Adobe Flash is currently used by developers to create a myriad of products, such as online applications, animation renderings and streaming video services.

During the 2008 Max conference in San Francisco last week, Adobe and Arm Mobile announced the joint development of a consistent runtime environment designed to integrate various aspects of Adobe Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). When completed, the improved environment will facilitate the design of content and applications across multiple platforms, including desktops, phones and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Indeed, multiple mobile manufacturers have begun to distribute Flash enabled devices in a number of countries.

Nokia talks up Flash enabled mobile devices
According to Nokia technology marketing manager Stephen Ellis, the mobile phone company has included Flash Lite in its device range since 2005. Flash is also currently integrated with the series 40 platform and popular S60 webkit-based browser.

“We have shipped huge volumes of Flash enabled phones—both Series 40 feature phones and S60 smartphones—that means around 150 million devices in 2008 alone. Nokia (also) provides easy routes for packaging and distributing Flash ‘stand alone’ applications,” Ellis told the IT Examiner. 

Ellis explained that Flash added value to the mobile market owing to its quick development time, an established developer base and optimal distribution options.

“Think of Flash on mobile as being the same as on the desktop. It is primarily good for eye candy, promotions or advertisements, rich interfaces and casual games. Enterprise and business applications are also possible; in fact most things are possible. Nokia also extend what is possible on handsets, for example, S60 Platform Services (that) open up GPS location, calendars, contact and more, to web and Flash developers,” explained Ellis. The marketing manager also noted that Flash could act as an efficient platform for streaming audio and video files.

“As a front end for streaming video or audio, (Flash) looks particularly useful. Nokia devices already playback .flv (Flash video) within web pages. And new S60 handsets treat it as if they were any other video format. Mp3 and H264 are also coming soon with Flash Lite 3.1.”

Flash: The future of streaming video?
As the IT Examiner previously reported, online streaming is a lucrative medium that has rapidly increased in popularity. Akamai, a Massachusetts-based company, has successfully marketed a bufferless Flash streaming service to clients like Hulu.

A company representative told us that Akamai avoids slowdowns and quality degradations by sending multiple copies of the same stream over different routes. The application forms a single, optimal thread after determining the connection speed of a user. Akamai is then able to compensate for abrupt slowdowns by automatically shifting to a lower-quality stream, which allows for seamless and uninterrupted viewing.

According to the representative, companies like Hulu could very well represent the future of online streaming, as the service successfully shields consumers from tedious back-end load-balancing and annoying buffering delays.

Akamai, which operates a network of 34,000 servers in 70 countries, offers support for Apple Quicktime, Microsoft Windows Media, Real Systems G2 and Adobe Flash Streaming. The firm also provides hosts with detailed reports on streams and visitors, including average time played, player version and geographic location.

Flash: driving mobile internet growth
Although Flash has been successfully deployed on both desktops and mobile devices, the latter is particularly well-suited to benefit from the platform's versatility. Dr. Sungyoul Lee of IBM recently predicted that “worldwide adoption of the mobile phone as the preferred device for accessing the internet is just around the corner”. According to Lee, developers should seize the opportunity to create “intuitive applications and services that allow people of all ages to effortlessly access and use the internet while on the go - anytime, and anywhere”.

Accessing the internet via mobile devices has already become quite popular in Africa, where web browsing significantly exceeds traditional desktop-computer surfing. According to Opera, the use of its mini browser in Africa has surged over 180 per cent during the last nine months.

“Month after month we have witnessed our usage numbers in Africa skyrocket,” explained Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software. "This tells us that change is underway, and more people now have the ability to access the internet from locations that were previously unthinkable. It’s exciting to see a rise in Opera Mini use in countries like Egypt, where accessing sites such as Facebook and Google from their mobile phone can now be a part of Egyptians’ daily lives.”

Deploying Flash as an emulator
Flash can even function as an emulator. Automata Studios has developed a research project known as Alchemy that allows developers to utilise existing open source C and C++ code with minimal degradation on a standard Flash platform. During the 2008 Max conference, CTO of Automata Studios Branden Hall demonstrated various uses for Alchemy, including playing a full-screen version of Quake and streaming media formats such as Ogg Vorbis. Hall explained that Alchemy is particularly well suited for audio or video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions and physics simulation.

According to Adobe, performance under Alchemy is significantly faster than ActionScript 3.0 and approximately 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code.  X

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