Adobe today announced the Open Screen Project, supported by a group of industry leaders.
“The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIRâ„¢ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes.”
And here are the great infos:
- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
“As a long time strategic partner of Adobe, we are pleased to help launch the Open Screen Project and applaud Adobe’s move toward removing barriers to adoption of Flash technology in the mobile ecosystem. Nokia will continue to deploy Flash runtime technologies on our devices,†said Lee Williams, Senior Vice President, Nokia Devices Software. “Nokia has a long history of pioneering the deployment of Flash technology in the mobile market and we look forward to exploring future opportunities with Adobe AIR for devices. Today’s announcement will help spur a new generation of rich Internet experiences on mobile devices.â€Â
Press release here. Here is a FAQ. This is huge for mobile !!!
Alessandro
[...] Scott Janousek Alessandro Pace [...]
[...] Y todo esto con la colaboración de nombres como Cisco, Intel, LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung o Sony Ericsson. ¡Y Nokia! [...]
Uhm… not sure how to read this: specifications were already available, removing restrictions concerns only those that licensed them from Adobe; even under DCMA it is perfectly legal to reverse engineer protocol formats for the purpose of intercommunicating with technologies.
Flash, Air and whatever are still closed, and even worse isolated from a device point of view. There are some nice tricks like Kuneri and other but they turn the FlashLite application into Nokia esclusive. With the policy of burning Flash into ROM, they help created an “ecosystem” (maybe is it time Adobe upgrade/update buzz words) with a high level of incompatibility between releseas even between the same version (for example: in Japan phones with FlashLite 3 cannot playback FLV video and are limited to 100Kb of heap memory).
So, it looks like a desperate move to make more inroad into developers and giving the player for free, to OEM only, (should have done this long time ago) is only because companies (i.e.: Nokia) are questioning why they should pay licenses for another runtime and others like Apple, are showing that it is possible to live without Flash of any kind.
Let’s see what happen, but I believe it is too little too late.
Ciao Emanuele,
the interesting part is the road map of the platform which from a developing point of view is the most interesting news.
Alessandro
Emanuele,
That’s a really negative response to this news! Personally I think it represents a major step forward in terms of opening up the marketplace and easing some of the distribution restrictions that have previously hampered the Flash for Mobile marketplace.
In terms of being too little too late I can assure you there is an underlying strategy behind Adobe’s mobile policies and recent changes within the internal setup of the company should improve the mobile products. As for the iPhone, while it’s a fantastic device which has raised the bar for user experience it’s a massive leap to conclude that one proprietary device spells the death knell for Flash. Just look at the recent Sony Ericsson announcement if you still doubt Flash’s practicality for creating handset user layers.
Chris
It’s not a desesperate move…
I remember an Adobe evanlegist used these words (or something like this) : We, Adobe, want to see Flash in EVERYTHING with a screen.
I was also sad when I came to Flash Lite and saw Nokia everywhere (I won’t talk about SE phones which don’t support FLite applications)
But I think this news is another step, and a good one.
I can’t wait to dev for everything with a screen.
I don’t think my response is negative, but I certainly believe it is just a bit of more smoke in air (not that AIR…). The specifications have been already available for years, even if not in official format, I guess the Alex’s SWF reference speak for all. I don’t see why publishing file formats will drive to more adoption of the player, infact most UIQ3 devices don’t have any form of FL. I completely agree that iPhone is only one device (but Sony Ercisson not adopting FL either are much more…) but the attention Adobe and its bloggers gave to the lack of FL on the iPhone tells a lot of things. In my humble opinion, it is another attempt to look more “open” without really opening anything. How many time you have heard of “We gave Tamarin to the community” but: without a compiler so pretty useless, after two years no project is using it, I don’t see any major browser even interested in integrating such a marvellous piece of code (beside Mozilla, but they still have a long way integrating it). If you want to produce more FlashLite nothing has stopped you from doing it until now. It is interesting to notice that outisde Japan, for example, other technologies based arond FlashLite like FlashCast, received only a big yawn.