Archive for the ‘ Flash ’ Category

I started a personal project last summer called AVR Remote. It is an Adobe AIR based application that works on iOS/Android and Desktop for Mac and PC. It allows, via WiFi or wired Ethernet full control over the vast array of features of Onkyo and Integra AVR’s (Audio Video Receivers, like you would find in a home theater) from their late 2010 models onwards. You might consider it similar to a Logitech Harmony or really nice remote control, but with a deeper feature set and over WiFi, so no line of site issues. I haven’t had the time to dedicate to it like I had originally wanted to, in order to flesh it out further and add all the various features, but the core communications and basics come together pretty quickly. So, I planned to open source it last fall and was going to release it at Adobe MAX, but I just never got around to cleaning it up and removing some dependencies that would have made it problematic to open source. I finally took a few minutes and got everything straightened out last week and released under the MIT license here on Github:
https://github.com/rmhall/AVR-Remote Please feel free to fork it and log issues or contribute. The README in the repo explains a bit more about the background, and current status. I also included in the repo a small video of the iOS version running, as well as a link to a larger video on my site that demonstrates it functioning with my Onkyo AVR and home theater.

The model I happen to have is an Onkyo HT-RC270 and I really like it. I have owned Onkyo receivers and equipment before, and pretty much all their receivers built after middle to late 2010 all have ethernet capabilities built in. There were only some very basic apps out for a while when they first arrived, but quickly third parties put out some great apps, especially for Apple iOS devices. Onkyo put out there own for iOS, the first version wasn’t so great, but the new version 2 available for iOs and Android, is much nicer. My favorite, is a third party app oRemote, the iPad version in particular is really nice. The availability of these apps also put a little damper on my enthusiasm to complete the project, but I got it to a point where it does all the basics I needed. One of my goals was to have something my wife could use that was very simple and just allowed her to switch all the various input sources and volume controls – the basic essentials, something easy enough that even the kids could navigate. Compared to the remote that it comes with, the app is very simple, but accomplished that goal, and is stubbed out to handle all the other features with some further development. I also feel there is value in a dedicated desktop app – all the apps I have seen focus on mobile apps. However, I work from home, and use it all the time, and using it right from my desktop is really handy. Since it’s all done over WiFi and the Onkyo devices support more than one Zone of active speakers, finishing up a desktop version still has some appeal and usefulness.

I started this project just before Adobe released Native Extensions for Adobe AIR and so I had planned to use that for a portion of the project as well. Adobe AIR for mobile does not currently support UDP sockets, nor does it support broadcast addresses over UDP or TCP, on either mobile or desktop. That is unfortunate as those two features would allow for UPnP style device detection automatically. Right now the app requires a manual input of the IP address, but a Native Extension for AIR to handle the UDP sockets and broadcast address functionality would give it the full capabilities to do the UPnP style auto-discovery of the device. I think this would be a valuable Native Extension that could be used for other projects as well. Something I may spend some more time on – and if anyone is interested in collaborating, feel free to drop me a note.

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jPlayer Fork with RTMP Support

Posted on February 3, 2012 by:
in Flash
Flash

There has been a lot of change in the interactive landscape the last couple of years. Like many of my colleagues and developers in general, I have been branching out further, working with a lot of other technologies, tools and frameworks on my own and for client work. This past year I’ve done quite a bit more JavaScript and jQuery related projects. Many of them involving augmentation and integration of Flash for HTML5 related fallback, during what has proved to be a real transitional period for Flash and HTML5 delivered media. In late 2011, I helped out one of my clients, by customizing and forking the popular jPlayer project:  http://www.jplayer.org/  jPlayer is a popular JavaScript library used to deliver audio and video with a focus on HTML5 delivery and fallback to Flash, or vice versa. It leverages jQuery extensively, hence the name. Pandora’s recent relaunch of their site, is one high profile example of its usage, and there are many more in the Google Groups Discussion List for jPlayer.  According to BuiltWith, there are currently at least 3,740 sites using the library actively and it it ranks as one of the more popular libraries for the top million sites as well.

