Mossberg: What’s the deal between you and Steve Jobs? He was here last year, and he had a chance to expand on what he had previously written about [Flash], and summarized, he said “Well, I think our duty is to pick technologies in the ascendancy. We feel like Flash is not on the ascendency, we think HTML 5 is, so that’s who we decided to go with for iOS Devices. What’s your respons eto that?

Narayen: There are a lot of misperceptions out there. When it first broke, people talked about the fact that they thought it was a technology issue, and I think it’s become fairly clear over the last year that it’s not about the technology: it’s about a business model issue. It’s about control of a platform. It’s the control of the app store that’s really at issue here. The value proposition Flash has is that we allow people to author programs once and get them to as many devices as possible. We’ve done that with Android. We will have 130 million phone devices that will have Flash on them by the end of the year…

Mossberg: And I have yet to test a single one where Flash works really well. I’m sorry. They struggle on those Android devices.

Catch the full interview here…

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I’m not a fanboy of either Flash or Silverlight… I’m a web developer, and I choose the tools best to solve a problem…

I agree to it that both Flash and Silverlight provide a great way to program rich applications with complicated interactivity… If your web application has simple interactivity, such as filling out forms or clicking buttons to make hidden things appear, you can do that easily with JavaScript… I can sense some cringes at that suggestion… Yes, HTML, CSS and JavaScript are prone to have cross-browser cross-platform incompatibilities, but a good html person with JQuery and browsershots.org should be able to handle it… That’s cheaper than paying a search engine consultant to figure out why your all-flash website doesn’t get any traffic…

Main problem with plugins like Flash and Silverlight is that they have never been regarded highly by search engines, so any time you have text in these plugins, you can pretty much assume that spiders won’t read it…

But seriously comparing Silverlight to Flash just doesn’t make sense… It’s like comparing an Iphone to lets say Motorokr… Its said that Silverlight was created for a far bigger purpose; to light up the web in the same way as Windows Presentation Foundation ( Avalon – PS : Just love there system of nomenclature ;) ) was to light up the Windows Platform…

I really don’t have to speak more on this… Flash is normally installed on 95% of web browsers… compare that to Microsoft’s 26% that too I think only in companies which are pro Silverlight… The only way Microsoft can win over this Adobe’s monoploy over rich applications is if they make Silverlight a “mandatory plugin” which would certainly result in a mass adoption overnight…

Microsoft would be foolish to try to sway people from industry standards like Photoshop and Illustrator… So having a smooth flow between designers and developers is crucial and Microsoft will never do this as well as Adobe does… Silverlight does have a couple points in its favor… It is new so the plugin doesn’t have to support several back-versions… More developers like C# over ActionScript, however, I believe part of this argument is outdated… When Silverlight came out developers were excited because they hated ActionScript 2 and developing within the Flash IDE… Now there is ActionScript 3 and Flex Builder with Eclipse, which in my opinion can contend even with Visual Studio… Open sourcing Flex is a really good start in the right direction by Adobe…

In summary, Jobs pointed out that Flash is proprietary, insecure and unreliable, a drain on battery life and not optimized for touch screens… He said Adobe’s claims of providing the “full Web” with Flash are increasingly irrelevant as more sites come up with alternatives, and that banning iPhone app development in Flash will result in better apps because Apple retains control over new features and innovations…

Outlining these points Jobs closed by saying :

We know from painful experience that letting a third-party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in substandard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third-party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Looks like the war of words won’t stop just like that… It’s as if both sides are implying that “It’s our device and we can do with it what we please.” But the meaning of that statement is completely different depending on who says it…

Lets see what’s in store over the next week.. Cheers. :)

Flex is the way to make rich Internet applications (RIAs) quickly and easily… Flex is a framework for creating RIAs based on Flash Player… Along with being a framework, Flex is also a new language… It  uses a MXML, a markup language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), to build Graphic User Interface (GUI)… It use an ActionScript to process a function of web… Flex has an easy to learn programming architecture and Flex Builder is a development tool that can help developers becoming productive quickly…

The reason why as a developer you should learn Flex are many.. I’ll highlight a few here…

1. It’s open source…
2. It has great community support…
3. You can have a job in another six months…
4. Flex was the first language designed for creating UIs…
5. It has a programming model similar to Java…If your a
6. You can use it with existing Java applications…
7. It works with Google App Engine for Java…

I know Ajax is also an alternative to build RIAs… But Flex ROCKS!!!

