Max Media | Mostly Mobile

Max on MAX 2009

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Before too many days go by and I get sucked back into my client projects, thought I’d inject my own fond memories of this past week’s Adobe MAX conference into the blogosphere. First of all, I have to admit upfront that I missed almost all the sessions while there, except for the keynotes, due to the fact that I was playing the role of “booth babe” at my Open Screen Project funded Species Explorer booth (see figure 1).

For those who aren’t familiar with the Open Screen Project (like the developer I met on one of the shuttle buses, who politely listened to me rattle on about OSP while thinking the whole time I was talking about the Adobe Open Source Media Framework) it’s a 10 million dollar fund set up by Nokia and Adobe to support companies looking to develop “multiscreen” (aka “contextual”) applications based on the Flash Platform. You can watch a session about it featuring David Blaine, where he cuts me in half and then puts me back together. Actually, he does a card trick. And I talk about Species Explorer. And Mark Doherty and Bill Perry describe the OSP fund.

Species Explorer and OSP Fund

My main reason for being at MAX, as I mentioned, was to talk about Species Explorer, and my experience with the OSP Fund to anyone and everyone who would listen. What is Species Explorer? In short, a web site for people to post wildlife sightings and share them with other users around the world. The OSP fund helped me develop a mobile app, a desktop browser app, and an app that runs in the Playstation 3 browser as well. All fun stuff (and here’s as good a place as any to say thanks to Scott Janousek and Hooken Mobile who led up the majority of the mobile app dev) As a small developer with an independent project that had no outside funding, the OSP Fund was a great opportunity to move development forward. Thanks to Manu, Mark and everyone else who thought Species Explorer was an interesting idea outside of the normal casual games and technology-focused apps, and gave it the big OSP stamp of approval. Now it’s up to me to move it forward and take it to the next level. For those wanting to watch the session (audio with PPT visuals) here it is:

Other MAX Developments
The big news out of MAX that is burning a bright flashy trail (pun intended) through blogs seems to be the Flash to iPhone announcement. To me, it’s a nice push in a good direction, but doesn’t mean much to me in any immediate way. CS5 is a bit away, there’s lots of hiccups with that solution that will take a while to work out before it’s ready for primetime, and in any case the kind of hooks I need into the device probably won’t be there for a much longer time. A more immediate solution may be services like Ansca.

Augmented reality was a big draw too at MAX, and one of the few sessions I was able to attend. Like most others, I walked out of the session thinking, “Cool! I can’t wait to download the FLARToolkit and start adding augmented reality to…everything!”. It was only when I arrived home and tried to explain how augmented reality could be added to my projects that my wife brought me back to reality with a few simple questions, like “uh, who exactly is going to use that feature?” and “Why do you need that?” Don’t get me wrong, augmented reality is SO going to happen in one of my projects, just not until I can figure out a practical need that makes it better than alternative UI’s that users don’t need a web cam and printed media to use. Still, too cool to ignore. But even that postal service example is probably not REALLY used by many people. I mean, there IS technology already that helps you figure out whether something will fit in a box…I like to call it a “tape measure.” Google it.

What I did find compelling was the Adobe Flash Platform Services, a set of new, uh, services from Adobe that lets you easily share your flash content across a grab bag of social networks, mobile networks, including ways to monetize your content through ads, and built-in analytics. And that’s just the “Distribution” leg of the services, there’s cool collaboration and social network hooks (coming) as well. While there are some sharing widgets/services out there that serve a similar need, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do it in such a robust way as Adobe is doing here, and especially one focused on integrating seamlessly with Flash.

Flash Mobile Community

Inspired by Dale’s thoughtful blog post on the sort of “where are we now?” (the “we” being those Flash Lite developers who have soldiered on year to year since the glory days of Flash Lite 1.1) I thought I’d try and add my own point of view as well.

This is a bit tricky, without sounding like a bitter old man complaining “why you young cuss, I remember when we didn’t even HAVE functions!” to these upstart developers with Flash 10.1 on their brain coming into mobile. But damn it, I DO remember when we didn’t even have functions. What we did have was a commitment to Flash, and a big interest in mobile, and an understanding that big things were coming for mobile and we wanted to be part of it. As a US developer, it never really came, mainly because not enough people had the phones with Flash on them, and if they did (hello Verizon and BREW?) there was no easy path to get your content on the carrier/phone. So most of us (not all, but most) of us Flash Lite devotees made some cool stuff that nobody ever saw, let alone bought.

MAX 2009 and FP10.1 may be a tipping point, where this all starts to change, time will tell. But as I have concluded each year in the Flash mobile space, progress IS being made. Hasn’t been as fast as I’d have liked, and there’s been significant deadends and missteps, but it HAS progressed. And if any time is worth looking at Flash and mobile, it’s now. With Google predicting huge market share for Android, Palm Pre entering the game, there’s reason to get excited. And of course there’s already big opportunities for folks targeting Nokia-friendly markets.

Like Dale I’m curious of how the “old guard” will interface with the “new guard” coming into mobile Flash now. I’m guessing we old guard won’t be obsolete any time soon. We’re a wily bunch, and I’m sure will adapt with the times. But that’s the young optimist in me now, not the bitter old man.

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