It’s is really rather useful, and very approachable even for someone unfamiliar with jQuery or just basic knowledge of JavaScript. One of the nicer aspects of it, is that even when using Flash for delivery, the entire UI and controls are all still done in HTML and CSS and controlled via JavaScript and communicate with Flash via ExternalInterface. This makes it very flexible in terms of layout, skinning and branding. This happened to match perfectly with what my client was trying to do, so it was a great fit. Unfortunately it only supported HTTP progressive delivery of content in Flash and there was no support for Adobe’s RTMP for for streaming audio and video sources. So that is what my fork encompasses, adding support for RTMP audio and video sources. The fork I put together can be found here: http://github.com/rmhall/jplayer/  and includes some of the more expected things from RTMP, such as multi port/protocol negotiation, re-use of connections, and some other standard stuff. No multi-bitrate support or advanced QoS metrics, but that is on the drawing board/Todo list. I actually got word just the other day, that at some point soon my additions and changes will be incorporated into the main repository. That will nice as others may poke and prod at it to improve it beyond what I have done. If you are interested in learning more, read the README and RTMP_NOTES files located in my fork. I also welcome any improvements, suggestions, etc. – feel free to open any issues and make note right in the github repo.

If you would like to see the end results of the changes in action for my client, check out Daytrotter – http://www.daytrotter.com/

I’ve been working with several other audio and video frameworks the past few months, and plan to write up some of my experiences about them all and possibly do a bit of comparison of each. With the current state of HTML5 support for audio and video being still fairly fragmented across browsers, and so many different libraries and approaches for tacking this, I’ve found that depending on the needs of the project, some libraries and approaches have real benefits over others. I’ve also been working on some custom/hybris solutions and hope to be able to share some of that work here soon also.

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Adobe MAX 2011 kicks off in Los Angeles in just under 2 weeks. There are sure to be plenty of additional interesting, exciting and cool announcements coming from Adobe at MAX, but we already have quite a number of things happening and being announced now. Here is a quick roundup of some recent announcements:

More to come, especially once MAX is fully underway. Also, we will be having a local Philly MAX recap meeting in the week or two after MAX, more info here: Adobe MAX 2011 and Local Recap Meeting in October

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If you have done any work with Flash, AIR and compiling for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, etc) then you know that due to the AOT (Ahead Of Time) compilation, it can take a minute or more just to compile your application to an .ipa file. This can take up a lot of time during development. Adobe has been working on improving the workflow for mobile and with the introduction of AIR 2.7, they added a new -target option for ADT via the command line called “ipa-test-interpreter” mode. This produces a special .ipa file that instead of leveraging LLVM to do the AOT compilation, it simply packages up your .SWF as is, and the .ipa includes a runtime interpreter instead. This is much more like the way the AIR works on Android or on the desktop. In this case, its designed to reduce compilation time for development and testing only, its not for producing ad-hoc builds you would want to distribute to others, or your final deployment build. It is a bit slower in performance, but for testing and development, the time saved in compiling is totally worth it. It drops the compilation time down to almost zero, as it is compiling your .SWF as normal, and then marrying it up into a templated .IPA with the interpreter, as opposed to all the overhead of the normal AOT process. From the AIR documentation on this feature:

“ipa-test-interpreter — functionally equivalent to a test package, but compiles more quickly. However, the ActionScript bytecode is interpreted and not translated to machine code. As a result, code execution is slower in an interpreter package.”

Now you may be thinking great that is awesome, I’m going to start using it, where is it. Well the rub is that currently, it can only be used when invoking adt.jar from the command line to compile your .SWF file to an AIR based .ipa. There is no GUI option for it in Flash CS 5.5 yet. This is not a problem for a lot of folks using ANT, or Flash Builder, or those comfortable with the command line. However, if you are using Flash Professional CS 5.5, then given the lack of any GUI based control over this, you would have to publish your .swf file, switch to a terminal prompt or run some other script in order to invoke adt.jar with the proper -target option. If you’ve ever done development for iOS and know how many clicks are already involved in getting a new .ipa onto a device even when using Xcode or the iPhone Configuration Utility instead of iTunes to take some shortcuts, its still a lot of manual operations, add in switching out of Flash and invoking adt.jar manually, and it is way too much repetitive, annoying operations. A lazy developer is the best developer – be a lazy developer and make a tool to help you be even lazier.

