Rather than explaining what makes Flash 10 so impressive, here are a few links:
Things are just starting to get interesting.
Recently I was at an Adobe conference in Sydney. The conference was aimed at media professionals and was all about the Flash Media Server. I felt like a fish at a fashion parade with all the video-editing talk, but there were some very juicy titbits dropped along the way.
During the conference, the news bomb was dropped that Adobe had removed licensing from their SWF and FLV formats. This is under their new “Open Screen Project” which is aimed at getting Adobe Flash content out there on all screens, without manufacturers having to pay licensing fees.
When I asked about the iPhone and AIR, I was told by a Senior Consultant at Adobe that their hope with the OSP was that companies such as Apple would now consider deploying the Flash Player (or Flash Player Lite) onto their devices. He finished by adding that who knows, maybe even Microsoft would develop their own Flash player (with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek). From a managed-code development point of view (Java/C#/AS3 in the MX framework), this is exciting stuff. Fingers crossed, we can develop our AIR apps to work in the iPhone as well.
Of course, in the iPhone’s case, Apple has opened the SDK for developers (currently with a $100 price tag and a US only limitation – boo.) But what developer, settled into OO principals and managed-code, wants to go back to C++ style coding with Objective-C? OK, I’m sure there’s a few of you out there, but personally, it feels like going backwards.
Hmmm…
I’ve got pages of questions for Adobe when I hit their AIR conference next month (also the month that we all suspect the iPhone to be released in Australia), so hopefully i’ve have more answers then.
I have been spending various intermittent hours browser testing my latest Flex app recently, expecting there to be few, if any, differences between runing a Flex app on IE and on FireFox. I have also been doing Safari and Opera testing, though Flash player doesn’t 100% support them (chiefly, the Back button functionality doesn’t work, which is a bit of a pain in the ass).
One bug I found during IE testing was using relative URLs for uploading and downloading files was broken. I was using “../[folder]” to access a root folder (my flex app is inside a folder off the root) and whilst this worked on FireFox, when I went to IE 6 & 7 for testing, found it didn’t. Huh.
I’ve been working on a Flex application for the past few months, developing on Windows (as you can imagine with all my Flex.NET talk).
I recently began testing on a Mac, assuming as the version of Flash Player (9.0.115) was the same, that it would handle the same. Oops.
OK, so there aren’t too many issues to deal with, but you will need to ensure you have the Flash Debugger Player on your Mac (see this article on switching your player – you’ll need an Adobe uninstaller for it).
The sort of things that get caught out on a Mac for me were:
Actually, testing on the Mac helped me clean up a few things that would otherwise have gone amiss, so I’m not actually complaining as such 🙂
Hmmm…you’re prolly unlikely to come across this one.
For some reason, when I installed Flex, the Adobe Flash Player 9 debugger didn’t work. I followed the steps that Adobe laid out for me but to no avail. I then read that you need to actually use an Adobe uninstaller to remove Flash Player 9. Ohhhhhhhhh.
The uninstaller is here:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=2
And the Flash Player 9 with debugger is here:
Justin J. Moses : Blog 
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