So for those that don’t already know, due to exceptional growth, Encore moved offices back in January!

Our new address is:

Encore
4th Floor
Phoenix Building
32 West Street
Brighton
BN1 2RT
UK

Some of the benefits:

• We have much more space now (the whole top floor)
• We are now right in the centre of town, 5 minutes walk from the train station
• We have a huge roof terrace over-looking the sea!

The only scary thing is we have already filled the space – in less than 3 months.

Here are some images of a JavaFX mobile application created by Encore and demoed by Sun at Oracle OpenWorld.

samsung-omnia-pro-1

samsung-omnia-pro-2

samsung-omnia-pro-3

htc-touch-diamond-1

htc-touch-diamond-2

htc-touch-diamond-3

Here you can see the application running on two different phones, the HTC Touch Diamond and the soon to be released Samsung Omnia Pro B7610.

The application itself forms part of the mobile wing of a larger enterprise application/solution, also developed by Encore, for one of our clients.

With Adobe’s announcement last week at Adobe MAX that they have added export to iPhone in an alpha version of Flash CS 5, there has obviously been a lot of discussion about this.

There are various strands of discussion, however the strand that interests myself is that of whether Apple will actually allow this.

Some background…

Apple have from the start had a very closed environment for developing iPhone applications.
Amongst many things:

• Developers must sign-up (and pay) for the privilege of being able to publish to the iPhone.
• Developers must use only documented API’s from the Cocoa API.
• Developers must not publish anything that can load in other code (eg a runtime such as the Flash Player, and this point has been the most problematic to Adobe).
• The only way to get an application onto the iPhone is by submitting it to Apple who check it conforms to all their rules before it goes onto the app store (which is the only way to distribute iPhone applications).

One of the reasons for this closed environment is so that 3rd party applications all look and work in a similar fashion, are all stable and wont interfere with other aspects of the iPhone.

The obvious problem for Adobe is that this means they cannot get the Flash Player onto the iPhone and Apple have not bowed down to the sometimes very public pressure Adobe have been putting on them to put/allow the Flash Player on the iPhone.

So what Adobe have done is found a way to allow its users to output native iPhone applications from the Flash IDE – therefore not requiring the actual Flash Player.
However, and importantly, these output applications are not Objective-C Cocoa Touch applications.
There is also as yet no information whatsoever from Apple as to whether this technique of bypassing the runtime is to be endorsed.

This last point is very important. Apple has historically been very tough when it comes to getting applications through their approval process. They have created an environment whereby they retain a very tight control of the applications that get onto the devices. And while there would be no actual Flash runtime on the device, there would be an ecosystem of iPhone development that Apple had much less control of.

The two biggest concerns for Apple would be a) performance and b) lack of look and feel.
Regarding performance, obviously to a large degree this comes down to the developer. But if the byte-code Flash spits out is of poor quality, then its down to the tooling (Adobe).
Regarding look and feel, this again in largely down to the developer, however Adobe is working on a mobile version of the Flex framework (codenamed Slider) and it would be highly likely many iPhone apps would make use of this and therefore not look and feel like iPhone apps but look and feel like Flash apps. And from a user experience perspective, this is very bad for Apple. Apple have always been keen advocates of precise and consistent user experience, as always reflected in their Human Interface Guidelines.

So all said, do you really think Apple are going to quietly let this happen?

I really hope Adobe are doing this with the full support from Apple. If this is the case, we have some great things to look forward to from Adobe. If not, well, just a flash in the pan.

Encore are proud to have become a Sun JavaFX Preferred Solution Provider!

As a company who specialise in multi-device and multi-platform applications, we have really been excited by JavaFX, which has given us the tools to quickly develop professional solutions that work as intended across a myriad of platforms, and streamline the designer-to-programmer workflow with the JavaFX Production Suite.

Becoming a Preferred Solution Provider gains us many benefits, including direct support from Sun and the mark of trust and approval that being associated with such a prestigious organisation brings – by getting a JavaFX solution from Encore, you have the knowledge that we have Sun backing us and that they recognise the quality of our work.

In addition, Orbitals is now hosted on the Java Warehouse Store – check it out!

A screencast showing just how easy the JavaFX workflow is for the designer-developer interaction.