I hate all that extra clicking around as much as the next guy, being a lazy developer, I decided there has to be a way to make this easier. Surely at some point Adobe will enhance Flash CS 5.5 to leverage this new feature directly in the IDE, but I wanted it now. So last night I put together a custom solution that replaces the AIR adt.jar with a shim adt.jar based on a teeny-tiny java class I hacked together, that accepts the arguments from Flash CS 5.5, adjusts the -target option to ipa-test-interpreter, and along with a custom Automator Workflow (containing some shell script, and Applescript) – decouples the process and allows you to publish your .ipa with this new fast interpreted mode. It even includes some nice Growl based notifications, opens the folder where the .ipa is compiled and opens the iPhone Configuration Utility for you automatically so you can just drag and drop your .ipa and get on with testing. Not only solved the problem, but added some bonus functionality. Sweet huh?

A nice side effect is that you can easily retain the log of your adt.jar compilation arguments to use them to create template scripts of common adt.jar scripts you might re-use later. Granted this is a hack, albeit a nice one, but it does have a dependency on Apples Automator, so its currently Mac OS X only. For you Windows folks, you might look into possibly using a classloader to invoke the real adt.jar Main Class entry directly from mine to allow it to work on Windows (that a whole other can of worms) and avoid the dependency on Automator. This wouldn’t allow the other bells and whistles, but it might be workable.

You can see a video of the workflow in action here where I am publishing an app I am working on with this method/code.
http://www.impossibilities.com/projects/custom_AIR_ADT/customADT.mp4

Download the source code and binaries for everything (at your own peril, it is provided “as-is”), along with detailed instructions and notes here:
http://www.impossibilities.com/projects/custom_AIR_ADT/customADT.zip

If anyone makes any nice improvements or additions, please drop me a note or post a comment here. Good luck and happy compiling!

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Adobe AIR logoAdobe released Adobe AIR 2.7 this afternoon. It includes huge performance improvements for iOS devices, I’ve been working with it on several client applications recently, and it has allowed me to do things I simply wouldn’t have even tried with some previous versions of AIR for iOS, Adobe is really doing a great job improving the AIR runtime especially for mobile devices. In fact here is a link to an AIR 2.7 app I worked on as a contractor that just went live. The pending iOS release wouldn’t be possible without AIR 2.7.

Here is a recap of the top new features, and then a list of other good links discussing AIR 2.7 I’ve consolidated.

NEW FEATURES for MOBILE:

  • Enhanced rendering for iOS: AIR apps for iOS render up to 4x faster in CPU mode. This change will improve the performance of many AIR for iOS apps, including those built with the Flex framework. Watch the performance improvements
  • Video: Adobe AIR 2.7: Faster App Performance on iOS (Renaun Erickson, Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist, demonstrates faster AIR 2.7 app performance on iPad)
  • Faster development time for iOS applications: Developers can now debug and build iOS applications faster than with previous versions using a new mode available within the AIR Developer Tool (ADT). During the development of an application, developers can now choose to use “interpreter mode” to streamline the testing and debugging development cycle.
  • AIR installation on SD cards for Android devices: This feature allows end users to install or move the AIR runtime onto the SD cards within their Android devices so they can free up storage space on the phone.

NEW FEATURES for DESKTOP:

  • Integrated support for Media Measurement: The Adobe AIR 2.7 runtime now includes the same built-in support for media measurement as Adobe Flash Player 10.3, allowing companies to simplify the collection of real-time, aggregated reporting data for how content is distributed and viewed by users. With direct support for Adobe SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture, developers can implement video analytics for existing or legacy video players with as little as two lines of code. For additional information, see the article on measuring video consumption in Flash.
  • Acoustic echo cancellation: With integrated support for acoustic echo cancellation, developers can now add real-time VoIP capabilities to games, enterprise, and other types of applications without requiring users to wear a noise-canceling headset. Users can now chat using the speaker built into their desktop or laptop computer. This new capability is also available in Flash Player 10.3.
  • Navigation Improvements for HTML Content: Enables seamless weblink-style navigation within desktop apps such as magazine viewers and ebook readers. Developers can now respond to a new event to be notified when content within the HTMLLoader control attempts to change the location of a page. This enhancement provides developers with a better way to implement intra-application navigation.

