My Plea with Adobe
Adobe has made an interesting announcement this week. While they will be offering Flash on several new devices with Flash 10.1, the iPhone is not supported. However in what seems to be their solution to this problem, they are going to allow Flash to iPhone apps directly from Flash CS5. This isn’t going to be a SWF inside a an IPA or something like that, it will be a natively compiled app. In fact it seems there are already several in the App Store already, and people didn’t even know it. This has brought me to my plead with Adobe to offer BD-J compiling with Flash in the same way.
Is this even possible? I don’t know, but I think it just might be after reading some of Adobe’s explanation that talks about Just In Time (JIT) compilation versus Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation and Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM). The LLVM is apparently converting the Action Script 3 code to the iPhone’s native ARM assembly. According to the LLVM site the compiler supports X86, X86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU, PIC16 MIPS, MSP430, SystemZ, and XCore processors. What I’m worried about is that it says it works with C and C++ and we all know that BD-J is Java, so I don’t know where that leaves us. I was trying to figure out what processors Blu-ray players use and that sort of thing, but it’s all a little beyond me. Does anyone else have any insight to this?
All I’m saying is this: How nice would it be to be able to use an existing tool, like Flash, that has been around forever to design and author all the BD-J code? I’m still not excited about On-Q and Sonic’s BD-J solutions are sloppy. If Adobe was serious about Blu-ray, they could add this in and integrate it with Encore (and hopefully Scenarist and Blu-print) and you may start seeing some actual BD-J games/applications that are worth using. I think it would also make Encore a serious competitor in the Blu-ray authoring world.
I’m not sure if anyone from Adobe would ever read this (though I do have a few hits from San Jose over the last month, so maybe they do) but if you do, PLEASE consider this. I know there isn’t as much as a market for this, but I think you could easily include this as an extra bundle. Even if it was $10k, I think I could convince my company to invest in it if it was well done.
Anyone have any other thoughts?
October 9th, 2009 at 2:51 am
I would also love Adobe to develop an app for BD-J.
But isn’t Sonic BD-J Converter supposed to do this already ?
March 17th, 2010 at 4:09 am
I think what Rey is after is a development environment that allows you to both design and code BD-J to produce an end product. A familiar Adobe front end would certainly make things easier.
As for porting code to BD-J, you’ll find it is still a very niche market. The current Bluray Spec is still quite limited. Yes, it is a strong platform for development, but the current standard of hardware is just not powerful enough for anything other than graphically intensive menu systems.
There is also the issue of product differentiation. While the Bluray spec ensures all players much conform to a set of guidelines and requirements, how they achieve that is up to the manufacturer. So gauging code performance is a hard one.
For example; compare the load time of a BD-J Disc on a PS3 to that of a stand-alone player and you’ll see what I mean.
Thankfully Bluray unlike DVD is a platform that can and will see on-going development and improvement.
Just my 2ยข