Category Archives: adobe

adobe, apple, iphone, mobile, software development

Apple lifts restrictions on app development tools, publishes review guidelines

3 Comments

Apple has lifted its restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS (iPhone and iPad) apps, in a statement published today:

We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year. In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

In addition, Apple says it is publishing the App Store Review Guidelines in the hope that this will make the approval process more transparent.

Good news I guess; but why? Maybe in part because the restrictions made little sense and were possibly unenforceable; and in part because Android’s popularity is putting pressure on Apple to be more developer-friendly. In practice, some apps that you would have thought breached the requirements apparently made it through the approval process; and those publishers of cross-platform tools which kept their nerve have their patience rewarded.

But what about Adobe? Apple’s development restrictions seems to trigger a significant change of direction, with work on the Packager for iPhone stopped, Android devices issued to employees, and evangelism for Android in Adobe blogs and tweets.

Since Apple is not changing its mind about runtimes, but only about development tools, this change of mind does not enable Flash on the iPhone; but I guess Adobe could now revive its cross-compilation work. On the other hand, Apple’s pronouncements have caused disruption for Adobe and perhaps served more as a wake-up call: this is a closed platform with one owner and therefore a risky target for investment.

adobe, google, mobile, software development

Getting started with Android – a few hassles

3 Comments

I’m setting myself up for Android development, and my HTC Desire arrived today. It is a lot of fun, though I have had a few hassles, partly because my device is locked to Orange and of course I wanted to upgrade to Android 2.2 “Froyo” right away. There are also a few issues with the Orange branding on a Desire, including the absence of Google Talk and applications like Orange Maps that you probably will not use. I went through a series of steps to unbrand the phone and install Android 2.2.

It is an odd situation, where mobile operators work hard at adding their branding and applications to the device, only for canny users to work out how to remove them. Branding also delays updates. If Android is updated, the operator has to receive the updated operating system image from the phone manufacturer, HTC in this case, add its customizations, and then apparently sent it back to HTC for packaging.

My guess is that if an operator decided to ship the standard Android image it would be a selling point and attract more customers. I even have a catchy name to offer: “Naked Desire”. How about it?

Still, all went well with my hacks; and eventually I was up and running with Android 2.2 and of course Flash 10.0:

image

That said, I had an annoying issue with Android Market. I selected an application, it would appear to start installing, but stuck on “Starting download” or “Downloading” with no actual progress.

It turns out this is a common problem – see here for one of many discussions. A popular fix is to change your account from someone@gmail.com to someone@googlemail.com, but this did not apply to me. I discovered the reason, which is that my wifi is behind Microsoft’s ISA Server. Android Market requires TCP outbound connections on port 5228. I configured ISA accordingly, and after cancelling and restarting the downloads they succeeded.

Finally, I wanted a screen grab or two to decorate this post. I used the method described here, fine for developers but not ideal for casual users.

image

I’ll report more impressions shortly, including no doubt the inevitable iPhone comparison.

.net, adobe, development, flash, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Silverlight versus HTML, Flash – Microsoft defends its role

2 Comments

Microsoft’s Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms, has defended the role of Silverlight in the HTML 5 era. Arguing that it is natural for HTML to acquire some of the features previously provided by plug-ins – “because some of these features are so pervasive on the web that they are seen by users as fundamentally expected capabilities” – he goes on to identify three areas where Silverlight remains necessary. These are “premium” multimedia which merges video with application elements such as conferencing, picture in picture, DRM, analytics; consumers apps and games; and finally business/enterprise apps.

It is the last of these which interests me most. Becker’s statements come soon after the preview of Visual Studio LightSwitch, which is solely designed for data-driven business applications. Taking the two together, and bearing in mind that apps may run on the desktop as well as in browser, Silverlight is now encroaching on the territory which used to belong to Windows applications. With LightSwitch in particular, Microsoft is encouraging developers who might previously have built an app in Access or Visual Basic to consider Silverlight instead.

Why? Isn’t Microsoft better off if developers stick to Windows-only applications?

In one sense it is, as it gets the Windows lock-in – and yes, this is effective. I’m aware of businesses who are tied to Windows because of apps that they use, who might otherwise consider Macs for all or some of their business desktops. On the other hand, even Microsoft can see the direction in which we are travelling – cloud, mobile, diverse clients – and that Silverlight fits better with this model than Windows-only desktop clients.