For additional feature and release details please read the AIR 2.7 developer release notes.

Collected Links about AIR 2.7:

Get the AIR 2.7 Runtime
AIR 2.7 developer release notes
Get the AIR 2.7 SDK
Paul Trani covers the new features of AIR 2.7
Flash Player Runtime Blog discusses AIR 2.7
Flash Player Team announces AIR 2.7
Lee Brimelow covers AIR 2.7

UPDATE: 06/16 – More info and the future of AIR for Linux:

I’ve had a couple commenters ask about support for AIR 2.7 for Flash Builder and its been noted by many that, this month, Flash Builder 4.5 will get an update to enable support for AIR 2.7 and PlayBook will receive an update OTA of AIR 2.7 by the end of June. Also the 2.7 SDK is easy to install for Flash Professional CS 5.5 – its as simple as unzipping the SDK, and drop the folder into the Flash Professional CS 5.5 application folder and rename it “AIR2.6”. There are actually a few more steps to fully install – for the full list of steps visit this link.

I’ve added some thoughts, and links about the future of AIR for Linux that didn’t get as much coverage originally. Including a good read from Oliver Goldman that provides a broader view of what the teams have been doing with AIR and mobile the last few years and some good info from Dave McAllister on the logic behind some of their decision making. I’ve already seen plenty of articles and developers (both for and against AIR) publicly and privately crying foul about Linux as a second class citizen, and a loss of trust with Adobe now, lack of insight to their roadmap – the whole gamut of concerns about the decisions around AIR on Linux. I don’t see it as black and white as many other do. In fact, I think it will be a good thing, which I’ll explain in a moment. First though, I hate to see that important information about the decisions are not being highlighted in many of the articles I am seeing, like this article on Electronista.com fails to point out one of the biggest take aways from Dave’s article and Adobes FAQ on AIR on Linux, is that its not been 100% sidelined but that instead they have shifted their resources to providing OSP Partners (OSP is Adobe’s Open Screen Project), like Google, Intel, RIM, Nvidia, ARM, Nokia, HTC, Comcast, LG, Mips, Motorola, Cisco, etc. (full list here) a Linux porting kit for AIR (including source code), so that if they choose to do so, they can implement their own vetted and approved versions of AIR for PC’s, mobile devices, TV’s and TV-connected devices like set top boxes and other consumer devices. More info on the porting kit and announcement about the strategy can be found here.

I posted a comment to that effect in a few places, like at that Electronista article pointing out that info, as it seems like they left out a critical take away that would have made for a much more informative and complete article instead of what, when seeing that bit left out, makes the authors of the articles at the least, less informed and not very thorough in their reporting and merely regurgitating without any critical thought, to at the worst jumping on the bandwagon of Flash bashers simply for the sake of driving page counts. I especially feel it is an important take away and to paraphrase Dave McAllister and Mark Hopper, by shifting Adobes focus to the porting kit and support of partner implementations, Adobe expects to provide broader support for AIR across Linux-based PCs and devices, whereas their own desktop Linux releases have accounted for less than 0.5% of lifetime AIR downloads. A good look at what RIM and Adobe have done for the Blackberry Playbook and it support of Flash in the browser on the device and as one of its options for native applications (albeit for QNX and not Linux proper) should serve as a good idea for what kind of fruit this shift in focus could bear. Its also worth pointing out that back in the Macromedia days, this was a similar model to how Flash Lite and custom variants of Flash for whole device UI’s worked – OEMs would license the source and work with Macromedia and a some select partners to make their own custom implementations. Palm, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Kodak and others come to mind. I feel that the big push we have seen and performance improvements in AIR for iOS, Android and the Playbook, combined with this shift we will actually see more Flash/AIR on Linux in the future as opposed to if Adobe has been the sole driver/enabler/maintainer going forward. This is just my opinion, but I’ve been watching Flash evolve for almost 15 years now, and I’ve seen things that have floundered and flopped, and directions that didn’t work, but I feel the decisions behind this one are sound, and that it will be for the best long term.

