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Right about now at Mobile World Congress, Adobe is officially announcing Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR for Android. I truly believe these technologies will redefine the mobile experience. Kevin Hoyt recorded a great video overview showing some demos on the Motorola Droid, which I have embedded below. I have also been testing a selection of mobile Flash sites, created by key partners like YouTube and ESPN, and I am very excited about the future of Flash in the mobile browser. |
These technologies, combined with Flash CS5, will revolutionize how developers create mobile applications. It will be easy to create a single application and deploy it to the iPhone and also to other devices via Adobe AIR. You can also use the same code and assets to deliver a mobile browser version using Flash Player 10.1. Google has made a great choice partnering with Adobe and I believe consumers will benefit by being able to choose whatever type of content they want to view.
Expect much more information about developing for Adobe AIR and Flash Player 10.1 here on this blog and over at gotoAndLearn(). If you want to get busy right away learning about the low-level details about how to optimize content for mobile devices, check out this beta version of a white paper created by Thibault Imbert. Seriously this white paper should be printed out and kept by your side as you create Flash content as it is chock full of secrets for getting the most out of the Flash Player.
Also for more details straight from the AIR team, please visit the Adobe AIR Team Blog. These are exciting times!
Lee
sweet
Awesome! Hopefully this gets Flash Player one step closer to being on the iPhone.
Congrats! Great news.
Do these AIR apps for mobile devices use *.air files to install apps? If so does that mean I can write one AIR app and deploy it to any phone running the AIR runtime?
Mike Downey
Platform Evangelist
Microsoft
Are there any other mobile OS’s expected to also support Adobe AIR? Other than Android?
This is great news! 2010 is turning into the year of the Flash developer. =D
iBrent
WHOAAAAA!
So much for being lazy… it sure looks like you have your ducks in a row to me, bravo, great news for the industry and for RIA developers.
“create a single application and deploy it to the iPhone and also to other devices”
… sounds like a quick way to bypass good user experience on all devices. Congrats!
This is very cool, seems a good time to be with google and google phones! i have a droid and love it, hope this all happens soon! i want flash. this is great.
this is great, and it seems to be a great time to be with google and have a google phone, i have a droid and i love it. hope this comes soon!
Awesome, I don’t expect that is so quickly.
When are we meet it?
Niiiiiiice.. I was hoping for Moonlight to beat you guys to the punch, but since I swing both ways, this is good enough
GJ!
This is great.
Thanks!
We can develop both iPhone and Android.
This is freaking amazing. I love you guys! Happy Valentines Day!
Any details on when it will be available?
Looks to me Apple wants to do an end-run around Flash from Adobe by going straight to HTML 5. If you want flash support, or to just copy files on and off as you please and use them however you like, looks like Apple is the wrong device.
“Very fast”?!?!
the transitions in the twitter client are pretty slow and clunky, in the Southpark Avatar app the body selection widget does not follow the finger and it is always lagging behind. Not sure how anybody can define this fast.
Even if it “cleverly” cropped away from the video, there is a significant portion of screen at bottom that remains black, another sign that “design for one and fit all” is really not there.
Can we download a beta version??
Wow, i am so excited to start developing AIR app for Android. Good job, Adobe
wow the video looks nice.it’s the first time I have seen motorola droid and the phone is incredible and smooth.anyway having flash for mobile is just a great thing. can’t wait to have it then.
Yessss! Tired of visiting a site on my G1 and half of it is inaccessible or getting popups requesting download of flash player
I don’t want a flashplayer on iphone. Not if it means that the abillity to make a native iphone app is taken out, and the possibility to tap into the app-store moneystream disappears.
What I want is a rich development tool (like delphi used to be) that works across mobile platforms (and ipad). As native apps. I couldn’t care less about flash as such.
very very exciting news, I was dreaming about this for the past few months
nais!
Great stuff!
Will the AIR apps also be able to be distributed through the Android marketplace?
How soon can we play?
flash cool air
I thought this was already announced?
Outstanding!
Since Nokia and Palm are partners–it’s is likely that webOS and Symbian will be supported:)
Looks pretty great!
Would like to see a direct performance comparison between an identical Air app and a native app. Its difficult to see from the video but despite what he said it didn’t look enormously smooth nor snappy.
I’m gonna try and keep a optimistic view here though until I see it running myself
SWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!
Shame the Adobe video couldn’t be shared easily…
Outstanding!
I can’t wait to see if the app I’ve created works on it.
Great! Now your phone can be infected as easily as your PC!
Lol, great headline, had to check it out; loving the subtle irony of broken plugin link at top (on my droid)
Adobe 1, Apple 0
Uau….that’s great!!
