Brave Predictions

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced at the D9 conference yesterday that “Android will overtake iPad just like it did the iPhone.” You may remember roughly a year ago when we mentioned that Apple’s decision to block Adobe Flash on the Mac would prove fatal to it’s longevity, well perhaps that one thing will not, but the overall philosophy is what is unsustainable. Sure, it is possible for Toyota to sell vehicles with their hoods welded shut, in fact, given the right hype they could get off to a record start. I can see the advertisements now: Cool Car: “What’s that, your hood opens? That’s so yesterday.” … Geeky Old Car: “How do you expect a mechanic to fix you if they can’t get to your engine?” … Cool Car: “I don’t expect to need fixing.” … Nice gimmick, but who exactly are we fooling here?

So back to Android and to our tech-savvy audience. The platform is wide open and we have a lot of fun developing Droid apps. Currently we still prefer the old and reliable Eclipse environment. We combine that with DroidDraw (I personally prefer to just type type the XML and avoid the inconsistencies) for layouts and have slowly gotten brave enough to do significant testing in the emulator before putting it on our devices. There are daily arrivals of some great libraries on GitHub and most of these are OpenSource. We’d love to hear of anyone developing their mobile apps solely in Flash (or Flex) on AIR. We have a client looking for this and could not honestly claim any experience with it yet, but you can bet we’re on it. It has been possible for over a year now, but my concern is what happens with phones that don’t have Flash? Is it still too early to recommend this to clients?

Well, this article will have to remain a “to-be-continued”. Until we get a better feel for the potential. Narayen may be producing precisely the buzz he’d hoped to.