On day one of Max, Adobe announced the upcoming availability of the Flash platform on a number of mobile devices. The availability of Flash on a wide range of devices is an important step forward for the Flash / Flex developer community.
The upcoming 10.1 version of the Flash player will ship not just for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but also for such mobile-phone platforms as Android, Research in Motion'sBlackBerry, Palm's webOS, and Nokia'sSymbian.
What about the iPhone?
During the keynote, Adobe showed a video that included most every major mobile vendor speaking to the importance of Flash content being available as part of the mobile experience. ‘The elephant in the room’ was quite obvious, as Apple did not participate. Adobe did demonstrate some simple examples of Flash content running on the iPhone, created with a new option in Flash Professional to export the content for the iPhone. This option is limited though, as it is not available for Flex applications. Also, it is clear that does not mean that the Flash runtime is coming soon to the iPhone, as Adobe shared the following with Yahoo Tech:
Adrian Ludwig, a manager with Adobe's Flash group, said in an interview that Apple has yet to agree to work with Adobe to clear two key technical hurdles that would enable Flash applications to run on the iPhone.
"The ball is in their court at this point. We've been very blunt about what we need and what we are requesting," Ludwig said in an interview."
Enterprise Updates
The other news of the day for developers was the release of ColdFusion 9 and the availability of LivcCycle ES2. LiveCycle ES is a product targeted at large enterprises. The product provides features around collaboration and workflow. The new releases will also be available as cloud offerings. Adobe has not announced final details around cloud pricing.
On day one, Adobe has demonstrated a clear commitment to software developers. They have clearly expanded their business beyond the designer community that they have been so heavily identified with historically.