Another consideration is that setup and deployment issues remain a pain-point for Windows apps. One issue is when it goes wrong, and Windows requires skilled surgery to get some app installed and working. Another issue is the constant energy drain of getting new computers and having to provision them with the apps you need. Microsoft has improved this no end for larger organisations, with standard system images and centralised application deployment, but Silverlight is still a welcome simplification; provided that the runtime is installed, it is pretty much the web model – just navigate to the URL and the app is there, right-click if you want to run on the desktop.

If Microsoft can also establish Windows Phone 7, which uses Silverlight as the runtime for custom apps, the platform then extends to mobile as well as desktop and browser.

The downside is that Silverlight apps have fewer capabilities than native Windows apps. Printing is tricky, for example, though Becker refers to “Virtualized printing” and I am not sure what exactly he means. He also highlights COM automation and group policy management, features that only work on Windows and which undermine Silverlight’s cross-platform promise. That said, via COM automation Silverlight has full access to the local machine giving developers a way of overcoming any limitations if they are willing to abandon cross-platform and browser-hosted deployment.

A winning strategy? Well, at least it is one that makes sense in the cloud era. On the other hand, Microsoft faces substantial difficulties in establishing Silverlight as a mainstream development platform. One is that Adobe was there first with Flash, which has a more widely deployed runtime, works on Android and soon other mobile devices, and is supported by the advanced design tools in Creative Suite. Another is the Apple factor, the popular iPhone and iPad devices which are a spear through the heart of cross-platform runtimes like Silverlight and Flash.

Finally, even within the Microsoft development community Silverlight is a hard sell for many developers. Some us recall how hard the company had to work to persuade Visual Basic 6 developers to move to .NET. The reason was not just stubborn individuals who dislike change – though there was certainly some of that – but also existing investment in code that could not easily be migrated. Both factors also apply to Silverlight. Further, it is a constrained platform, which means developers have to live with certain limitations. It is also managed code only, whereas some of the best developers for both desktop and mobile apps work in C/C++.

I suspect there is division even within Microsoft with regard to Silverlight. Clearly it has wide support and is considered a strategic area of development. At the same time, it is not helpful to the Windows team who will want to see apps that take advantage of new features in Windows 7 and beyond.

Yesterday Windows Phone 7 was released to manufacturing, which means the software is done. Another piece of the Silverlight platform is in place; and I guess over the next year or two we will see the extent to which Microsoft can make it a success.

adobe, flash, professional, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Develop for Adobe Flash/Flex in Amethyst for Visual Studio

2 Comments

SapphireSteel Software is poised to release Amethyst, which lets you develop Flash and Flex applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 or 2010.

Why bother? There’s two aspects to this. One is simply the comfort factor: if you are a .NET developer used to Visual Studio, but now working on Flash or Flex, this could be an easier way in than the Eclipse-based Flash Builder. There is a visual designer, a full-featured debugger, a property inspector with sections for properties, events, effects and styles, for example, and double-clicking an event generates an event handler as you would expect.

The other factor is areas where Amethyst can improve on what Flash Builder offers. One example is ActionScript refactoring, disappointing in Adobe’s product. Amethyst is not brilliant, but does have a few extras including Extract Method, Encapsulate Field and Extract Interface.

image

Another useful feature is that Amethyst can share projects with Flash or Flash Builder. Before you get excited, it does not do the magic you might want, Visual Studio editing of .fla files with embedded ActionScript. It does work reasonably seamlessly though: you can open .fla file in the Flash IDE by clicking within Amethyst.

This would have been even more interesting if Adobe had not added a measure of Flash Builder integration in Flash Professional CS5; and that is the challenge facing SapphireSteel – how to keep up with Adobe’s official development tools.

I’ve only played briefly with Amethyst but although I’ve been impressed with it in some ways, I also found myself missing features in Flash Builder, such as the Connect to Data wizards, and the view state management.

It is early days though; and I would be interested to hear from others who have tried Amethyst on what they do or do not like about it.

Price is not yet stated, but SapphireSteel also offer a Ruby product which is priced at $49 for a basic edition, or $199 for a professional version. Amethyst also comes in two editions so perhaps we will see something similar.

adobe, flash

Render SWF in JavaScript – a solution for Flash on iPhone/iPad?

