Slides and Demos from FITC San Francisco

Posted on August 23, 2010 by ryanstewart

FITC was an absolutely awesome event. Props to Shawn, Rick and team for another great event. I’m looking forward to them coming back to San Francisco next year. Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. I got some great questions and as I said in the sessions, if you have anything cool you’re doing with mapping and Flash, drop me an email.

Below are the slides I used and I’ve also posted all of the code for the demos I did. I haven’t really cleaned them up at all, but if you have any questions, let me know.

Mapping and Geolocation on the Flash Platform

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New Flash Player with H.264 GPU Decoding for Mac

Posted on August 10, 2010 by ryanstewart

Thibault Imbert just blogged about the release of Flash Player 10.1.82.76, which includes support for H.264 GPU decoding on the Mac.

You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature. For more details about it, Tinic already posted about this.

Some of you may remember talk of a Flash Player “Gala” that was put out as a beta right before Flash Player 10.1 was released. The GPU decoding didn’t make it into the 10.1 release so we had to wait for a security release to add it. That security release is here and it should make quite a bit of difference for Mac users who are playing H.264 video through Flash Player.

The Problem with Technology Silos and Where Flash/HTML can Lead

Posted on July 20, 2010 by ryanstewart

There is a cool workshop being given by Jamie Kosoy called No Flash? No Problem and he had a great quote in the description:

There’s a long list of common complaints about the use of Flash, but many of the criticisms just aren’t true. Detractors say that Flash isn’t search engine friendly; Screen readers can’t understand Flash content; You can’t deeplink to specific pages…

You know what? They’re wrong. These criticisms are symptoms of misunderstanding by developers on the ways different technologies work together.

I think this is one of the biggest problems that Adobe has. Technology and development choices tends to be borderline religious in nature. And technology in general loves to have good guys and bad guys. That means the communities are very siloed and there is some resistance to incorporating or looking at other technologies. It’s HTML5 versus Flash, Microsoft versus Google, .NET versus Java, etc.

It’s also become a lot harder to be a generalist. Developers get rewarded (at least in terms of attention) for becoming experts in their niche. They’re asked to speak at conferences, they get better gigs, so becoming an expert has direct financial and publicity benefits. Who has time to dive into other technologies when there are so many advantages to drilling down into your own?

Because of that, I don’t think we’re seeing technology at its best. And it’s not limited to Flash. PhoneGap has been very successful by combining the iPhone with HTML/JS. But Flash suffers more than most. There are a lot of great integration points between HTML and Flash. We’ve got the Flex/Ajax bridge for Flex that lets you expose Flash methods to JavaScript and vice versa. We’ve got deep-linking support with SWFAddress that uses JavaScript and Flash. There are a lot of integration points but they don’t seem well publicized or well used. And there are no shortage of areas where Flash can augment JS/HTML to solve problems. File uploading, Webcam/Mic support, and charting.

But I also think Adobe is at fault. I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job of making it easy to integrate Flash and HTML. Even now internally you hear things like “HTML strategy”, or “HTML versus Flash” and I haven’t heard a lot of talk about how we’re going to take what we know about RIAs and web apps and apply that to both Flash and HTML.

But I think that’s changing. So part of the post is to give heart. We recently had a big re-organization and most of the Creative Suite web tools and the Platform (Flash/AIR/Flex,etc) are together in one business unit. I think that means you’re going to see a lot of Flash-knowledge applied to our HTML tools and hopefully you’ll see a lot more about using Flash and JavaScript together so we don’t need sessions like Jamie’s a year from now.

With the web design tools and developer tools in one place, I’m looking forward to talking a lot more about rich web solutions that provide some innovative examples of technology working together and encouraging HTML/JS developers to look at Flash where appropriate and Flash developers to think about HTML/JS when it makes sense. The easier we can make that for developers the more success we’ll have and the better applications we’ll see.

I Hate That We’ve Gone Native

Posted on July 9, 2010 by ryanstewart

I love the web. I love web development, I love web applications, and most importantly I loved where we were going with web applications. I was obviously a huge proponent of rich Internet applications and capturing a better user experience inside of the browser. Combine a great user experience with all of the good things about running in the browser (deployment, ubiquity, cross-platform, free publishing) and I thought that was a winning combination.