Wow, this is excellent news! So where exactly is the download?
Droid does! iPhonee 3G not so much.
Why would an Android user want Flash? Flash works horribly with Linux, and even if they get over that, at its best Flash is a resource hog. HTML 5 will hopefully encourage the use of open standards, and give us a better experience, and freedom from these defacto proprietary standards like Flash and (maybe) PDF.
@Chris Watkins: People want Flash on Android in order to run Flash applications. Having Flash-support doesn’t hinder anyone from using Html5. So you have both options to chose from which is of course much better than having only one choice. And Html5 won’t be usable for at least the next 3 or 4 years, when most of the current mobile phones will be out of service already.
Most of the Android phones will run Flash like ass and by the time end-users get access to this they will all be running Android 2.0+. Which means good HTML 5 support will be near universal on Android much like the iPhone.
And geez… 10.1 still hasn’t been released? Yeah Adobe take your sweet time. The Internet will wait. Not.
nicely done!!
omfg, every blog/news site entry the same discussion about flash and html5? yes PLEASE spend money and time in html5 (which will almost certainly come with all spec’s in about 10 years???) and leave all the flash developers in peace..
can’t wait working with cs5! please hurry up
@Bruce I have an Android phone in my hands and it runs Flash much better than ass.
@Chris Watkins: You do know what blog this is? You just walked into a rowdy bar of Red Sox fans and screamed Yankees rule! Sure HTML 5 is on the horizon. But to just consider Flash a video player and hence “killed” by the video tag is myopic. If you want to develop a rich user experience on any internet enabled device, Flash still has much bigger. Admittedly I hope this whole dust up has lit a fire under Adobe to improve the player, nothing like a little bad PR and competition to motivate the mind.
This is some good news!
Awesome news!
Keep it up guys
so whe can we expect flash for the droid phones?
Does someone know if it is going to be possible with AIR for mobile to do things such as playing with the user contacts or to start or end calls?
@Bruce
HTML5 dbabdbabdbabdbabbdabdba duuuuhuhhhh
When firefox, chrome, safari and IE agree on how to display colors, I will believe you. till then, good luck writing hacks for each and every single browser while I just press “Publish” for all the clients.
I for one can not wait for HTML5 to hit mainstream and read desperate forum posts asking for ways around things
Like I said before I will embrace HTML 5 but I am starting to wonder what HTML supporters are fussing about?
Maybe they are bitter that they only see blue legos on their phone…and might wait 10 years or so for them to see a considerable adoption of HTML 5. Mmmm …may be worried that by the time HTML 5 is done and submitted for mass use–that it might no longer be needed because of the advancement made it moot and academic? Try the HTML 5 experiments and see for yourself that they are indeed resource hogs. And are these people really know the capability of HTML 5? It can do some basic things that Flash can do, but not all. Please leave us alone. Let us rejoice over this good news.
@lee: “it runs Flash much better than ass”
Oh, so now Adobe’s playing the ass card.
Dude, you are in so much trouble.
@Steve LOL yeah why doesn’t Wired write an article with that tagline?
I’d love to watch the demo but I get this instead http://grab.by/2r5O
Maybe if you used HTML5?
@Andy I doubt you would find it interesting anyway.
I would like to have viewed the Droid Flash video here, but unfortunately, Flash Player hasn’t worked properly on my iMac (Intel running OS X 10.4.11) since Flash Player was updated to 10.0.32.18 in August 2009.
Videos show the “loading” icons continually, or they appear as a blank white square like the video here, or they tell me to download Flash Player, or I’m told to “adjust global storage” (I’ve tried and adjustments won’t take) and that I need to “allow third-party Flash content”.
I filed a bug report FP-2587. http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-2587. Nothing has been done to fix this issue, which occurred in Firefox 3.5 and now 3.6, as well as Safari.
Oh, and there’s was no improvement with the 10.1 beta that I tried in November last year.
Am I frustrated? You bet. So are the other people who commented on the bug report I filed.
Adobe, why can’t this problem be fixed?
Man! I’m excited to port my harp-instrument app to Android also!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/innocent-angel/id351068460?mt=8
essa porra ! I’m curious – does AIR on Android have access to the full Android API as well ? Stuff like GPS etc.
“why doesn’t Wired write an article with that tagline?”
You know what? Fuck them. You didn’t do anything wrong. Your mistake was giving people an opening to take shots at you. Instead of displaying that screen shot with the others, you should have posted a link to a popup window with some kind of warning about adult content.
Porn on the Internet? Good heavens, say it isn’t so!
