My FITC Mobile Notes pt2

This is second part of my FITC mobile experience where I attended mainly iPhone and Flash development lectures. The following is a collection of loose notes.

iOS NETWORKING with Jim Dovey who works @ Kobo inc.

Jim discussed Grand Central Dispatch which is the iOS approach to multicore computing and thread management. He talked about asynchronous network development in 10.6 using CFNetwork, NSURLConnection, Reachability, and the new Blocks which provide function closures.

I was also curious about his personal site allanquatermain.net and just who was this Allan Quatermain character?

Media Player Programming on iOS with Adam Hunter who heads up the mobile division @ Rogers

Adam showed us how he was able to stream large media files. He used the short animated film elephant dreams as an example, and was able to stream the film creating 10 second chunks using open source iPhone streaming technology called a segmenter. He discussed other streaming services like encoding.com. He walked us through some sample code that showing that one can now create a video player instance within an app that doesn’t need to take up the entire screen using AVPlayer sharing it with other views.

Adam’s latest success story was the CityTV ipad app which held the number one free app position.

Flash Platform for Mobile and Devices with Mark Doherty

The massive variety of screens make for an unpredictable future and that Flash has at least attempted to remain consistent across these screens. He did encourage developers to test on each device and create different builds depending on how they perform; don’t just build for one device and think it will translate to all Flash devices. He mentioned the move towards the cloud where we can centrally store data and share it among a swarm of screens.

Adobe has a lofty goal of supplying the Flash Player Lite to 1.2 Billion devices: tablets, smart phones and set top boxes. The mobile version of Flash — Flash Lite — is still different from the desktop version of the latest Flash Player 10.1. As Scott Janousek points out, the differences between the two players should be minor and allow for easy porting. It seems we do need different version to support under powered devices.

It was cool to see him demonstrate the papervision 3D site ecodazoo.com on a Froyo android device and see him spin the 3D models showing that it had only a slight loss of performance over the desktop version.

Adobe has started to work on the iPhone packager for Flash CS5 again after Apple decided open up to other third party developers which is an excellent move and renews my faith in the future of both Apple and Adobe.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Where do I stand in 2010 on Mobile Dev? In 2009, I liked the idea that you could in theory develop for multiple devices specifically the big three. Today, I think that generalist approach isn’t practical for the apps that I want to create and not having access to multiple devices is a definite barrier. The differences between the Blackberry, android and iPhone devices are simply too great. By focusing on a single platform, I’ll become a specialist for that device which for me should translate to future iOS projects in 2011. I do know that I need a decent app in the app store before anyone would consider me as serious iOS developer.

I’ve decided to dedicate 2010 to the iOS platform and have buckled down to learn objective-c [as well as C/C++ since they all work on iOS] by reading textbooks, watching iTunes university lectures [the Stanford iphone ones are exceptional!], and chipping away at a side project prototype which should be ready for release in a couple more months.

The more time I put into objective-c dev; the more I discover that I need to know which only re-enforces this specialist approach. So as much as I do admire android, I’m not attempting to learn Froyo just yet but banking on Flash to port any desktop apps to that device so that I don’t have to learn yet another language; the various flavors of C are quite enough for 2010.