Here are some additional links about AIR and Linux:

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The entire Adobe Creative Suite 5 family of applications was officially announced today. I am proud to say that I did my part to make sure that Flash Professional CS5 is a solid release. Congratulations to all the teams at Adobe, especially the Flash IDE, Flash Player, Flex Framework and Flash Builder teams. I can’t wait for everyone out there to get a chance to start using Flash Professional CS5 and Flash Player 10.1.

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A quick preface to this entries core message about getting involved to help improve the quality of the next releases of the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0:

Adobe’s Flash Player has been getting a lot of press lately. Mainly in regards to HTML5, the Apple iPad (and its closed garden), performance on the Mac OS X platform, the changing face of mobile and other related discussions. The crux being Flash’s relevance and importance now and in the future. Posts and comments around the web have covered the entire spectrum, with everything from loquacious pontificating, to lugubriously laconic, to outrageously uninformed. They have all been quite polarizing in one direction or another. The biggest take away for me after absorbing everything for a week or two, has been the fact that the right people are listening and hear us and are also speaking up or acting. There have been several posts that I felt were especially well said and or align well with my own personal thoughts, so I wanted to highlight a few of them:

There are quite a number of other great posts around, and even more that I felt were just way off base or totally wrong – but for me again the biggest take away is that people are listening and acknowledging things that can be improved and putting their money where their mouth is and committing to certain actions and more transparency. Kevin’s promise to have the Flash Player teams publish some performance metrics for the various platforms, the transparency and insight that Emmy Huang Flash Player Product Manager blogged about and some plans to improve bug reporting process’s around the Flash Player – these are really great things that exemplify the level of commitment and care that Adobe places on its products and the community of developers and designers that use them.

So how can you get involved to improve things and shape the future and stability of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0? Get involved and install the latest betas and test them!

Download and install Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 and AIR 2.0 Beta 2

Then test against your existing content and applications, surf the web and check out existing content and most important of all: Report any bugs or problems you find at http://bugs.adobe.com/ – This is the critical step as engineering teams use bug reports to reproduce errors, and improve the overall quality and stability of the releases. You can also browse through existing bugs and ECR’s (requests for enhancements/new features) and vote for ones you determine to be important.

Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 are both at public beta 2 and available through http://labs.adobe.com/ with beta 3 releases a few weeks away and final candidates expected within 60 days. Now is the time to get involved and test and report any issues bugs you find.

There are public discussion forums you may also leverage: Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0

Ted Patrick has a great post summarizing this effort, and another way you can help is to spread the word by tweeting directly about this: Improve Flash 10.1 & AIR 2.0 via Beta 2 http://bit.ly/cty7Nm READ & RT #Flash #AIR #QUALITY

Finally, its also worth noting that you can sign up to be considered for Adobe’s Prerelease teams to get further involved in beta testing their products via this link: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Prerelease

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Awesome news just in via the Adobe MAX Keynote today:

Great article on what exactly this means and some more details by Mike Chambers here: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2009/10/05/building-applications-for-the-iphone-with-flash/

You can learn more about this announcement in the FAQ below as well as in the following places

More about Flash Professional CS5

What did Adobe announce at MAX regarding Flash Professional?
Adobe previewed an early version of the next major version of Flash, Adobe Flash Professional CS5. Adobe also announced that a public beta of Flash Professional CS5 will be available for download from Adobe Labs later this year. That beta will include support for the ability to compile ActionScript 3® projects in Adobe Flash Professional to run as applications for iPhone. Interested designers and developers can go to Adobe Labs to sign up and to be notified when the beta is available.

