In today’s Adobe Systems Q2 earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said that Adobe is seeing “tremendous adoption” of Flash across not just PCs, but all kinds of devices.
Narayen stated that Adobe has ported Flash Player 10 to multiple smartphone platforms, including Google’s Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm WebOS. A beta release of Flash Player 10 for smartphone platforms will be available to developers at Adobe’s MAX conference this October.
In response to a question specifically about the Apple iPhone, Narayen declared that Adobe is “absolutely committed” to bringing Flash to the iPhone but went on to state, “We need more APIs and cooperation to bring the capabilities of Flash to the iPhone.”
“We think it is in Apple and Adobe’s best interest” to make Flash available on the iPhone Narayen stated, adding “We are constantly reaching out to them.”
[Updated 8:52 PM to add links and make minor corrections to quotes based on audio released by Adobe from the session.]
On Technology and Media 
I assume Apple is hesitant to allow Flash on the iPhone because it has the potential to hurt iTunes and App Store sales. Although I have an iPhone, I am not a fan of Apple’s lockdown approach to the device. Because of this, and a few other reasons, I believe Google Android will eventually be the mobile platform to beat.
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Agreed! I too have high hopes for Android in opening up the iphone os available via the sdks as well as the store.
At the same time, I’m more interested in HTML (5 and later) reducing/eliminating the need for flash/silverlight/java. A man can dream!
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Kendall,
Do you know f t is possible to embed a flash application into a PDF?
Also, if the flash application populates itself (think business reporting service) by making web requests to a webservice… can that application be embedded into PDF?
I have what is essentially a reporting UI built in FLASH and I want to embed the report viewer into PDFs that get emailed to subscribers.
The report viewer populates itself by fetching data from a webservice… Does this sound like the kind of app that can be embedded into PDF?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Dave:
You should be able to accomplish what you describe, particularly if you use Acrobat version 9 to create the PDF file and require your users to have Acrobat or Adobe Reader version 9 to interact with it.
As I mentioned in passing in an earlier post, starting with version 9, Acrobat includes the Flash Player runtime within Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Acrobat 9 includes a Flash tool under Tools > Multimedia for embedding a Flash SWF file.
See Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Help: Add Multimedia to PDFs for more details.
In previous editions of Acrobat (version 6 and higher, I think) you could embed a Flash SWF file using the Movie tool, but the SWF rendering depended on a locally-installed version of the Flash Player. I’ve heard reports of inconsistent behavior across different versions of Acrobat or the Flash Player using this earlier technique so, if you can require Acrobat or Reader version 9, I think you’ll have a more reliable experience.
In terms of pulling in data from a Web service, I think you can do this, but you should verify this before committing to the project. I don’t know whether there are any cross-domain scripting issues to contend with (such as those described in Flash Player Developer Center: Understanding Flash Player 9 April 2008 Security Update Compatibility). You should obviously test your embedded SWF under real-world conditions to confirm there are no problems. And, of course, your app needs a way to handle the cases where the user is offline or the data service doesn’t respond.
Best of luck,
:Kendall
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Anyone knows when Adobe Flash Player is availalbe for motorola droid?
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