Archives For adobe

Last week, or thereabouts, Adobe announced that it was discontinuing support for Flash on mobile devices. This is, by all accounts, a wave of the white flag in Adobe’s battle against Apple and its iOS devices (if only Steve Jobs were alive today to celebrate). I didn’t think too much of that decision: it does make sense to use HTML5 or native apps for dynamic content to be run on mobile devices anyway. And Flash would still continue to run on desktops, where something like 99% of browsers have the plug-in and 90-some% of video is run through Flash. Flash is such a large component of Adobe’s various technologies that I can’t imagine Adobe leaving it behind.

And then Adobe announced today that it was offering Flex to the Apache Software Foundation (managers of the ubiquitous Apache Web server, among other projects).  Apache will need to vote on whether to accept Flex or not. This announcement does surprise me, as Flex is used not only for Flash creation, but also desktop and mobile application development via the AIR platform. Adobe says it will continue to support Flash and Flex, but clearly Adobe is moving more towards HTML5.

An interesting, and rather big, development. One does not normally think of a technology with such a large market share being outright dropped. We shall see how this plays out…

Adobe’s BrowserLab

November 19, 2009

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but in case you haven’t caught this yet, Adobe has created a resource called BrowserLab. First, there’s a Web-based version, which only requires an Adobe account to log in and use. After you’ve done that, enter a URL and you can view how that Web page looks in various browsers. Right now, only browsers on Windows XP (Firefox 2, 3, and 3.5; IE 6, 7, and 8; Chrome 3) and Mac OS X (Safari 3 and 4; Firefox 2, 3, and 3.5) are supported, but it’s a wonderful start. For anyone needing to see how their site renders on other browsers, including operating systems they may not have, this is a wonderful tool. There’s also a way to compare how a page renders on multiple browsers at one time, so that you can get that pixel perfect look. If you’re using Dreamweaver CS4, there’s even a BrowserLab extension, so you can have the same functionality without leaving your Web development tool.

For more, also see this video on Adobe TV.

Tour de Flex

May 30, 2009

A valuable Flex resource, in case you’re not familiar with it, is Adobe’s Tour de Flex. If you’re doing any kind of Flex development, this really is a “must have”. Besides showing off what you can do using Flex (and Adobe AIR), the Tour de Flex provides a single, simple interface for referencing:

  • Flex components (UI, containers, effects, validators, etc.)
  • Services (data and network interactions)
  • Cloud APIs (Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Twitter, etc.)
  • Mapping (Google, Mapquest, Yahoo!)
  • Third-party tools

Most categories also have a “techniques” section, giving specifics for how to accomplish common tasks. There’s tons of sample code that are also visible in action, so you can easily understand how the code works in practice. And, of course, the related language reference is included.

Tour de Flex is available in both an online and desktop version (thanks to Adobe AIR for the latter).