Come folks whether you like Flash or not the real issue is accessibility. I other words that ability to choose what content you want to see. I guess the “lazy” people at Adobe have been working hard?!?! I also suppose that Google is still bullsh*t??? When iPhone users throw away their Apple product for the Android Steve Jobs will get the hint.
For those of you screaming HTML 5, would you please look at the history of HTML 4. It began in the early 1990′s and ten years later it didn’t do want they intended it to do. So, by the W3C recommendation it will be 2022 or later before they recommend HTML 5.
To all of you who thinks that flash is just video that html5 will replace flash you have no idea about talking about and by this I really mean that you are so f.. stupid to make statements like this. Everyone is in title to have an opinion but this is really retarded…
The users and fans of html5 why do you keep bother other people that has an opened mind, I thought that we are passed the dark times when people like you think that the earth was flat…
God let me chose the if I want to used flash or not do not chose it for me…
Who cares. I’m spending my time learning how to develop apps for the iPad. That’s where the money is.
Ed
Ed rocks.
Wow can’t wait to get my hands on that South Park app. So useful, and it should improve my productivity 4000%.
@CV45
My 6 year old Dell died last week. I just got a 27″ iMac running Windows 7. In Firefox 3.7 the video on this page gives me big time issues. It will play, but stopping or pausing the video will temporarily lock up my machine. Eventually it will recover. This is a completely new issue to me – never saw this on my PC.
However, if I view a video player that I made (http://www.charlestoncvb.com/) I don’t experience the same problems. So maybe there is a bug with this particular video player? If you don’t mind, check out my player in the above link and tell me if you have problems with that one.
Thanks,
Craig
Good to see it is getting onto mobiles… but the South Park app has simple graphics at best, and that looked clunky… and Flash is so much more than gimmicks and video.
I appreciate it is Beta, but Flash needs to become a lot more lightweight I fear.
Questions for the html5 fans…. Can you do something like the below site with html5 … the answer is NO and it will never be possible….
FLASH IS NO JUST VIDEO!!!
http://www.bluebelljeans.com/
It’s really lame that those people invited to the private CS5 party are now releasing their android/iphone apps to make some dough before the general public has a chance (@leef). Anyone else agree???
Tibi,
If I was a company and wanted to sell clothes I wouldn’t want to sell them with that web site.
SEO…sucks
Accessibility…sucks
What was the call to action? Did I buy anything… No
Ed
Flash doesn’t even work properly on Mac OS or Linux. Every video on Mac OS stalls at around the 5 second mark, for half a second, EVERY VIDEO. I know you have to write the video decode code in software, because of Apple restrictions on using hardware decode, but VLC manages it much better.
SOrry, don’t tursy, or want Flash on my phone. Flash has become a horrible part of the web, I want to avoid.
@EGlasheen
I have an example for you fully optimized for search engines with deep linking and that sell stuff and yes it is in FLASH!!! and is so f… cool!!!
http://www.sportbikecenter.ro/
If you will say that it is not optimized well note that there is a way to index a flash site exactly like a html site and please do not talk about stuff that you don’t know s…
http://www.asual.com
@ EGlasheen
The website isnt there to sell anything, it is a showcase website with lots of interactivity aiming at a very specific user panel.
in other words, not a boring text with an image and a call to action button.
You’ve got problems with the basics
@EGlasheen
That site DOES blow. ie: Poor UI, vague description of content, long load times, etc…Why does it even exist?
HOWEVER, don’t blame Flash for poor design. HTML5 won’t magically teach people good taste or common sense…. Poor UI, vague navigational layout, long load times…. ALL equally be achievable with other tools like HTML5/javascript/jQuery.
@5.1 Jeff
HTML5 will save everything and everyone.
Simple example of how HTML5 will not eat your CPU like flash
@lee
Will you guys stop giving us screen captures of CS5 and just launch it.
5.1 Jeff
True. I just learned that Google has voice recognition in their SEO algorithm. I do not know if that is true ( I learned it from a trade show conference on SEO ) or not, maybe there is hope.
I do not hate Flash in fact I think it is great at doing some things while horrible at others.
If Adobe had better PR and customer service, I think there would not be so many Flash haters.
However, being the number 1 malware exploit coming from overseas currently doesn’t help it either.
Again Adobe’s poor PR and lack of damage control.
Ed
Great post. Can’t wait to finally get my hands on Andriod 2.0 with flash player 10.1 and AIR. Soo cool!
I have to say that I am impressed with the tests people have been able to pull off in HTML5. It is fairly impressive… but not really very close to what is possible in Flash.
