Granted, one can scale the buttons down.

But it would still be a bad GUI for an mobile add. One would remove the tabs, the bookmarks, remove the navigation. Current mobile browsers focus on the URL.

App UX does not end there for different mobile devices. My Blackberry Bold has a different screen than my iPhone, it has a trackball, isn’t touch sensitive, has an excellent keyboard. Android has 4 buttons, the iPhone has one button.

One Flash app does not work. HTML does work, because the native browser supports this all (zooming, keyboard, trackball, …)

But it will be a great app on a mobile device and horrible at larger sizes (or you want to have 10cm buttons) or good at larger sizes and

You’re so deep into implementation, that you can’t see the problem.

It’s not technical – obviously not – it’s an UX problem for gods sake!

Adding another technical solution will not help, I agree with you that scaling images and buttons is easy. It’s about scaling UIs.

There’s plenty of material out there, reading up on the SDK for Android or the iPhone would be a good start, but Swing or SWT are good too.

John Dowdell gave you a glimpse of how to design scalable images, we call these “nine patch images” on Android. It’s simple, really: you draw an image, such as a frame designed to go around something, you divide that image in nine rectangles and you specify which parts should be stretched and tiled if a rescaling is necessary.

More details there:

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/draw9patch.html

And that’s just for images, there are similar techniques for creating resolution and density independent user interfaces. As I said in the beginning of this discussion, this part of the development process is really not a problem, and there is really nothing that prevents Flash from supporting this kind of technique (and I bet most Flash developers are already using such techniques).

–
Cedric

No, I do not think it’s possible without a second app.

But if someone shows me one, and how this is done, I’ll agree.

Otherwise one needs to write a special Flash app for the iPhone (and Blackberry Bold, and iPad, and ….) and then why not write a native app.

Flash could add layout capilities, zooming (double tap), rotating, gestures and emulate everything iPhone apps can, but currently it doesn’t. In the end it would reimplement HTML capabilities inside Flash inside HTML.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that Android UI will scale your application so that it will look as good as it can on a different resolution or different DPI. It’s moot in the case of the transition from a phone to a tablet, but it’s very important and useful when you are switching to resolutions and densities that are close to each other (e.g. QVGA to WVGA), such as running your application on two different phones.

Now, why you keep connecting this discussion to Flash on the iPhone is still completely lost to me.

If so, have you looked into the basic properties of vector illustration, the scale-nine innovations, the export-to-Apple functionality of the authoring tools?

I’d agree that getting the basic physical design on a new size of display is hard (although not as hard as rethinking the app for mobile use!), but it seems Flash has the advantage rather than the disadvantage here…?

jd/adobe

Resizing by scaling pixels adapting to different DPIs is easy. It’s the same size, just different pixels.

See your PNG which was done for desktops and scale the app to a phone. THEN I’m convinced.

Apple already said, that you probably need to write a different GUI for iPad and iPhones, excatly because the recognized that you can#t have the _same_ UI for mobile and tablets.

For the same reasons, Flash on the iPhone does not make sense.

“Do you have examples of apps written for 12″ Android tablets that work as good on small Android phones?”

Most of the applications written for the G1 scaled fine to the MyTouch, Droid and now Nexus One without any intervention from the developers. We’re talking about different resolutions *and* DPI, and I mean images, views and fonts.

I’m telling you, this resolution/dpi-dependent mythical problem is a red herring. It’s not a problem, it works fine, and Apple will most likely offer support for this in their next SDK to accomodate the iPad and whatever future devices they have in store.

Saying that because of this problem, Flash on the iPhone does not make sense is a very strange argument.

1. Did you really take a look at the graphs?

2. Don’t start a iPhone vs. Android flame war, I’m not interested.

3. “My name is Cédric Beust. I am a software engineer at Google on the Android project.”

You’ve lost a lot of credibility since “Others I’d like to meet are above all Crazy Bob for Dynaop (and Guice), Cedric for his stand on dynamic languages and Rickard of course.”