1 Comment

Looking at the blazing-fast JavaScript in IE9 Preview 4 made me wonder if anyone had tried to write a SWF renderer in JavaScript. SWF is the Adobe Flash file format and a published specification.

Of course someone has. Tobias Schneider has been working on Gordon and built his first full release in June.

image

Gordon is a little behind in terms of version support:

In this build, Gordon can read and parse all valid SWF’s, even if they are compressed with ZLIB, but plays only SWF1 files completely, as well as the most of the SWF2 features.

The Adobe SWF specification is now up to version 10.

It is still an interesting exercise. Consider Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript. What if Adobe did something similar for Flash? In fact, if you look at the Smart Paste “sneak peak” from Adobe Max 09 something like this was demonstrated.

The Flash player includes some proprietary codecs that could not easily be replicated in JavaScript. Still, given such limitations, “Export to HTML 5” would be a nice option to find on some future version of Flash Professional, and would help Adobe’s tools business even if it also dented its ambitions for Flash as the universal runtime.

adobe, flash, professional, software development, Web

SOA, REST and Flash/Flex – why Flash does not PUT

Adobe’s Duane Nickull has an illuminating post on how the Flash player handles REST. Nickull is responding to a post by Malcolm Box in which he complains how hard it is to use Flash with a REST web service. Box observes that Flash cannot send POST, PUT and DELETE requests when running in the browser, and does not send cookies.

Nickull defends the Flash behaviour:

Flash’s HTTP libraries currently support GET and POST. My architectural view of this is that the HTTP libraries only should really support these and not worry about the others.

He also notes that cookies are a poor way to manage state:

Cookies are for the browser and belong in the browser. Having Flash Player able to access cookies would be a mistake in my own opinion. Any logic that is facilitated by a browser should probably be dealt with at the browser layer before Flash Player is used.

Now, I think the comments on REST are important to read if you are engaged in designing a web service, as many of us in these days of cloud+device. There is a kind-of “word on the street” approach to web services which says that REST is good, SOA/SOAP is bad; but in reality it is not so simple, and these distinctions are muddled. REST is arguably a form of SOA, you can do SOAP with REST, and so on.

One factor is that reading data in a web client is far more common than writing data. It is easy to be an advocate of the simplicity of REST if all you are doing is GET.

The question Nickull asks is whether the transport protocol has any business dictating how the data it transports should be processed, for example whether it is an operation to retrieve or to write data:

In an SOA world, the transport functionality (usually implemented using SOAP) should focus on just delivering the message and it’s associated payload(s) to the destination(s), optionally enforcing rules of reliability and security rather than declaring to the application layer processing instructions to the service endpoint.

Read the post for more of the rationale behind this. Maybe, even if you are doing REST, restricting your web service to GET and POST is not such a bad idea after all.

That said, whatever you think about the architectural principles, you may find yourself having to write a browser-hosted Flash client for a service that requires an HTTP verb other than GET or POST. There are ways round it: see this discussion of Amazon S3 (which uses PUT) and Flash for an example.

adobe, open source, professional, web authoring

Day Software: another strategic acquisition for Adobe

Adobe has acquired Day Software, a company which specialises in web content management. Its products include the CRX Java Content Repository and the CQ5 Web Content Management Platform. One of its distinctive features is an emphasis on interaction and collaboration. Day’s chief scientist is Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and well-known for his work on REST (Representational State Transfer).

The acquisition gives Adobe a stronger presence in the open source community, and it will be interesting to see if it influences controversial issues like the fact that the Flash Player is closed source, or that some of Adobe’s open source projects are not as collaborative as they could be.

I suspect though that Adobe is mainly aiming to broaden its technology to encompass web content management and to tie it together with its rich client platform, Flash and AIR. It is a good fit, since it is Java based and should work nicely with the existing LiveCycle pieces. We might also expect integration with Omniture web analytics as well as with the content authoring tools in Creative Suite.

Looks like a sane acquisition to me.

adobe, apple, development, professional, software development

Enterprise app development on Apple iPhone and iPad

2 Comments

Apple’s iPhone is still perceived as primarily marketed to individuals rather than corporates. However, I was interested to see how much Apple is doing to attract corporate developers. First, Apple now supports some basic enterprise-friendly features, such as Microsoft Exchange (with a few caveats), VPN, remote wipe, and the ability to lock down iTunes to some extent. Without these capabilities, the devices would not be acceptable in many environments, making it pointless to consider them for custom applications.