I have been working in HTML and Flash for quite a long time now (HTML for more than 10 years and Flash for more than 8… is that possible?) and the devil is always in the details.
Said another way, let’s give HTML5 5 years to get it together across all browsers. That cuts the waiting time in half because we are busy people and we don’t want to wait. Speaking of waiting, let’s see if Flash will wait around 5 years to let HTML catch up. Do we think Flash will be doing in 5 years what it does today? Reality check people!
Worthy of note, I have built a few iPhone apps in HTML and so far, they run like ass. And Safari on the iphone has it’s own special HTML and events to accommodate the iphone browser. So between having to code for the limited iphone browser and currently having to develop a few more versions of your site for the next few years in browser specific non-w3C-recommended-HTML5, I think I will stick with Flash. It is clearly the better investment for web rich media.
Oops! I can’t run flash on my iPhone browser? Well you can’t run HTML5 examples in IE and IE is still way out in the lead in the browser wars.
Final Note: Isn’t in interesting that Safari has been in the browser war since 2003 and Google Chrome past it up in a little more than 1 year in the market? No wonder Steve Jobs is pissy. He went and reinvented (re-invested in Safari) and lost traction to Google. So now he takes his fourth place browser and forces his audience to experience the web through that loosing product that has to be oversimplified to even begin to be a good experience.
I like my iPhone. I like my iPhone apps. But if anything is ass, honestly, it is browsing the web in safari, IMHO. Now, that my friends, …is ass. Anyone who disagrees is a n00b. I definitely wouldn’t buy an iPad unless I could experience the whole web, not the Steve Jobs AOL-circa-1992 version of the web with a bunch of safari-specific-HTML hackery.
@Craig
Thanks, I viewed part of the Charleston video and it played beautifully, no stuttering or stopping. The only issue I had was I couldn’t stop it, when I clicked on the icon to do that the whole player bar jumped up and down.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m running OS X 10.4.11 and FF 3.6, so maybe that has something to do with that? Not sure.
FYI, I encounter my problems with Flash on tons of different sites, not just this one.
What about support for input textfields on phones without qwerty keyboards?
This is an answer from Flash as the news comes shortly after the release of the iPad, the lack of flash on the iPhone, and a lot of forum discussions regarding HTML 5 being a better technology. Have a look here for more information: http://www.thehdstandard.com/hardwaresoftware-solutions-for-streaming/adobe-flash-and-air-available-on-android/
Catalin
Professional Streaming Consultant
It’s nice that the Nexus One and Motorola Droid can play these Flash videos.
I can’t on my 10.4.11 iMac. They show up as white boxes in Firefox 3.6 and crash Safari.
I ask again, why can’t this bug be fixed?
This is a great news! Long live Adobe! I love Flash/Flex & Air.
This is the best thing to happen to mobile devices in a very long time, I’m strongly considering moving up to a smart phone once this is up and running and fully functional.
Ok, flash lite clearly works great on the Droid, WHAT is the hold up? When will we be getting this release???
Just release the damn thing on Android market first and then do a dog-and-pony show about it.
When will people pull their heads out when it comes to HTML 5? The W3C last predicted that it won’t be ready for stable release until 2022! 10 years is an enormous length of time when in the context of web development. There are many exciting new changes and directions for everything media related; who among us really can say with any certainty what we will be developing with and for?
Anyone currently developing live sites with HTML 5 will most likely find themselves using features that very well may be removed from right under their feet.
As far as current new things that will greatly affect our profession:
Comcast (Xfinity) is getting ready to roll out a brand new product where the already blurry line between TV and internet and mobile devices will become even blurrier, almost nonexistent.
Nice! I’m really excited to work on flash. It’s a first step for me that now flash is working on the DROID. Thanks.
I have a droid and was wonderin if the adobe flash was goin to be a free or pay app
flash for android looks awesome! http://theflashblog.com/?p=1758
Goodbye iphone android is gonna fly now!!!!!
You Suck… Now you just killed 100,000 of java developers jobs and the Android Market now Why developer for Android now if people can just play games and get apps for free. I’m not making any more apps for Android now if I can make more money on iPhone.
So you think you will sale more phones but you will now lose all the developers and the Android Market will make no.. money so that kills Android so Apple is smart to stop this from happening
I hope it will work for my cell
I will beleive it when I see it. Been promised for some time now.
“Very fast�!?!
I agree with another post on the fact that it is not fast.
In the Southpark Avatar app the body selection widget clearly does not follow the finger and it is always lagging behind.
It also appears that parts of other application navigations were cut from the video. I suspect it has something to do with performance as well.
How do I get adobe flash player 10.1 for my Droid phone?