Then the App Store came along. Now everything is about standalone mobile applications. It feels like the web has taken a backseat as developers plunge head first into building native applications and users download them in droves. What bugs me the most is that I’m the same way. Most of the applications I use on my phone have perfectly good browser equivalents but I use the native app.

Dancing With Wolves

So what the hell happened? I think it comes down to two things. One, the app store provided a much better economic model for developers. One problem with the web was the downward pressure it put on the economics of content. Actual dollars were replaced with eyeballs and people started giving away the content and making money on advertising. (Think about how this affects Google, the ultimate web company; With revenue driven by advertising, they get a cut. With revenue driven by the App Store, Apple gets a cut.) With the App Store, developers can go back to charging directly for stuff they create instead of giving it away. It’s also insanely easy. They don’t have to worry about taking a credit card, setting up payments, or anything else that developers don’t want to worry about. They just have to build software, set a price, and the checks come in. That’s incredibly compelling. Especially if you’re doing development in your free time as a hobby. Now you can easily get paid for it without having to do any of the business tasks that might bog you down if you tried to do it on your own. That frictionless entry has changed the game for a lot of developers and created a huge supply of native mobile applications.

But that doesn’t explain the consumer demand for applications. I think that lies in user experience of applications. Prior to the explosion in mobile apps, we were getting close to a native-like user experience with RIAs in the browser. The components were better, the user interactions like drag-and-drop were appearing, and we were tackling problems like offline access directly in the HTML5 spec. Even the browsers were one-upping each other to be faster so we could get closer to native performance. The gap between a desktop experience and an in-browser experience was closing quickly.

Then quality mobile devices came along and changed everything. Instead of a mouse pointer we were dealing with fingers. Instead of worrying about offline access we had a ton of new functions on the phone including built-in GPS, accelerometer, camera, and a compass. The fastest and best (and in some cases only) way to take advantage of these new features was with native applications. Furthermore, the web experience was very much stuck in the old “pointer” mode. Mobile Safari on the iPhone made HUGE improvements to the mobile browsing experience, but nearly all of the websites were built for big screens and mouse pointers. Using the mobile browser on the iPhone (or any smartphone) is a lot of zooming and dragging. Even worse, some of the things we worked so hard on when it came to RIAs, like drag-and-drop, didn’t work the same way (or at all) and became more of an annoyance than a great feature.

So almost overnight all of the user interface paradigms the web had moved towards were rendered useless for this generation of mobile browsers. There were some initial attempts at fixing the issue, the best example is iUI by Joe Hewitt, but most people moved towards native apps. With better access to all of the new features, who could blame them?

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

So what does this mean for Flash developers? To be honest, I’ve been a little nervous. There is a huge drive to get Flash on mobile devices when the world seems to be crazy about apps. If you want to build apps with Flash, you can do so with AIR for Android (and eventually other platforms). But I don’t want apps. I want the web. Up to now, a lot of the interest/debate has focused on consuming basic content in Flash. People want Flash on their devices so they can watch video and play games. But we were making huge progress on in-browser RIAs with Flash. I want that momentum back in mobile form.

But what if we can revolutionize the in-browser mobile application experience the way Flash helped revolutionize RIAs on the PC? There is already an undercurrent of anti-native sentiment in the development community. Take a look at Sencha Touch, which is a fantastic looking mobile application framework designed specifically for i-devices and the mobile browser. And their first marketing campaign is even better, declaring the “end of native” at WWDC.

That’s exactly what the Flash community should be striving for. What’s so great about native? The performance? The user interface? Those are both things we can overcome with better technology and better design. Is it that it’s so easy to make money? Then the web is ripe for a better business model. The biggie is feature access. But here’s where Flash has always led the pack. We’ve had camera/microphone access forever and have always led the way in expanding the functionality the browser could take care of. If we can follow that trajectory on mobile then Flash developers are in a great position to make mobile browser apps a reality.

