Friday, May 30, 2008

Google I/O: Flash on Android, and Wrap-Up


Running Flash on Android
At the Android Q&A, the developers said that the first release will have a webkit browser included but without the ability to have plugins installed. So there won't be Flash or Flash Lite on the Android platform to start. The follow-up release will be able to install plugins into the webkit browser, which will make Flash available assuming Adobe offer an open source version of the Flash plugin.

This should provide the iPhone with some competition. I haven't seen another phone-based web browser as good as the iPhone's yet, and Flash support will be one way to compete. Hopefully this will then lead to Flash on the iPhone.

Wrap-Up
It was interesting that the Android sessions always seemed to be the most packed. I think the Google Gears work had the next highest level of interest.

I found the Gears work the most likely to be used in projects where I work - eg. storing stock and mutual fund data in local databases to allow fast filtering of results.

It was a well put together conference from Google, giving you an introduction to the various areas of web development that they offer developer tools in, and showing how they can be used alone or together to create web applications.

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