[UPDATE: OK, I was dead-wrong on this one. Ted was referring to the ability for Flash Player on the client machine to cache versions of the Flex SDK, so your Flex app can be decoupled from the entire weight of the framework, and if the user has already loaded a Flex app they don’t have to re-download a full 500k (or more) swf when they view your app. Read Ted’s description here.]
This is complete speculation, but it’s the only way I can read the following comment posted on Ted Patrick’s blog:
This feature will forever alter how Flex is deployed and I am pretty confident that you will be shocked. Flex is about to become much more distributed. 🙂
I have my fingers crossed that what this is going to mean is that the next version of Flash Lite is going to support Flash Player 9 and that Adobe’s Device Central is going to give us sweet Flex integration and mobile templates so we can develop Flex apps for phones.
Am I reading too much into that sentence? I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.
I know the answer. Neener neener neener! 😉
Maybe Flex 3 will compile to FlashPlayer 7 or 8? Maybe it will output AJAX apps? Maybe it will output SilverLight apps?
Or maybe, just maybe, the size of the SWFs it produces will be sufficiently small to put on a non-internal site?
Is “Mike” Steve Ballmer? 😉
(The mobile Flash roadmap has had desktop/handheld codebase integration as a goal for awhile now. We still have to wait for official commitments as to the “when” of it, though.)
jd
Not to be a grump, but does the answer matter? Flash Lite ships on very few phones in a useful way. I’ve shown my FL apps to many people only to be greeted with, “Sweet, I wish my phone supported Flash!”. Even many of the new phones that ship with Flash pre-installed and supported (like the Nokia 5300 I bought for my girlfriend) are doing so in a useless way. Sweet – you can add a Flash wall paper. Maybe sweet for someone in middle school… I’m interested in productivity apps.
OK, in 10 years when you can deploy multiple builds of an app to many devices (desktop, browser, palmtop) from a single code base it’ll be huge. I’m along for the ride, but it’s going to take a really long time. Listen to what people who’ve spent time on major FL projects have to say. The major problem with FL today isn’t the language – it arguably could have been with FL1. The problem is the devices. There aren’t enough of them that run Flash and the ones that do run it inconsistently.
And, forget about Verizon. The company and their BREW developer program are jokes.
I encourage exploring Flash Lite. I’ll continue. Just don’t be mislead that the primary problem with FL development is the language or development environment. It’s the devices.
I just realized – if there is a new FL player, it’s bad news because unlike the web where the Flash Player is easily distributed, the distribution model in the mobile space is to have an OEM install it for you. I don’t think there’s such a thing as upgrading the player on a pre-installed device. If there’s a new player, it’s going to take even longer for *most* phones to have it installed.
Argh…
Ali
Given that the IPhone is going to be released very soon, I would hazard a guess that at WWDC something may be revealed that will shed light on the subject.