So, you want to learn Flex???

Actually its quite easier than learning PHP or even for that matter AJAX… If your a beginner then take the following steps as a launch pad to learn Flex…

1. Adobe’s official Flex Quick Starts offer simple code samples to get you started… All the documents are written by Flash expert Aral Balkan.
2. Flex Language Reference will turn out to be a nice bookmark… Even as your skills and knowledge increases, you’ll keep coming back to this ultimate guide for Flex and Flash Player’s APIs… Every component property, method, event, and style is at your fingertips, often with useful inline examples…
3. Adobe also offer free video training with a series called Learn Flex in a Week…
4. If you love mailing lists then you can also subscribe to flexcoders mailing list…
5. Flex Cookbook, published by O’Reilly is also a nice reference…
6. Last but on least Flex.org, the official developer portal for all things Flex. It offers a ton of links to blogs, consultants for hire, and job postings related to Flex…

Happy learning!!! Cheers.. :)

Have a look at its press release and blog article….

Looks like its Adobe’s reply to Steve Job’s comment that “They are lazy”… This move is like a knockout punch for Apple as there tablet(iPad) has no support for flash…

Taken from WIRED :

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Looks like Jobs not happy with businesses not being Apple-friendly now days…. ;)

To install Adobe AIR on Ubuntu 8.10 follow these steps..

Open Terminal window from (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal ) and issue the following command in the terminal window.
wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Now :
chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

After That :
./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

After the above command you will get a installation dialog box like this follow the instructions to install Adobe Air.

After installation is over you will find a menu item (Applications -> Other ->Adobe Air Application Installer ) which allows one to easily install Adobe Air applications.

Some interesting Adobe AIR applications are :

ReadAIR
ReadAIR is an rss reader. But it lacks keyboard shortcuts.
You can download ReadAIR from here : http://readair.googlecode.com/files/ReadAir.0.3.air
You can install the downloaded the (.air) package using (Applications-> Other -> Adobe AIR Application Installer).

RichFLV
RichFLV is a video editor for flv files , some of its features are :
* Read flv Metadata
* read/edit/modify/delete cuepoints
* cut flvs
* convert the sound of the flv to mp3
* convert flv to swf
RichFLV is still in early stage of development and is an alpha release.

Download and Install RichFLV from here : http://www.richapps.de/files/richflv/RichFLV.air

RoadFinder
RoadFinder combines Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps into a single application. It allows one to easily look up address using its intiuative interface. RoadFinder allows you to search maps for physical directions anywhere in the world. It also allows you to view satellite images.
Download and install RoadFinder from : http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/samples/1/RoadFinder.air

Spaz
Spaz is an Open source Twitter client and features an extremely user friendly interface. Some of the important features of Spaz are :
* Built-in global search powered by Summize
* Short URL creation tool with support for multiple services (is.gd, bit.ly, snurl.com, and more)
* In-line short URL decoding
* Markdown syntax support
* Multiple themes and support for user-created themes
* User-defined CSS overrides
* Event sounds using the Tokyo Train Station soundset by Dominik Dimaano
* Directory listings of users you’re following, and your followers.

Download and Install Spaz using this link : http://funkatron.com/apps/spaz/AIR/SpazAIR.air

TweetDeck
TweetDeck is also an Open source Twitter client, i find it better than Spaz..
Download and Install TweetDeck using this link :
http://www.tweetdeck.com/

I hope you enjoy AIR an its applications.. If you face problems please comment… :)