And that’s what I’m excited about. Screw native. I’m a web developer.

Watching the World Cup with ESPN3 and Flash

Posted on June 11, 2010 by ryanstewart

If you’re a citizen of the Internet, you probably know that the World Cup kicked off today. If you follow me on Twitter you know I’m not a huge soccer fan, but I am a fan of global events like this so I’ll definitely be keeping it on in the background. I may even be hitting one of the local bars at some point to drink way too early and watch. But mostly I’ll be watching it online and ESPN3 has all of the world cup action streaming along with stats, info, and anything else you could ask for. And it’s all powered by Flash.

My colleague, Jens Loeffler has a great writeup on the app and the experience. It’s all powered by the Flash Platform and Flash Media Server. You get multiple audio channels (so you can listen in Spanish, which I think is the best way to listen to goals being scored) as well as picture-in-picture and real time highlights that appear along the timeline so you can go back and see the cool moments. It’s a really great showcase of Flash and how the whole platform comes together to provide an excellent viewing experience.

Flash on soccer fans!

Testing Battery Life and Performance with Flash Player on the Nexus One

Posted on May 24, 2010 by ryanstewart

When I did my video of various bits of Flash content running on the Nexus One, the overwhelming theme that kept coming up was battery life. I know battery life is something that both users and Flash developers are curious about. Flash provides access to a wealth of rich content. Video, games, and animation are all things that are much more processor intensive than rendering static images and text. In general, Flash content’s impact on battery life is comparable to other similar multimedia technologies. Where Flash really shines though, is that it uses the same amount of battery as other technologies, while providing a much richer experience with significantly better performance.

With all of the questions I wanted to provide some numbers about battery life but didn’t think that my rudimentary tests would be very good so I asked Vinay Ramani, the group product manager for mobile runtimes if his team had any data. These are very early initial tests but I thought they were worth sharing. You’ll be seeing more in-depth stress tests from us soon but hopefully these early numbers give you an idea of the fairly small impact that Flash Player in the browser has on battery life.

These are pretty close to clean-room tests. The team hooked up the meters and performed each test under a strict set of conditions:

Wi-Fi – off
3G – on
OTA Push – off
Volume – on, at one notch
Bluetooth – off
Only browser is loaded, nothing else
3G, lying flat on a table

Also, keep in mind that this is ALL done in software. Hardware acceleration is coming down the road but we wanted to make sure that this thing ran lean and mean in software without hardware acceleration at first. We also have ways that developers can control how SWF content loads on their pages so they can give certain SWF files priority and the Flash Player will give those a higher percentage of the resources. This should result in a smoother browsing experience.

Video

Video is probably the thing I get asked the most about with respect to battery life and it’s a good thing to compare because since both Flash Player and the Nexus One’s native player support H.264 you can get a good feel for how the battery life stacks up between native H.264 and H.264 video played through Flash Player. The team used the same YouTube video, one encoded at H.264 baseline level 2.1 at 30 fps with a resolution of 480 x 270. They did two sets of tests, one was on full brightness and the other was on half brightness. Then they just kept playing the video over and over again.

On full brightness, the Nexus One without Flash Player got 3 hours and 45 minutes. Playing the video through Flash Player gave a battery life of 3 hours and 8 minutes. Not a big dropoff. At half brightness it was even better. The Nexus One without Flash got 3 hours 56 minutes and the Flash version got 3 hours and 31 minutes. Just a 10.5% change, which isn’t bad at all considering everything Flash Player does.

Gaming

As you can see from the Flash/non-Flash tests, video is pretty intensive no matter what. What was even better was the battery life around games. There wasn’t a good way to test non-Flash versus Flash, but the team took a couple of popular Flash games, Tic-Tac-Toe and Alchemist, and played them until the battery died.

Tic-Tac-Toe lasted 6 hours and 49 minutes while the device could play Alchemist on the Nexus One for 7 hours and 7 minutes. While they aren’t intense 3D games, that’s pretty spectacular battery life and this was on full screen brightness. If you’re a game developer you can be sure that people playing your Flash game are going to be able to play it for a loooong time.

