something in the way

Congratulation to the team at Graphic.ly for releasing an alpha version of their upcoming desktop application powered by Adobe AIR. If you are or ever have been a fan of comic books, you simply must download this application and take it for a spin.

Features of the desktop application include:

• An application store that allows you to browse and purchase comic books (several are currently offered for free!)
• An activity feed that displays what others in the Graphic.ly community are reading and rating
• A built-in achievement system that recognizes users for discovering new features
• A beautiful, full-screen interface for navigating the pages and individual frames of a comic book
• A social feature that allows you to write comments on individual frames that others in the community can read

The Graphic.ly team describes what they are building as a "a cutting-edge community and digital content delivery platform for comic books, graphic novels and other forms of publishing." I am looking forward to seeing feature iterations of the application; especially as Graphic.ly becomes available on new types of devices.

AndroLib has reported that the total number of applications on the Android Market has exceeded 50,000; this number is a wee bit bigger than what Google itself has reported during a Q1 earnings report. Jeff Huber, Google’s senior VP of engineering reported the number to be a respectable 38,000, which stands as Google’s “official” count.

“We’re sticking to 38,000 for now. We’ll announce when we do our next formal count.”
-Google, to Android Central

50,000 seems to be quite a big over-estimate if Google is sticking to their lower figure; however, I could see the numbers getting easily inflated due to the amount of not-quite-apps on the marketplace. Any search for “Beautiful Widgets” or “Better Home” will give you a sea of entries that are just for skins, which just make finding the original app that much harder. This flood is one of the main critiques of the marketplace, and something I believe needs to be fixed ASAP to bring us a more functional environment to find apps.

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Congratulations to the teams at National Geographic and EffectiveUI for releasing The Complete National Geographic! The complete collection contains every issue of National Geographic magazine, digitally reproduced in stunning high resolution. Users of the application can explore a topic, search for photographs, browse the globe, or create their own own expedition. Adobe AIR was used as core technology in helping to bring this application to life. The team at EffectiveUI developed a success story that highlights key capabilities of the application.

In addition, the official website from National Geographic provides additional details on the features of the application.

Explore 120 years of amazing discoveries, fascinating maps, and the world's best photography with The Complete National Geographic. This definitive collection of every issue of National Geographic magazine, digitally reproduced in stunning high resolution, brings you the world and all that is in it. Use the advanced interface to explore a topic, search for photographs, browse the globe, or wander on your own expedition. Order The Complete National Geographic now!

Additional Information

• EffectiveUI Success Story: The Complete National Geographic
• Adobe.TV Interview With Effective UI's Chris Aaron
• Robert Scoble Demos The Complete National Geographic

Google has been keeping a secret for most of this year and it’s called Google Goggles. We mistakenly called the service Google Visual Search earlier today, but the actual name is in fact Google Goggles (no not Mail Goggles). CNBC is running a special called Inside the Mind of Google and I highly suggest you tune in (or DVR) and watch the entire show. A short clip of the Google Goggles segment has been posted on YouTube.

Upcoming showtimes for the CNBC special include:

• Saturday, December 5th  7p ET
• Sunday, December 6th  10p ET
• Thursday, December 10th  8p | 1a ET
• Thursday, December 24th  4p | 8p ET
• Friday, December 25th  Midnight ET

[image courtesy CNBC]

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Well good news for Flash developers, Flash CS5 will finally compile to native iPhone and Touch Applications. This is great news for many developers out there who have stuck with the Flash platform.  I am sure there will still be limitations to what you can do with Flash on the iPhone and it will probably be mostly 2D games and apps but this is a great start to getting the Flash platform truly mobile and up to the rest of the industry.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.*

A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 with prerelease support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year. Sign up to be notified when the beta starts.

I have been questioning why they have not moved to this model before when others are doing so such as haXe, Unity3D and MonoTouch.  Getting Flash on the web browsers on a mobile is hard because Flash is pretty CPU intensive on embedded devices which is really where computers were in the late 90’s and close to 400-600 MHz processors.  Today these machines wouldn’t be able to run Flash very well and that is the same effect you get on a mobile phone.  But cross-compiling to native, similar to how Unity 3D does it or other solutions like MonoTouch and XNATouch, this is the best solution until mobile/embedded devices have 1GHz processors and more than 500MB of memory. Adobe is using LLVM, much like the Alchemy model, to achieve getting AS3 content onto an iPhone/Touch with AOT or Ahead of Time compilation rather than JIT compilation.