Do you have examples of apps written for 12″ Android tablets that work as good on small Android phones?

Stephan

PS: I’m sure, http://beust.com/ucq/ucq1.png scales excellently as a GUI to Android (without scrolling)

As always I disagree. First I’m not sure how much Flash experience you have, either by writing or by managing Flash projects.

From my experience from Flash, Swing and SWT, GUIs do not scale. Yo can’t just decrease font size to 6 pixels. GUIS do not resize. The best I’ve seen was MUI on Amigas – and that didn’t work either.

I haven’t seen good resolution independent applications, that resize. All I’ve seen are apps with large, easily resizable components in them like text ares (IDEs), images, graphs. The GUI stays the same, the components resize (as written in the post about video). Buttons stay the same, which works with increasing the screen size (Desktop) but not with decreasing it (mobile).

“We’ll still be using Flash in ten years from now, it’s not going anywhere and when most mobile phones will be able to play videos from Hulu or play Farmville (very soon), the iPhone will have to fall in line or be reduced to a niche.”

Flash is 15 years old, mobile internet 10 years. It didn’t take off, and it won’t take off. The breakthrough of mobile depends on Farmville? Uhuh.

PS: “Flash is dying” – please do not make quotes that are not quotes.

Resolution independent UI’s are a solved problem. Desktop UI frameworks solved it a while ago (Swing, .net, etc…) and Android is showing it’s pretty easy to do on mobile phones as well. Actually, Android even lets you specify UI’s that are DPI independent.

Really, writing code that calculates widget sizes based on getHeight() and getWidth() instead of hardcoding these values is trivial.

As for “Flash is dying”, well, sure, like Microsoft is.

We’ll still be using Flash in ten years from now, it’s not going anywhere and when most mobile phones will be able to play videos from Hulu or play Farmville (very soon), the iPhone will have to fall in line or be reduced to a niche.

Actually, this might have already started:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/15692/android_marketshare_growing_iphone_shrinking_says_quantcast

I really appreciate your blog.

Why doesn’t Adobe optimize their player for Apple? Because Apple is still a niche market compared to PCs and other phones. Unfortunately Apple guys know how to make things bigger than they are actually. So Adobe’s strategy of sparing some money fights back eventually.

If i was Adobe, i couldn’t care less about a few iphones. Money is elsewhere.

Best,
Ralf.

How many of the games available on the iPhone are either copies of flash games, or easily made as flash games? When there is a free internet version vs a 0.99c app-store version, why would Apple risk losing it’s 0.30c per download by allowing people to use flash to play online?

This will be even more apparent on the iPad assuming that the market for it are the same people that would kill time playing stupid flash games on the internet.

2) insufficient layout capabilites
Interesting point about the unsufficient layout capabilites. I’m no flash expert – as stated above – but repeating this brought me quite an insight, thanks. I guess you point to wrapping capabilities etc? If I understand yo right, better layout capabilities would allow to reuse the same desing on different mobile devices (which seems not possible currently).

3) compelling UI
I think there’s no contradiction between useful and compelling. Ideal UIs combine both. IMHO a perfect site for the masses (not for the two of us, we have a technical background and get positive impressions by great technologies already) should combine great usability and visuals. In my eyes this is one of the reasons why as ex. Macs and the MacOS (I’m a linux user though) are pretty successful lately. I think that a compelling UI is always a plus and should be a goal to track.

With Flash you will probably need a version per device (Nokia, Android, Blackberry Bold + Storm, iPhone). Or Flash supports better layout mechanisms, zoom and scrolling.

“[...] mostly visually more compelling than plain html stuff.”

Yes might be, perhaps I’m in a different camp using mobile for useful stuff not to watch visually compelling sites – then again, I’m no designer.

I at least, can see, why Steve Jobs is saying Flash would be a killer for Safari on the iPhone.

I do understand your rational point of view, but to mee it’s much more simple.