by Adobe in my view. FlashPaper had it’s flaws, but it was a capable tech for replicating Acrobat Reader in a light and compact fashion. No more. End-of-Lifed this year and told not to let the door hit it’s backside bits on the way out, it left my team hanging, pretty much immediately after launch on a project. No IE7 support. Nothing. Not even a proposed replacement or simple way to write PDFs straight from the Flash player. Seems like it was killed on some sort of sacrificial altar of Adobe/Macromedia merger-y black magic. “One shall die to make the other stronger” crud like that. I’m sure I may be exaggerating, but c’mon… Where I am supposed to go after this? Print2Flash, AlivePDF, etc are all promising, but why no Adobe solution in CS4/Flash Player 10? The Flash API’s PrintJob class blows for much more than most simple jobs… Help us!
8. CS4 Installer not much better than CS3 installer – John Nack’s blog has been the hotspot of talk from the installer front, with several posts commenters lambasting the team and berating the children of the installer team’s developers. I won’t go that far, but wow. Just please please please make CS5′s better. Shock and awe us with its simplicity. Maybe even *gasp* use the OSes’ native installers (If Final Cut Studio can install simply on OSX and MS Office can do the same on Windows, Adobe can figure it out)! If nothing can be done here though, at least make Adobe Updater go away and stop making us quite all our apps while your yipping dog fails yet again.
9. SEO enhancements for Flash, but with no real documentation – Oh, how I wanted this to work out. This summer, it was announced that Adobe and Google would be working together to improve the searchability of Flex and Flash content. Ryan Stewart even ran a contest on it. Only real downside… no actual documentation. Or technotes. Or tutorials. Or, you get the idea. Just a simple little FAQ. C’mon! Peter Elst has a little more info on this at his blog.
10. Global Pricing for Adobe Products unfair as ever – The world definitely doesn’t seem flat when it comes to selling downloadable software packages. Take a look at this comparison of prices for CS4 across the world. Ouch. John Dowdell has a bit on this at his blog entitled CS4 painpoints, so it’s obviously a known issue there, but not sure what’s going on in this realm right now. I do know that it has to hurt to upgrade when the software costs twice as much if you live outside of the US. May as well fly to buy it, or just skip the revision and save the dough in this downtrodden global economy. I have a feeling alot of people may be doing just that.

So, there you go. My list of the ’08 disappointments in the Flash platform. Any things I missed in your opinion… I’m interested in hearing from other designers and devs out there on this one.

The description from his site:

I’ve created an AIR application to help developers and designers measure pixel distances on their screens. You tell if you need pixDIF if you answer yes to any of these questions:

1. Do you ever find that you need to measure the pixel distance/size of something when you’re not in Photoshop? Or, put another way: do you wish you could take the guides in Photoshop with you to the computer desktop?
2. Do you ever want to know what a graphical asset will look like in the context of a website or application. For instance, do you wish you could take an image and move it around over your website to see what it would like like in various places before you start writing the code to place it there?
3. Do you ever have a website or application design that you need to break up into pieces and build into a working site/app? And then as you write the code you need to see how close to the design you are?

If any of those answers are “yes” then jump over to the pixDIF page and check out the features and overview video tutorial.

Dan is a highly talented designer/developer and you really should check out his site.

We owe alot of the success of the tool and the revision process to Flex. Honestly, the maintenance and the agile changes required to make it work would have been unnmanageable if developed without the Flex framework. We also use Degrafa in the app, too, so it really does have some nice things running under the hood, too.

It handles pictures, video, audio, SWFs, and the now defunct Flash Paper. It does Ken Burns effects, smooth dissolves and other types of transitions, too. It can go fullscreen, be embbedded in other peoples siites via the share code and can even be downloaded as an EXE or and Adobe Air app. All in all, a very cool ap and one we are proud to be part of.

This little experiment was a step towards trying to get around that by making a little utility that can take a video (currently FLV, but hopefully H.264 very soon, more on that in a moment.), timeslice it and generate the image previews that might mean the difference between a few minutes of scanning some autogenerated thumbs and several hours of digging through tapes. Storing tons of video footage on our network would be impractical, but an assortment of stills, no problem. I have the beginnings of such a utility I’d like to share as a link, but soon I hope to add to it. With Flash Player 10 on the scene and the enhanced FileReference stuff in there, I probably don’t need PHP’s GD Library as I had originally planned, so sometimes waiting just a bit actually pays off. I learned a bit while I was making my SWFShot app, too, so I’ll probably use the AS3CoreLib’s JPGEncoder to save images out of this.

