Muddy Mobile Waters – Part 2

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Apple is moving away from using a shared standard for distributing and running RIA content on their mobile devices. So how will we be able to efficiently create rich online experiences and have them work on the desktop and on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad? Let’s look at some possible solutions:

Target Only Apple’s Devices
I’m sure that there will be still be situations where it’s cost effective to develop an RIA that only targets Apple’s devices, at least for the near future. But the obvious problem with this approach is that you will limit your audience. While the iPhone is currently a very large slice of the mobile pie, Android based devices are rapidly gaining ground, Microsoft will soon release their new mobile OS, Windows Phone 7, and other mobile OSs are maintaining their market share.

HTML5
Creating RIA that works within the web browser, using the new HTML5 tags to handle video, audio and animation is certainly going to be a useful way to deliver cross-platform content.

However it relies on if a platform’s browser fully supports the HTML5 specification’s APIs. Currently most mobile device and desktop web browsers do not or only partly support HTML5 and all have individual quirks in how they handle older HTML and CSS. HTML5 also does not provide as fully featured an API as various plug-ins have (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), so it will mostly be useful for embedding simple video, audio and animated content into the user’s browser. For more complex RIA interfaces in the web browser we will likely continue to use Web 2.0 solutions such as server-side scripting, AJAX, jQuery, plug-ins, etc. Even for embedding video and audio there will be issues, as it will be up to the browser to render video and audio and they are not in agreement about which codecs to use.

Flash
The Flash plug-in is already widely accepted by Internet users on their desktop computers, so I don’t think it will be a big stretch for them to use it on their mobile devices, especially if it comes pre-installed. Clients are comfortable with having their RIAs built using it and Device Central integrates several the Creative Suite apps, including Flash, to make it easier to create mobile content. Flash also supports exporting animations to the HTML5 Canvas tag, which may be useful for creating alternate content for non-Flash users.

But the problem with Flash is that currently there are not enough mobile devices that have the Flash plug-in installed to guarantee a large mobile audience and Apple is not likely to support the plug-in any time soon, if ever.

Conclusion
I anticipate that the Open Screen Project making Flash as mainstream on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. But it is the mobile user who will decide what really works for them, and truly RIA capable mobile devices which support the Flash plug-in have not yet gone on sale.

I suggest that unless you need to develop a mobile RIA right now, you’re best off waiting until the Fall. By then we should be able to see how the sales of non-Apple mobile devices are faring and have a clearer indication of how people’s mobile habits are evolving.

Muddy Mobile Waters – Part 1

An event is happening in the mobile world which is going to make it harder to build RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) that will work on everyone’s mobile device.

iPhone SDK 4.0
This summer Apple will be releasing a new version of the Software Development Kit for the iPhone, which comes with a revised Developer Agreement. This agreement includes new restrictions on what languages developers can use to create Apps for distribution in Apple’s Online Store.

Why is this a big deal?
Online access of the web using mobile devices is steadily increasing, so if you are involved in creating online experiences or your company has an online presence, you should start supporting mobile devices, if you aren’t already. As those devices become more and more capable their users will expect more than a simplistic web page and you will have the opportunity to impress them with richer content.

To economically develop RIAs that can target desktop and mobile devices it’s best to develop it once, with a minimum of the budget spent on tweaking and creating sub-versions for each device. For that to happen we need to have shared standards in the language, APIs (Application Programming Interface) and media rendering on all of the target devices.

Apple’s new Developer Agreement will limit developers to working in an Apple approved language which will only target their mobile devices. There are several languages and applications which will no longer be able to target the iPhone once the new Agreement goes into effect, including Adobe Flash CS5, which launched on April 12th. Flash is a commonly used method for distributing cross-platform RIA, but Apple has never allowed it’s customers to install the plug-in on their devices. Flash CS5 works around this by adding the ability to export a Flash movie as a native Apple mobile App, but under the new Agreement any App created with Flash will be automatically rejected by Apple when it is submitted for distribution on their Online Store.

Solutions..?
What’s an RIA content creator to do? I’ve a few ideas, which I’ll write about in Part 2.

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