So how do you build an application for the iPhone? It’s simple, really. The forthcoming beta of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 incorporates the ability to create an iPhone application. You have access to nearly all the AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 APIs. For example, you can use APIs such as RTMP, Remote Shared Objects, and AMF as well as AIR APIs like SQLite and filesystem access. For more information see the developer FAQ on Adobe Labs.

I am glad to see Adobe finally moving on mobile platforms beyond Flashlite.  Flashlite is a poor solution in most cases on embedded devices because they really need native apps to perform, again due to the hardware limitations and it is a whole new platform to learn. Adobe is doing the hard work to make it easy to get developers content on the new embedded devices that are storming the world such as the iPhone and Touch.

• Info on the CS5 Beta
• Sign up for the beta of CS5
• FAQ on Flash iPhone Applications
• Developer article on how the LLVM cross compiling will work
• Flash 10 full version on all phones by Q2 2010 except iPhone

AIR is very popular for creating twitter clients, Sönke Rohde just made it much easier to make AIR apps for twitter with an AS3 library for Twitter. This library is built on top of core oauth as3 library by iotashan.  Core OAuth as3 library is a standard OAuth library this can be used for your own OAuth backends or connecting to other OAuth services as well.

A very nice feature of this library, in addition to being coded cleanly and as3 style, is the ability to have the Twitter OAuth page render inside of Flash.

Instead of opening the Twitter authorization page in the browser the library also contains OAuthLoader which is a wrapper around HTMLLoader which enables to directly show the authorization page within an AIR window:

// use this in the requestTokenHandler instead of navigateToURL
var loader:OAuthLoader = new OAuthLoader();
loader.load(request);
loader.percentWidth = 100;
loader.percentHeight = 100;
var w:Window = new Window();
w.width = 800;
w.height = 400;
w.title = req.url;
w.addChild(loader);
w.open();

• Shannon Hicks core oauth as3 library
• High level AS3/Flex library for OAuth
• oauth-as3 Google Code page
• OAuth
• Twitter OAuth FAQ
• Twitter API Documentation
• Getting Started with OAuth

Alchemy is going to shake things up a bit.  As witnessed before from Quake running in flash and now ODE compiled to run in flash using Alchemy (LLVM based). It is an early test but shows what could be possible.

Mihai Pricope has a post with sources on how he got the ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) a great open source physics engine for 3D, running on the AVM2 Flash Player virtual machine.

I’ve took Alchemy for a test and decided to compile ODE (Open Dynamic Engine). Just to add yet another physics engine to the Flash World. It was a hell of a ride but I finally got to produce some bouncing balls :). For a still unknown reason some as 3d libraries have been very slow to render 6 translucent walls and 2 balls. Papervision3D seems to move quite decent.

You can download the ode sources from here. To recompile them do (you need to have the Alchemy environment turned on):

Flash 10 will become mainstream shortly and with that the possibilities of using Alchemy in your projects is becoming a reality for production.  But what specifically can you do with Alchemy, a project that helps to compile C/C++ code into AVM2 capable files?

Alchemy described from Adobe:

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

Alchemy is based on the LLVM Low Level Virtual Machine that allows new levels of code translation.  Maybe this can lead to more effective and performing code to run on the iPhone with flash player 10. Or some type of system that allows flash developers to code in AS3 or take projects and get them ready to run on the iPhone much like some of the Java to Cocoa compilation systems and Unity3D using mono to compile down to iPhone capable code.

Adobe will essentially open up the RTMP protocol officially. RTMP has been used in other tools such as Red5 and haXe video for some time now.  But officially having it open will make it possible for more products built on it.  I am sure that most of this is to combat silverlight and to gain more video users that can play flash formats. RTMP spec will be posted here when ready.

RTMP provides an enhanced and efficient way to deliver rich content. Developers and companies will have free and open access to the documented RTMP specification to help enable unparalleled delivery of video, audio and data in the open AMF, SWF, FLV and F4V formats compatible with Adobe Flash Player.

Adobe has also been working on more real-time protocol tools based on UDP instead of TCP (which RTMP is based) that fall under RTMFP using ordered UDP that will be interesting to watch evolve.  Stratus is so far a sample of what is to come there.The UDP based real-time tools will be able to beat the capabilities of TCP based real-time  tools when using authoratative servers.

But with the RTMP announcement, multiuser and video applications should thrive even more with an open RTMP spec.