O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications wants be an active participant on mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Adobe engineers put their minds together and delivered a solution to work around the problem of the iPhone browser's lack of support for Flash. If the iPhone Safari browser will not support the Flash player, let's use the Flash tools to compile a native iPhone application (ipa) which lives directly on the device. This initiative now gives the opportunity for ActionScript developers to develop applications for the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Adobe have spent a lot of cycles / years nudging Apple that Flash should be on the iPhone. Apple have firmly just said no, and despite the answer, Adobe keep expecting them to cave due to public demand. The problem with this logic is that Apple won't give in. Let's break this down into two parts: First, Don't poke the sleeping giant. Secondly, just because it's easy, doesn't mean its successful.

Adobe has announced that the browser based Flash player 10.1 will soon be running on every major mobile platform (Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, WebOS) except Apple's iPhone. (See my opinion on Apple here). They also announced that although Apple...

We sat down with Chris Griffith and Kevin Schmidt to discuss the big MAX announcements and give our take on what they mean. Topics covered include: Flash for the iPhone, Flash 10.1 on mobile, TVs, and netbooks.

Adobe MAX 2009 is underway and yesterday during the keynote Adobe announced Flash 10.1 for mobile phones. It's a new runtime with improved performances and memory usage with support for new mobile platforms such as the Palm Web OS and...

Inside RIA's Rich Tretola reports on a treasure trove of links. Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.

One of the greatest frustrations when building RIAs for mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Safari, Webkit for the Android and Palm, and even IE for Windows Mobile phones is the lack of functional testing tools. Yet if you are making a RIA that is complicated or used for critical work, it behooves you to develop some approach to testing that is not completely manual. Furthermore, if you are serious about performance, you need to make sure your application is working functionally so you can create performance profiles that reflect a solid working application.

With the growing popularity of smart phones like the iPhone and Google’s Android, as well as new players on the market like Palm’s Pre, the idea of having an always-connected general computational device is finally being realized. Today’s smart phones are not only used for making calls, taking pictures, and listening to music; now people are using their phones to do business, build presentations, make quick edits to important files, and even surf the web. Yet contrary to what the commercials would have you believe, few smart phones provide a web experience equivalent even to a netbook.

Most of you (43%) agreed with me that Android would be the first mobile OS to be rocking Flash Player 10. Next we have 18% voting for Windows Mobile and 18% for iPhone. There doesn't appear to be much hope...

After months of being gagged and leashed, iPhone developers are now free to talk about the iPhone SDK. Apple has dropped their NDA and opened the flood gates to those new developers who thirst for iPhone programming knowledge. I feel that Actionscript developers will have an easier transition to Cocoa-Touch than developers coming from other languages. Being a long time Actionscript developer myself I found it easy to port from Flash to iPhone. Further down in this article I show how I built my app in Flash and the steps I took to port it over to Cocoa. But first, here's why I believe the learning curve is very low for Actionscript developers.

With almost 200 voters (as of yesterday morning), in our developers minds, iPhone is the clear winner in the mobile platform. This is not surprising to me as iPhone has been such an overwhelming success and is quickly becoming a...

If you've ever developed an iPhone application, or thought about developing an iPhone application, or thought, gee, I'd love to develop an iPhone application if it wasn't for that silly, restrictive, nonsensically awful Apple NDA, then this web app is for you. Webmonkey started an online forum charting the history of Apple's descent into Evil. It's conveniently available as an embed-able timeline (below.)

Write a blog entry about Curl and enter to win an iPhone 3G

It might be debatable whether a native app written Objective-C is an RIA, but most of the are internet connected at least part of the time and lots of the coolest iPhone apps I'm using run right in Safari on the iPhone. It's not however debatable whether or not iPhone has raised the bar for slick and aesthetically pleasing UIs and if you're going to develop a web app or native app for the iPhone you need to meet that bar to succeed. On that note here are a couple resources to make your iPhone apps look like Apple's very own apps!

The second annual iPhoneDevCamp has just started here at the Adobe offices in San Franciso. There's about 300 people and I think most of them are planning to build an app or at least hack a little bit. The even runs from Friday night until Sunday night. The highlight of the even is certainly going to be the Hackathon where developers and designers will be splitting off into teams and trying to build an iPhone by Sunday afternoon for the grand demo. This year's event has 60 sponsors as well!

So it's finally happened, and deep down, we all knew it was coming...the 3G iPhone was announced at the Apple WWDC keynote this morning. Among the new features confirmed today, Steve Jobs also announced that the new iPhone will feature built-in GPS, as well as a more robust iPhone developer SDK including access to powerful development tools such as Cocoa Touch, their development framework for building applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

iPhoneDevCamp 2 has been announced and will be taking place August 1-3rd in San Francisco at the Adobe Offices. The event is inspired by BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, and MacHack, to develop Cocoa Touch and web based applications for iPhone and iPod touch. This follows the first iPhoneDevCamp held at Adobe Systems in San Francisco, July 2007.