Today Adobe released Flash Player 11.1 into the Android Market, fulfilling its promise to support Flash on Ice Cream Sandwich. Adobe is finally burying mobile Flash, a standard that has had one foot in the grave since Steve Jobs passed a death sentence on it when the original iPhone came to market.
As of now, the Flash Player update will only be available to users with Ice Cream Sandwich devices. Basically, that means anybody with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which was released through Verizon this week and has already sold out at most stores.
According to several reports, Flash for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be ready by the end of 2011. This will be the final release of mobile Flash as future versions of Android will support it. At this time that only means that Samsung Galaxy Nexus users do not get Flash and since that device (or Ice Cream Sandwich) is not yet widely released, Flash for new Android device users is not likely to be a problem.
The question becomes: does mobile Flash really matter? For Android in general, the answer is yes, Flash does matter. For Android 4.0? Maybe. It all depends on how many Android Gingerbread users get the ICS push within the next couple of months and how much they rely on Flash. Most Gingerbread devices will eventually see ICS updates. Yet, with HTML5 being pushed by developers, this is a fork that Android users will hardly notice.
A former manager and engineer of Flash at Adobe said today that when the true smartphone revolution came in 2007 with the announcement of the iPhone is 2007, Adobe ignored it. Carlos Icaza co-founded Ansca Mobile, the creators of the Corona SDK, left Adobe in 2007 when his call for embracing the touchscreen smartphone evolution was ignored by Adobe executives.
"They ignored it until it was too late," Icaza said. "They were not looking out for the best interest of developers." According to Icaza, Adobe chose to focus at the time on apps for feature phones. Adobe's lack of foresight put the company in catch up mode and ultimately headaches and ridicule of the mobile industry leading to the news that Flash for mobile will soon die.
The Web is singing this morning. The coming death of Flash on mobile devices has made a lot of tech pundits and developers very happy. There is a big fat "I told you so" coming from all corners the of Internet while all Adobe can do is quietly sit back and rue the day the original iPhone was announced.
There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.
Two weeks ago, Apple launched iOS 5 and along with it came Photo Stream, the photo-syncing feature of iCloud. With it, Mac and iOS users can syncronize their photos across the desktop, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
For those who aren't thrilled with Photo Stream, Adobe launched an alternative today called Carousel. The new applications for Mac and iOS allow users to centralize their photo library in the cloud, making them accessible across devices. The software also syncs edits that are made regardless of which device they were made on, and also keeps a back-up copy of the original.
Adobe is making big news on the first day of its Adobe MAX conference. First they announced that they are buying Web font pioneerTypeKit. Then came the news that they have acquired framework provider Nitobi and its powerful PhoneGap code. In keeping with the theme of mobile innovation, the company has announced Adobe Touch Apps, a family of six applications to enable creative professionals to produce dynamic work that will run anywhere.
Touch Apps will be part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. That includes Photoshop, which Adobe will release as a mobile app that will work with a finger or a stylus. The six Adobe Touch Apps will be able to run across devices and be transferred into the company's Creative Suite CS5.5. Check out what Adobe has in store after the jump.
In its ongoing quest to help publishers and designers adapt print-style layouts to the Web across devices, Adobe has admittedly run into a few limitations. As powerful as HTML and CSS are, they don't yet offer the means to create layouts with unlimited flexibility like print designers can.
Not content to settle for what's possible, Adobe has recommended some specifications to the W3C that will allow CSS to create much more fluid, flexible layouts.
Newspapers and magazines still clinging to hopes that tablets will help revitalize their businesses have something to look forward to this Fall. That's when Apple with launch Newsstand, a marketplace for digital publications that will be rolled out with iOS 5.
Adobe announced today that its Digital Publishing Suite will be ready when iOS 5 and Newsstand go live. Using DPS, media companies will now be able to publish directly into Newsstand, just as they can now publish stand-alone apps for iPads and other tablet devices.
Adobe has launched an application for iOS that lets you create PDF files from an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. CreatePDF is not the first app to offer this functionality, but it is Adobe's first official crack at enabling PDF creation on iOS devices.
The app lets you turn common document files like Microsoft Office, Open Office, Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and a variety of images into Adobe's propriety PDF format. The company promises document quality comparable to that produced by Acrobat for dekstops.
Today, Adobe is launching a new tool called Adobe Edge which will allow creative professionals to design animated Web content using Web standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Not Flash.
Aimed to coexist with Adobe Flash, not replace it, the Web design software is Adobe's big bet on how it will continue to solidify its position as a top player in the infrastructure of the modern Web, especially as the Web goes increasingly mobile. In this new mobile context, the Web has become a more hostile environment for Flash, which has no place on Apple mobile devices, and likely never will.