The cool part of this was learning a bit more about the ImageSnapshot class (I had never worked with it before, but I am having a lot of fun with it.), and also learning about some flakiness I uncovered in the VideoDisplay component (moral of the story, don’t set or mess with the autoPlay attribute on the player, it really dinks things up). I also got a pretty good shot to learn about Flash’s handling of H.264 (H.264 clips lack a lot of useful metadata in them that I have come to rely on that are in FLV files ‚Äì which does change things, for better or worse, when working with video in Flash).

Once I have a bit more time I may connect the app to an existing DAM we have via some services, but for now, some things have popped up that will prevent me from putting real hours towards this. Check it out, view source is enabled, I actually recommend you don’t bother watching it online, as I haven’t quite got all the quirks of the VideoDisplay component ironed out for suitable online play when used in conjunction with the snapshot creation process. It’s really meant for desktop or LAN use anyway, as it it will probably end up as an AIR app when I finally get more time to iron things in it out and add image saving to it. I recommend you just download the Zip file and start messing around with it.

The video is “The Heart Races” by Architecture in Helsinki. Thanks to Mark Tovey, my cube mate who helped me work through some issues I was having with this. He’s pretty good. He has a blog he’s starting up, I’m working on getting him posting. He has some really cool mashup stuff he’s working on. Here’s your nudge, Mark.

Let me know if you find the code useful. It’s a bit of amess really, but I’ve had it sitting around for a few weeks now, and if I don’t publish it now, I might not ever. You know how it is.

On top of that… Adobe is currently cosponsoring application signing certificates for developers that submit unsigned AIR apps to the marketplace. This means you can get one for free! These certificates from Thawte are worth about $300 if you wanted to buy one. If you have an app that is done or nearly done, my advice would be to finish it and submit it soon! The process of submitting to the exchange and¬† getting the certificate is pretty painless, and after that you get a nice cert that you can use to sign your app and get rid of those red X warnings on the install screens of your apps. A good way to put you users at ease when installing your shiny new apps. I’m pretty sure this is a limited time offer, so you better get compilin’!

The ImageSnapshot class in in Flex allows you to capture much larger images than the previous limit. You can encode the images as PNG or JPG and then, with Adobe AIR, you can save the image captured to the local system.

I saw the FITC post that Flash player 10 will bump up that limit. That’s great. I’m psyched. But, I also know that many people could use this functionality now, so, here it is. SWFShot. Flash Player 10 is at least a little ways off, so 2880 is the max from Flash for now.

Install it now, using the sweet new AIR plugin for wordpress written by Peter Elst.
[airbadge]SWFShot, http://visualrinse.com/files/SWFShot.air, v0.1, /files/swfshot_badge.png[/airbadge]
If for some reason that installer badge doesn’t work use this link.

A few things. I did have a few more features planned for the app, scaling, filters, and some simple playhead controls… But in the interest of getting it out there and letting people play with it, I’ve decided to sideline some of those features for now. Also, the app seems to work well with images up to about 8000×8000, but I haven’t really tested it past that. Furthermore, JPGs, PNGs and AS1/AS2 Flash files have no real problems as far as I can see, but I did observe that some AS3 Flash files that directly access stage properties currently trigger the AIR security sandbox and will hang the app. I hope to have that fixed soon, too.

Sidenotes… this all sprung out of the fact that in creating a video thumbnail generator in Flex (it crawls the duration of the clip, creates bitmaps of them and them puts them on stage for quick review), I discovered ImageSnapshot. A fantastically helpful little class in the Flex 3 SDK, it’s noticeably absent from Flash. I blogged this last week. Today, Aral Balkan tweeted about a similar concern about the growing chasm between AS/MXML/Flex/Flash features and the things that one IDE has that another doesn’t. Another quick example…

In Flex you can do this…
container.removeAllChildren();

In Flash you can’t, so you have to do something like this…
while(container.numChildren){ container.removeChildAt(0); }

I would agree that these discrepancies lead to confusion when you jump back and forth between the environments. What about you? Having difficulties living in a multitool Flash platform that seems to be getting a bit more difficult to navigate? With the AIR function being rolled into the standard AS3 documentation on top of all this, there is yet just another thing for you to keep track of.

Anyway. Enjoy, play with it and let me know what you think.