Flash Player Multi-Touch: Confirmation from Kevin Lynch
At the Adobe Analyst Summit today Kevin Lynch gave some clarity around Flash on mobile devices which included news that Flash Player for mobile will have support for multi-touch and accelerometer features. James Governor had the first tweet; which also included info about the release date, namely a public beta before the end of the year and release early next year, but if you’ve been following along you probably know that.
Having more native device capabilities on the phone via Flash is going to let Flash developers do some very interesting things. Think about the implication for games, video, augmented reality, and general application user interfaces. If you’re interested in the Flash Platform and multi-touch Daniel Dura is going to be doing a session at MAX covering some of the advancements in the Flash Platform and multi-touch. It should be an interesting session. Considering how creative Flash designers and developers are, I think this is going to be a feature that will get a lot of interesting use.
Image from Techdu.de
Posted in Adobe, Flash, Flash Player, MAX
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:39 am
This is great news, Ryan! I’ve been waiting for multi-touch in Flash for sometime.
Currently there’s a hack to do multitouch in Flash using a webcam + image recognition on a surface which has shadows, etc, but it’s fantastic to hear there’s going to be native support for multitouch devices
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:44 am
Thanks for the heads-up Ryan.
Do you know when the desktop version of Flash will have a built-in and fully supported API for multi-touch?
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:26 am
This is really great as honestly MultiTouch still works most naturally on mobile due to the iPhone. Being able to pipe in the hardware touch feedback into Flash apps will be a good thing for interactive mobile apps.
Hmmm…wonder what the Silverlight mobile line will be. Yes I said Silverlight mobile. Kind of like saying I saw a Lochness Monster or Bigfoot.
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:45 am
If Flash on mobile is a separate development platform, I will be very disappointed. Please don’t make it another Flash-Lite, roll it into one universal Flash Player please.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 am
@Richard, I’d assume that any multitouch we do on the mobile side will make it into the desktop player in the next version.
With the next version of the Flash Player we’re planning to release not only Mac/Win/Linux but also the mobile runtimes at a single time with one codebase so there’s not a discrepancy in functionality.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Not saying he’s lying… but I recall at last year’s MAX conference he held up an iPhone and said Adobe has Flash working on it and it just has to be approved by Apple’s main “chef”. Same deal here?
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
@Phillip, well I think the main difference is that this doesn’t have to be approved by anyone. We control the Flash Player so we can put whatever APIs we want into it.
How this applies to other devices depends on which ones want to support Flash.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:20 am
I knew this multi touch is interact with two dimension of image. How about the 3d model? Can this stuff rotating XYZ axis?
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:27 am
It’s different in some ways yes. I thought Apple is or tried to trademark/copyright multi-touch.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:19 am
If Flash on mobile is a separate development platform, I will be very disappointed. Please don’t make it another Flash-Lite, roll it into one universal Flash Player please.
July 28th, 2009 at 1:49 am
@Phillip, I agree with Ryan, If apple dont want the great tech because they feel they will make less money, so be it. At a time when the market is opening up, Apple seem to be tightening up! Theres lots of great devices coming from lost of hardware manufacurers. We thank Apple for pioneering the multi-touch revolution but its time to move forward.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:46 am
going to ask this same question on Lee’s blog… but any word if the Multitouch would be applied the Flash platform in general instead of just mobile? The main reason I ask is because of Multitouch installations and TVs… it would be nice to not have to use a Java 3rd party solution. Especially when Flash is making such a great push to become a stable on the TV platform.
I guess this question coincides with ilginc comment… if its one platform then all is well.