Animation

Let’s also quickly talk about HTML5 and Flash Player on mobile devices both in terms of performance and battery life. The team used the exploding balls test from Cameron Adams and tested the Canvas versions and the Flash versions. This one is a little tricky because part of the impact on battery life is how many CPU cycles are being used. And the higher the frame rate, the more CPU content is going to use. So it’s tough to compare HTML5 and Flash content directly because right now HTML5 content just doesn’t run very well on devices. The canvas example runs at 6.7 frames per second while the Flash version runs at about 24 frames per second. The difference between those ends up being minimal even though Flash has so many more frames per second. With the canvas test you get about 3.1 hours of battery life and with Flash Player you get 2.9 hours of battery life. A difference of about 12 minutes. We’re going to be doing some more exact tests around this where we equalize frames per second, so you should see some dramatic improvements once the test can be normalized.

This is just a sample of some of the early numbers that we’re getting. As I said, we’ll have some more detailed tests soon, but this should show that the hit for running richer content isn’t as big as one would think. The teams have done an absolutely phenomenal job of creating a runtime that performs on par with the desktop player and doesn’t sacrifice much at all in the way of battery life. If you’re a Flash developer, the exact same things that got you excited about Flash Player on the desktop now apply to mobile devices. The mobile world is your oyster Flashers.

Now Flash on.

Slides and Demo from Mapping/Geolocation talk at Flash and the City

Posted on May 14, 2010 by ryanstewart

I gave a presentation on Mapping and Geolocation with the Flash Platform today at Flash and the City. Below I’ve embedded the slides and you can download the PDF here. When I get some downtime today I’ll be uploading my demos as well.

Mapping and Geolocation with the Flash Platform

View more presentations from ryanstewart.

Examples of Flash Content Running on Android

Posted on May 10, 2010 by ryanstewart

On Friday I gave the Keynote at Flash Camp Seattle and as part of that keynote I tried to show off Flash Player 10.1 running on Nexus One. Unfortunately the demo didn’t go well and it got some attention around the web. I’ve had a great experience with Flash on my Nexus One but in this case I was running an interim Flash Player build, one I probably should not have installed, and one that I definitely should not have used for any public demos

After I saw Jeff’s blog post, I sat down, upgraded my Flash Player, and went through and tested some of the sites I use on a regular basis. The experience was fantastic. Everything from the Eco Zoo to the NHL video site runs almost flawlessly. While it won’t make up for my mistake at Flash Camp, I recorded a video so people could see an experience that will be much closer to the final experience with Flash Player on Android.

It’s been cool to see so many Flash sites work on mobile devices. However because there is such a variety of Flash content out on the web, it’s important to understand that not all of it is going to run on devices like the Nexus One, both because of lower hardware capabilities of devices and because of user interface design.

A lot of people are clearly interested in Flash Player on mobile devices. It’s a big issue, and I feel terrible that my unpreparedness ended up being a strike against Flash on mobile devices. We’ll be releasing a public version of Flash Player 10.1 at Google I/O and would love to hear how your Flash sites perform. You can always submit issues by using the open Flash Player bug base.

“We’re Going to Try To Make the Best Tools in the World for HTML5″

Posted on May 5, 2010 by ryanstewart

Kevin Lynch had a Q&A With Brady Forest today at Web 2.0 Expo and addressed a lot of topics including HTML5. As an Adobe employee, I’m kind of excited about what we’ll be able to do with HTML5. Who knows more about drawing APIs and interactive web content than Adobe? Now that HTML5 has started to coalesce a little bit, I think you’ll see us bring a lot of that knowledge to bear as we do build tools that target HTML5. You’ll see some of the early thoughts around that on our Design and Web blog so if you’re interested in that, I encourage you to subscribe.

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Click to play

But just as HTML5 evolves, Flash is going to evolve as well and there are a lot of cool plans for the next generation of the Flash Platform. I think it’s a pretty exciting time to be a web developer no matter which technology you choose.

Hands-On Review of Android Multi-touch Tablet