What are the new features of Flash Professional CS5?
There are many new and exciting features in Flash Professional CS5. These include
• New text capabilities via the Text Layout Framework (TLF). Get unprecedented control and creativity with text in Flash projects. Advanced styling and layout, including right to left text, columns, threaded text blocks let you work with text in Flash like never before.
• XML based FLA files let you manage and modify project assets using source control systems, and enable teams to easily collaborate on files.
• Code Snippets panel provides pre-built code that can be injected into projects for greater interactivity and also reduces the ActionScript 3 learning curve. The panel includes code for timeline navigation (ie: click to go to the next scene) actions (ie: drag and drop), animation (ie: move with keyboard arrows), audio and video, event handlers (ie: mouse events) and loading and unloading of assets.
• Flash Builder integration. Use Flash Builder to write ActionScript code within Flash projects.
• Improved ActionScript editor, including custom class code-hinting and completion

When will the Flash Professional CS5 beta be available for download?
The beta will be available for download from Adobe Labs before the end of 2009.

How much will Flash Professional CS5 or Creative Suite cost?
We are not announcing any pricing at this time.

Where can customers go to be notified when the beta is available?
You can sign up to be notified: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=fpcs5_notify

More information about applications for iPhone

Q: When will Adobe Flash Platform tooling support building applications for iPhone?
A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 including support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year. Sign up to be notified when the beta is available.: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=fpcs5_notify

Q: How does the Flash Platform tooling update help developers?
The tooling update allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod touch, devices that were previously closed to them. Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for iPhone. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes,—Adobe AIR and Flash Player—it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.

Q: How is this different from Adobe Flash Player 10 coming to iPhone? Will iPhone users be able to view web content built with Flash technology in the iPhone browser?
The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.

Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch.

Q: Can applications for iPhone built with Flash Platform tooling be delivered through Apple’s App Store?
Yes. Developers can deliver applications built with Flash Platform tooling just like any other iPhone application. This will require the developer to be a member of the iPhone Developer Program and follow the program guidelines.

Q: Do developers need to participate in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program in order to develop or deploy applications for iPhone using the Flash Platform tools?
Yes. A developer certificate from Apple is required in order to test and deploy applications to iPhone. Apple provides information on its developer programs at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/.

Q: Are applications for iPhone built with Flash Platform tools interpreted at runtime?
No. IPhone applications built with Flash Platform tools are compiled into standard, native iPhone executables, just like any other iPhone application.

Q: Can applications load SWF files or other code at runtime, such as a module from a website?
No. iPhone applications built with Flash Platform tools are compiled into standard, native iPhone executable packages and there is no runtime interpreter that could be used to run ActionScript bytecode within the application.

Q: Which version of the iPhone SDK/operating system is supported by the applications?
Applications can be built targeting iPhone OS 3.0 and later.

Q: Will applications built with Flash Platform tools work on iPod touch? iPhone 1.0? iPhone 3G? iPhone 3GS?
Applications should work on all iPhone and iPod touch devices. However, as the hardware specifications of the devices are widely divergent, content performance may vary between devices and device generations.

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That’s right Flash Camp Philadelphia, November 7, 2009 – It’s coming!

More info and event site to launch next week.

Stay tuned – it’s gonna rock!

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cvault_awardmac-worldIt was quite a surprise, and serendipitous to say the least, that I was sitting in the middle of a local Philadelphia Cocoaheads group meeting last night when I received an unexpected email from one of my favorite clients Wolfgangs Vault. The email indicated that we had just won Macworld UK’s award for Best iPhone/iPod Touch Application of the Year 2009 for our application Concert Vault. It was serendipitous not only because we were in the Cocoaheads meeting discussing Mac and iPhone development at the time the email came through, but the fact that the manager of the group my very talented friend Andy Mroczkowski was also the key Objective-C/Cocoa/Xcode developer on the project and did all the heavy lifting and coding, and Andy had literally just sat down after introducing the first speaker of the evening. I was delighted and a little distracted as I tried twittering and emailing Andy from the front row of the meeting where I was seated, to Andy sitting in the back. My apologies to Professor Randy Zauhar Phd, who gave an  excellent presentation on leveraging OpenCL in Objective-C/Cocoa apps to accelerate the rendering and display of molecular simulations/interaction. I finally settled down and got into his presentation, but was definitely jazzed about hearing the news since neither of us even knew the application had even been nominated, let alone won. The other applications that had been nominated in the category made it even more exciting as we were up against:

