Adobe combats Apple with 'mobile first mindset'

Despite the hostility of Apple, Adobe is determined to be a major player in the mobile and multiscreen world. And it used its MAX developer event to show exactly how it plans to do so. At the MAX conference, Adobe made its usual promises of spanning multiple platforms painlessly, and extending this message to new norms such as …

[Anonymous Coward]

Really!? AIR on a mobile platform?

let's do something more constructive for mankind like mutate a strain of malaria for wheat?

Flash is a toilet of a platform and due to the clout of Adobe we may end up with portable chemical toilet versions in our hand that underly our very apps.

[Tom 7]

Time we just left Adobe to rot

Google APSA10-05

Spanning multiple platforms painlessly

Yeh - and free money too...

[Justin Clements]

Gatecrash

Does anyone get the feeling that Adobe is becoming that unwanted party guest?

That they are desperate to gate crash the party, any party, but refuse to host their own party?

[The Grime]

Yay Flash!

Only two knee-jerk reactions so far? Come on commentards, you can do better than that!

[Giles Jones]

Oh the irony

One big objection to Flash is it isn't designed for the mobile world. It's a plugin that requires high resources as it has been designed with the desktop in mind.

So how ironic that the same people are saying "think mobile". Surely to "think mobile" is to think "hmm, limited resources, we'll use resources optimally and write in native code". Not like Adobe advocate, which is to use a virtual machine type technology.

Sure, quick development time, write once and run anywhere. But you can end up being jack of all trades and master of none. Your software will be on all platforms and not fit in with any of them. It might be something companies like Tomtom can get away with as their touch screen interface is well established and familiar.

But do you really want lots of really badly designed custom UI applications springing up all over the place? Bad design decisions, misleading use of colour and inconsistent appearance.

[Sean Baggaley 1]

"Limited resources", eh?

"One big objection to Flash is it isn't designed for the mobile world. It's a plugin that requires high resources as it has been designed with the desktop in mind."

So, you're saying a mobile device with as much as 32GB solid state storage, as much as 512MB RAM, and a multi-touch display with resolutions as high as 1024 x 768, 1GHz+ CPU (with multi-core likely to be the norm by this time next year), and both accelerated 3D graphics and video support, is a device with "limited resources"?

There's fuck all "limited" about modern smartphones and related devices today. There are proper *notebooks* on sale in shops *right now* that would have a hard time running anything as fancy as Unreal's "Citadel" technology demo as well as the iPad or iPhone 4 do. Android devices share much of the same hardware and OS architecture as Apple's iOS devices, so those, too, are pretty damned powerful.

If Adobe were drooling over the Nokia S40 platform, I'd understand your point, but to suggest Adobe can't pull off a decent overhaul of what is, essentially, a glorified 2D animation product with video nailed on, flies in the face of the evidence. Adobe have some pretty good programmers. (I'm not quite so convinced by their designers though.)

Adobe's biggest worry is Unity Technologies, whose own plugin / standalone technology has already effectively wiped out Adobe's "Director", and is likely to make a serious dent in Flash's popularity as a web-games platform. I don't think Adobe have quite realised exactly what a threat Unity is to Flash: there's very little Adobe's technology can do that Unity doesn't do much, much better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe have some pretty good programmers?

I think your primary mistake was in this statement.

- They were very recently, I don't know if they still are, the biggest attack vector for Windows. Beating even office and IE6.

- They can't write an (unwanted, unrequired and crashy) download manager that doesn't completely eat the resource of my computer.

- The PSD format is a joke under the bonnet.

- They honestly think ActionScript is a language to base applications on.

Adopey can go die in a corner as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't trust them with a bin liner.

[Goat Jam]

Yes, "Limited resources"

Sean, you might be happy to keep your mobile device tethered to the wall in order to feed enough juice to your Flash running uber phone but the rest of us want to go mobile and anything that wastes (power) resources at the rate that Flash does is quite simply not wanted.

HTH

[Anonymous Coward]

Question

Will it be as buggy and as open to exploits as the rest of Adobe's software? If so then it's good news for some... bad news for the rest of us!

[Goat Jam]

Nope

No chance in Hades.

I have an Acer Revo. It has a dual core atom plus nvidia ion.

I run ubuntu on it.

I use it mainly for boxee.

It sits there, day in day out, either idle or streaming videos and is dead silent.

The exception to this rule is if I load up FF to check something on the intertubes. If you browse to a website with any sort of Flash on it all of a sudden the fans spin up to full speed and it starts whining like a baby.

What a piece of CRAP Flash is.

Do Not Want Adobe Products On My Phone.

Ever.