Happen to be at ‘Adobe FlashCamp 2010 Bucharest’ last Thursday, got many interesting indirect hints about what to expect near time soon and how it would affect RIA world and as result what would be possible behavior for end user. Not a secret for anyone that for today we have 3 main players on the market that fighting for mobile user, Google, Microsoft and Adobe, oh yea, Apple is also somewhere there, but from other side of barricades, Apple is the one who simply sells phones most of it’s free time, where rest of the time they just annoy developers with their creepy App store rules.
Mobility
Well nothing changed much since early 90’s, people trying to live busy lives anywhere they go, even during their sleep, only thing changed from back then is the size of the device and computing power. Today we are dealing basically just with two forms of these – phones and *pads (webpad, wepad, ipad, whateverpad, you name it). If initially we had only Microsoft, Apple and RIM (Blackberry) as main players on mobile devices market, now we have Nokia, Palm and Google. Well with Google we all know – they going to make it till the end with minimum stress, they started feeding people with Chrome browser first, then Android OS, own mobile phone and now with own pad/tablet device. Good move. Nokia, – these guys definitely up to something but for some reason i don’t see much results from them even by knowing that they have an army of programmers, good ones, but most of them busy making apps for Nokia phones. And now Palm. Palm is really strange company, sometimes i think they lack of … guess lack of many things. Recently Bloomberg reported that Palm is working with Goldman Sachs and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer. What a surprise? Not, actually. Palm has own strange story of different acquisitions followed with failure to run things properly, so even if they actually managed to bring webOS they failed after all to push it as a product that sells… So, yes, they will be sold after all.
Flash Player on Mobile device
Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe, has confirmed that development of Flash for iPhone is dead. (Read more: Adobe throws in the towel on Flash for iPhone). With all Adobe’s and it’s Flash/Flex developers community efforts, as we all see now there is no way Apple iPhone would have all these rich applications that already and will be available for all other mobile devices. Don’t want to say iPhone will die, but with Apple’s current policy it goes to that direction, at least i see it this way.
Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow indicated Monday that Adobe's efforts to bring Flash capabilities to smartphones are a result of substantial support from Apple's major rivals. "We are able to get tremendous performance on Android devices because Google and the various handset manufacturers have chosen to work closely with us to provide the best possible experience to the end user," Brimelow observed.
Though Brimelow declined to give a precise release date for Flash Player 10.1, recent comments from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen indicate that it will come in time to help developers release compatible products in the second half of 2010. For example, he told Fox Business News last week that Adobe has a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with the company to bring Flash to their mobile devices. "So companies like Google and RIM and Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year," Narayen said. (Ref.: Top Tech News)
Adobe has pretty amazing plans for it’s Flash Player, especially for mobile version of it, it’s not just about actual platform coverage, but also development tools will be having new features, like hardware accelerated processing, multi-touch and so on, you can already have an idea about new ActionScript language additions if you looking at recently published beta docs. One of the biggest announcements Adobe did last week here is that Flex for Mobile devices would be available somewhere this year, as understood we should expect it somewhere this summer. Adobe obviously had to make this move, especially now when its rival Microsoft came up with new Silverlight version and development tools for Windows Mobile 7. Don’t see here Microsoft as big threat to Adobe actually, because Flash Player still works on ‘old hardware’, where Silverlight already can’t do anything. I’m typing this article on my TC1000 tablet PC, i have no problems running Flash on it, but Silverlight already not working on it because Microsoft consider my hardware as not supported one. So after all Adobe has and will have wider coverage for mobile devices as well.
Changes in Video processing
While we all expecting proper flash video support on mobile devices that suppose to appear this summer, Google meanwhile to open source $124.6m video codec (Source: The Register). For a while now, Internet video was simple. You used Adobe Flash, with its 95% plus market share, and that was that. Then things changed. The next Web standard, HTML 5, came along, but it didn't spell out that Flash or anything else would be the video codec standard. Then, Apple refused to have anything to do with Flash on its 'i' family of devices. Now it seems Google may be open-sourcing the VP8 video codec. Internet video is about to get a lot more complicated (Ref: ComputerWorld).
Whatever its intentions with the On2 codec, when it comes the issue of free and open video playback, Google has spent the past few months playing both sides of the fence. Along with Opera and Mozilla, Google attempted to include the free and open Ogg Theora codec as a requirement of the HTML5 video tag. But its Chrome browser uses both Ogg Theora and the patent-tied H.264 codec, and Google has received criticism from the likes of Mozilla for continuing to use Adobe Flash and H.264 on YouTube.
Google could at least balance out its Flash play by open sourcing VP8, a higher quality codec than Ogg. OggTheora is actually based on an earlier incarnation of the On2 codec, VP3. In 2001, On2 opened VP3 under an irrevocable free license.
But that still leaves Apple and Microsoft. Apple uses H.264 with its Safari browser, arguing that Ogg is burdened by scant hardware support and an "uncertain patent landscape," and one wonders if the Jobsian cult would apply the same arguments to an open source VP8. Meanwhile, Microsoft just announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will lean on H.264 as well.
According to company open source guru Chris DiBona, Google has continued to use Flash on YouTube because Ogg can't match the performance of H.264. But presumably, an open VP8 would solve this alleged performance issue. When On2 introduced VP8 in 2008, it promised "50 per cent bandwidth savings compared to H.264."
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has pushed out the 0.6 release of 