Unfortunately iTunes is still needed for activation, deploying software updates, and installing applications. It is silly that Apple requires business users to install a music library to use its phone, I guess reflecting the device’s history as a music player. It is also a somewhat intrusive application especially on Windows.

If you then want to develop internal applications, you sign up for the iPhone Developer Enterprise Program. At $299 per year this is more expensive than the more general equivalent, but no big deal. Then you have to get a digital certificate from Apple. Next, create one or more “provisioning profiles” that install onto the device and authorize it to run your applications. Applications you create must be signed with your digital certificate. Finally, you can add the signed applications to an iTunes library, and users can then drag them to their iPhone or iPad. It will only run on devices that have the matching provisioning profile installed. Organisations can also revoke applications by revoking the identity used to sign the provisioning profile.

As Adobe pointed out to me, since these apps do not go through Apple’s approval process, there is nothing to stop corporate developers using the Flash Packager for iPhone that is available in Creative Suite 5.

There is more detail on Apple’s iPhone in Business page.

adobe, apple

Why is there so much junk in Apple’s App Store?

2 Comments

After 4 weeks with Apple’s iPhone 4 I’m mainly impressed with everything other than the call quality (I am in a poor signal area for O2). I’ve been exploring the App Store though, and while there are many great apps there, there is also a huge amount of junk. Here’s a review for an app I was looking at:

This app is such a con. The adverts are deliberately put in the most awkward places so they get pressed accidentally; there is no “would you like to make a call” dialog box, nothing, it goes straight to an 090 number and even if you cancel the call instantly you are still charged … Apple should be ashamed for letting this little con artist on to the app store!

Other users report frequent crashes, lost data and so on.

With over 200,000 apps available, it’s not surprising that some are duds. However, given Apple’s insistence on checking every one, I’d expected the overall standard to be higher. Apple cannot easily judge how useful an app is, particularly in a niche area, but things like instability or unfair advertising practices should be caught.

Another odd thing: if you browse the store on the device, you cannot sort by rating, as far as I can tell, making it hard to find the better apps quickly. I guess this could be designed to mitigate the “winner takes all” factor: if one or two apps in a common search category achieve high ratings, it is difficult for newcomers to get noticed sufficiently to drive up their own ratings. Still, give the amount of dross in there, it would help to have this as an option, even if it were not allowed to be the default sort.

The existence of so many poor apps also puts into context the Thoughts on Flash posted by Steve Jobs. I kind-of understand why Apple wants to exclude the Flash runtime from its device platform; but that does not explain the ban on Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, which compiles a Flash application to an iPhone binary. That might make sense if Jobs could point to the consistent high technical standard of iPhone Apps; but that is simply not the case.

adobe, flash, internet, microsoft, professional, software development, web authoring

Big browser and RIA news: Canvas comes to Internet Explorer 9

2 Comments

I’ve just installed the third Internet Explorer Platform Preview (on a virtual machine just in case) and run through a few of the demos. One of the most impressive is Canvas Pad, which demonstrates the HTML 5 Canvas element.

image

Canvas is particularly interesting, since it provides a surface to which you can draw anything you like. Canvas support was not announced at Mix earlier this year, when IE9 was unveiled, and some of us speculated that Microsoft would omit it in order to preserve the value of its Silverlight plugin – though in doing so it would also help Adobe Flash. Well, apparently the IE9 team decided to risk it. Not only is canvas supported; it is also hardware-accelerated:

Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. Hardware accelerated canvas support in IE9 illustrates the power of native HTML5 in a browser.

Is there still value in Silverlight and Flash? There is, for several reasons. A plug-in presents a predictable runtime, insulating the application from browser variations. A plugin will work on browsers that do not yet support Canvas. Further, Silverlight includes the .NET Framework with its rich library, and supports the .NET languages, whereas for HTML5 you have to use JavaScript – though don’t forget Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript, and other similar projects.

Even so, once you have hardware-accelerated Canvas there will be few occasions when you absolutely have to use Flash, Silverlight or Java.

Microsoft is doing the right thing. Crippling IE for the sake of Silverlight would only push users to other browsers, so it would not achieve its goal.

A full list of what is new in IE9 is here. It is shaping up to be the most interesting new IE since version 4.0 back in 1997.