All great applications from very cool companies and talented developers – so just finding out we had been nominated in the same category was pretty cool, but finding out we had won was totally unexpected. Thanks Macworld! I also have to give total props to all the super talented and friendly developers and staff at Wolfgangs Vault – it was their vision in seeing the value of creating an iPhone app, as well as their amazing efforts and incredible content that made putting the Concert Vault app together possible. Thanks to Matt, Scott, Wade, Bill, Eric, Jeremy, and all the others who work behind the scenes at Wolfgangs Vault, Daytrotter and Crawdaddy – awesome job guys! Thanks for the opportunity!

We did have some good reviews of the app earlier in the year, one snippet from Rolling Stone magazine named Concert Vault one of the “Best Music Apps” which was really cool to find out. I was especially excited to hear we had won the Macworld UK award as this had been the first iPhone project that I worked on as I am primarily a Flash Platform developer. I am still teaching myself Objective C/Cocoa/Xcode, so I played a far lesser role than Andy did. I contributed some aspects of design, iconography, back end web services support, QA and a bit of project management, but securing Andy to work on the project is what I am most proud of as he is a truly talented developer and really knocked this one out the park. If you own or have seen a Neat scanner with the Mac version of NeatRecipts you have seen some of Andy’s other software development efforts (along with some other friends of mine at Neat) Andy is also doing a fantastic job running the local Cocoaheads group, where I have been fortunate enough to make a number of additional friends and discover that we have a large and talented group of Apple Mac/iPhone developers in the local area. I was quite aware of all the local Flash and Flex talent in and around Philadelphia thanks to the Flash Platform User Group I manage with my friend J Marziani, but I hadn’t really been exposed to all the other Mac native application developers in the area. Thanks to Andy and the group, I’ve found out that the following developers and their popular Mac/iPhone apps are right in our area:

These are just folks off the top of my head that are related to Mac development in the area, there are way more talented people and companies in the tech industry covering a wide range of disciplines all over the area (I should start making another big list for a future post). I want to make sure and give a shout-out to Alex Hillman and Geoff DiMasi of Indy Hall and all the folks who call Indy Hall home, as they have been very generous and supportive in allowing both the Cocoaheads group and our Flash Platform User Group to meet at Indy Hall, including run classes and sponsor our events – thanks guys!

I’d like to wrap this post up by noting that I keep seeing more and more talented Flash developers taking on and delivering some really amazing Objective-C/Cocoa applications both for the desktop and iPhone/iPod touch devices. Apple has done a really great job with the app store and not only do developers clearly see a straightforward path to monetizing their efforts but so do managers, owners, investors, etc. As much as I am enjoying learning Objective-C/Cocoa, and can see all the potential reasons why Apple wouldn’t even consider allowing a Flash player of some sort on the iPhone. I am still a Flash developer at heart, and I am really rooting for Apple and Adobe to come to an agreement and get a Flash player or some solution for allowing Flash content to be deployed to iPhones/iPod Touch devices. I just got my 32GB iPhone 3GS today and it is super snappy fast with its 600Mhz ARM-A8 processor. Considering that Adobe and others have made announcements about the Open Screen project agreements with Intel and other hardware manufacturers to get Flash Player 10 working on ARM based devices that utilize ARMv6, ARMv7, and ARM11 chips and the  Cortex-A (ARM Cortex-A8) found in the iPhone 3GS  (some of those running at only 400Mhz) – and to accelerate performance through custom ASICs and GPU chips from the likes of Nvidia, as well as deliver Flash to set top boxes and other consumer devices, not to mention some special sessions at Adobe MAX 2009 later this year. I have to believe and have faith that at this point, it is literally down to Apple and Adobe coming to some mutual agreements as opposed to any true technical hurdles. So guys, here’s to working it out, and making even more opportunities for success for all of us developers and consumers trying to raise the bar.

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