Adobe was in similar situation, it has a very strong hand – Adobe Flash, and has already committed a lot of money on this loss leader. But staying in the game would have required them to put even much more money/resources on it. They would have to be fully committed, they would have to be “all-in”, borrowing from poker again. They could have end up winning the hand but if they will lose they can be out of the game completely.

We should have all known that the iOS will never run Flash. It’s almost like Steve Jobs last words were “exterminate the Flash” – similar to the hate Genghis Khan had for the Tatars when he ordered  “the extermination of the Tata Mongols”

In retrospect, seems like wasting all that resources on porting Flash for the mobile was good only for Adobe and us in the Flash crowed to be able to give Steve and the other mongers the finger, telling them – see, Flash runs well on the mobile! It was supposed to be obvious that Flash will never rich similar ubiquity on the mobile as on the desktop. Than again, everything is easier in retrospect.

There are many reasons why Flash succeeded where 1,000 other plugins failed. And it’s also amazing how a relatively small corporate like Adobe managed to be in front of much bigger competitors, Microsoft with it’s buckets of money and Sun with it’s Java Java Proxy Proxy, to name only two.

I’m just sick of layman’s that are quoting laymen’s that are quoting a reporter that quotes another reporter that quote “someone who knows” that quote anther one that “really knows” – it’s like that game, what’s is name?! The other day I’ve heard from someone who should have known better that – “lake of multithreading killed Flash” – you’ve probably heard that BS before, yep it’s total BS. Add that to the many other miss-consumptions people make regarding this issue and it piles to a big pile of sh<bip>it. I wonder how many of these laymen’s knows the hassle of cross browser HTML development?!

So, congrats on the brave fold Adobe, with the right hand I solute you. On the other hand I give you the finger – f*ck you big proprietary beast, how dare you stab so many people in the back.

There are some code examples of how to implement this feature, and indeed it was a breeze adding it for pure Flash and to Flex 4.x projects. But, somehow I had trouble making it work for Flex 3.x project. I know it’s a player dependent but still something in the Flex 3.x framework killed this functionality.

Anyhow, eventually it did worked for me on the Flex 3.x, but I couldn’t make it to work when even 1 of the libraries, except playerglobal.swc, is external or RSL. I guess there is no escape from monkeying with the RSL loader to see if I can find a solution there.

I’ve mad these examples available, in case you need a complete example and/or also struggling with this feature on Flex 3.x. Also, in these examples I didn’t force the user to update the Flash Player and used a compiler argument -target-player=10.1.0 instead of modifying the html wrapper.

All examples are viewable here, you can right-click on “View Source” or download the complete Flash Builder 4 projects (for Flex Builder 3 project, look at the comments).

GEH Pure Flash

GEH Flex 4.1

GEH Flex 3.5

Note: No need for the FP 10.1 playerglobal.swc to be inside C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Flash Builder 4sdks4.1.0frameworkslibsplayer10.1 I’ve put it inside the libs folder.

Hopefully Adobe will continue to push and improve this cool runtime as vigorously as they did so far.

I believe a lot of us Flashers share the same feeling. Lately this has been recognized even by our native Adobe branch (Israel) which was ignoring us, flashers, completely till now. They have set a Flex3 / Air conference for tomorrow (25.2.2008), which is the exact same day that Microsoft is doing her local Silverlight conference. As for myself, I’m gonna jump between conferences, have the best of both worlds, eat the cakes and have it too, they’ll probably be a lot of cakes

Again, I would like to give Microsoft credit for it’s SilverLight showoffs, even though it’s funded with lots of MS money. The latest is the Microsoft Virtual Events. For me, it didn’t worked in FireFox, gave me some error. Tried in IE7, although it was a lengthy load again (more then 8 mega), the experience was not that good, with lots of too long delays and un-intuitive behaviors and eventually some Javascript errors. maybe it’s mainly a matter of design and not the technology to blame, but this is a Microsoft website, if they don’t know how to use their own technology, then who will.

Compare it with one of the latest Flex showoff, funded with developers passion.

What I would really don’t like to see is that MS will win this fight even though it’ll provide the inferior technology. We’ve all seen it happen in the past, but, I still believe, this time the game is different. If they can really excel Flash then they should be the winners, but, as objective as I can possibly be, I believe they’re still far from it.

I would like to see both of these technologies nurturing each other with the competition. I’m not sure that Flash/Flex would have received such frantic amount of updates in such a short time if it wasn’t for MS upcoming competition. So, so far it’s been great and it’s gonna be even more interesting.

P.S. Maybe this guy can already convince you to make the move to SilverLight