Flash Player 10.1
This release of the flash player sees the first realisation of the Open Screen Project whereby all the partners aim to bring the interactive web to all devices. And which better platform than the Flash Platform to implement this. This is why this version of Flash Player 10.1 will be available for all major OS’s as well as smartphones. Yes – that means Flash will be playing games,  movies, adding interactivity and more to web pages right on your mobile. This is a major step forward in using the internet on our smartphone, for all except one major player in the field, the Apple iPhone.
My prediction: Mobile will finally have the full web and this includes them in the web application target market. But the mobile internet far outweighs the PC internet market. This will mean websites will be optimised for mobile out the box. In fact it will become a standard to have a resizing version of your application so that it becomes easier to read on smaller screens. Since the device capabilities can be read in Flash, it would be able to adjust to whether its run on a mobile device or a PC.
Apple has decided not to have the Flash Player in its Safari mobile web browser. The mobile device sector is changing rapidly, specially with the introduction of Android. So my prediction is that either Apple brings Flash Player to its mobile Safari or the iPhone becomes the next “windows mobile” of its day.

Flash CS5 Professional compile to iPhone application
Developers will be able to compile a native iPhone application straight from Flash Professional CS5. So it is an iPhone application but created using Flash Professional. No longer do we need a Mac to create the application either, we can as easily create it on Windows. We can even create it using our beloved ActionScript 3 rather than Objective C. This does not mean that the application wont abide by the iPhone security rules, they still apply as they do to any other iPhone application. In many cases Flash allows certain features that break the rules for Apple’s security policies for iPhone applications – these features will be disabled when compiling to an iPhone application. An example of this is the way that the application will not be able to load an external .swf file. Another example is that writing to the camera is allowed but not displaying photos from the camera roll.
My prediction: This innovaiton will be welcomed by Flash developers. In the past writing an iPhone app meant learning a whole new language. This may even turn out to be the de-facto method for creating iPhone applications. We will definitely see more web applications being offered as iPhone apps, and it may become standard to offer Flash web applications as iPhone applications too.

AIR 2.0
Adobe Integrated Runtime(AIR) has been a great success. By January 2009 it had been installed more than 100 million times, and is currently around the 250 million mark. The big announcement regarding AIR is that it will be deployed on mobile as well. It will be installed just like a regular mobile application, and will appear to the user like a regular application. AIR 2.0 has more hooks into the native OS, and has the ability to create a native OS installer.
My prediction: The previous prediction applies here as well.  It will become standard to have a mobile app to go with every AIR application. This will be another method of  gathering stats, with the ability to get more information from users when they connect from AIR applications.
Because mobile devices offers more in terms interactivity, this could mean added functionality for web applications, for example: the poke feature on facebook could become a tickle (via vibrate) feature on the mobile version.

Summary
Now that Flash is going mobile it means we can finally have the full web experience on our mobile devices. This will complete the full circle of  devices to which we can port our web applications. So this will mean develop once and deploy once to let users access your application from Windows, Mac, Linux, your smartphone browser, as a native app iPhone app, or as an AIR application, straight from the website!  Now all we need are great ideas!

Nowadays it’s almost impossible to write an article about mobile phones without mentioning the very successful iPhone. Apple had practically turned the mobile  industry upside down with its touch screen device. Some people will argue to the death about how the iPhone, or the “Jesus Phone” as some call it, is the best thing since sliced bread – and nobody can argue against how successful this device has become. But I am predicting a total onslaught of Android devices within 2 years. The Android army of phones will be everywhere you look and you will not be able to visit any cellphone store without running into at least 50 different phones running this OS. OK – maybe that is going a bit far but I think you get the message and already we are seeing signs of it. At the time of writing this article there are 16 official Android devices. How will this army of Android devices be created you ask ? Enter the Open Handset Alliance.

The Open Handset Alliance was formed in 2007 and currently has 47 members. It is a consortium of technology and mobile companies all dedicated to bringing us better mobile experiences, with Android being their first project . There are some big names amongst the 47 members, including Google, Intel, Nvidia, HTC, Asus, SonyEriccson, LG, Ebay. With so many big names dedicated to Android development, it is bound to be amongst the top mobile device OS’s. You can read more about this argument here, let me get to the Android architecture.

Android is a Linux based software stack. On top of the Linux kernel layer lies a layer for the system libraries such as SQLite, SSL, OpenGL, etc. This layer also houses the Android runtime, which runs the Dalvik Virtual Machine. On top of this there’s the Application Framework, housing the managers like the Activity Manager, Window Manager, etc. Then finally there is the application layer, which is the layer we are most interested in.

Android applications can consist of different sections, namely Activities, Services, Broadcast Recievers and Content Providers. Activities form the User Interface(UI) part of the application, Services run in the background similar to RSS feed readers checking for updates. Broadcast Receivers just listen for particular system broadcasts, for example , when the battery is low. Content Providers just provide content to any asking application , for example your application asking the contact book to provide the users contacts for use within your application. We will mostly be concerned with Activities.

Activities were designed to be totally integrated with one another. What I mean is that Activities can call one another and pass data to one another, basically  like an event driven system, but on a system wide level. An application is thus a group of Activities passing Intents to one another. It is then possible to include , lets say, a Google Maps Activity into your application by passing a Google Maps Intent to it and waiting for a result from it. It would seem to the end user that you created a Google Maps section to your app. I think this is pretty powerful.

To get started with creating these applications you need the free Android SDK, Apple iPhone developers need to register first($99!). Then you going to need an IDE, there is an Eclipse plugin, the Android Development Tools(ADT) plugin that has everything including the latest stable SDK. You don’t immediately need a phone to test on as ADT comes with an Android emulator that you can debug and test with but you will eventually need a phone to properly test with. ADT is pretty awesome as it comes with many tools to tell you exactly whats happening on the phone, which threads are running,it has code completion, wizards to quickly create sub classes and much more. It took me less than 30 minutes to get a “Hello World” application running on the Android emulator from the time I installed the ADT!

Since ActionScript 3 is a lot like Java I could easily jump in even though there were a few syntax differences – but after about 2 days and the help of ADT I had a basic application drawing a ball bouncing round the screen. But that was only the beginning and have rewritten sections of the game many times. Now after two weeks of lots of learning I have created the game and have it running on my phone. It is still a prototype and even though it needs weeks more spit and polish, after demonstrating the game I have gotten the thumbs up to turn it into a real game which we will be registering in the Android market.  There is still a lot to learn from this wonderful framework but the Android groups have been great help, as well as all the Android forums and of course, the Reference guide which ships with the SDK. It has been a challenge to get to grips with this entirely new development area but it was far easier than imagined it would be. I spent about 10 times longer getting to know Flash, and that was with people available to help me.

What about my experience using the phone? I can honestly say I am now more connected than ever before. My email, both gmail and exchange, is pushed to the phone. My Twitter application runs in the background constantly fetching  tweets, while my Facebook application gets all my buddies’ status updates to me as often as I want to see them. News and weather is updated all the time. My calendar and contacs are synchronised between my phone and my mobile. I never get lost anymore, maps are always available and my Gtalk status is always “available” and running in the background, unlike on some other phones Oh, and it makes phone calls as well.

I will follow up with another article of my findings, good and bad, this time focusing on the actual Android game development.