Android developers got a nice boost from Adobe. As Apple continues to abandon and oppress potential developers. Adobe has officially announced it will stop pursuing iPad and iPhone development with Adobe Flash. While the feature will still be included in CS5 it will not be developed any further. Instead, Adobe has decided to shift focus on Android development with Flash.

"Fortunately, the iPhone isn’t the only game in town."

-Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe

With a vast number of Flash developers out there this is most certainly welcome news to any Android user. Comparing the Apple AppStore Games to Android Market Games reveals a large weakness in the Android platform. If Adobe truly throws their weight behind this project Android users will certainly benefit. As much as Flash has grown in the past ten years this also means a lot for basic applications on Android. The ability to leverage web services through Flash will make it a powerful productivity platform as well as gaming platform for development. This is something that has really taken off in recent years and many people tend to think of Flash as only for fancy menus and games.

Flash has been unwelcome in many Web Development circles due to accessibility and usability issues. I think the true problem regarding flash in Web sites relates to its abuse and not its intended purpose. Development for mobile devices is where Flash truly shines. For any mobile company, to leave Flash out of equation, just sounds like bad business. Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe, said on his blog: "The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development."

Sources:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8639240.stm
• http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphon...

Web Development has moved from being a simple hobby of mine into my profession. At work, I am a professional ColdFusion developer. At home I still play, albeit, not as much as I once did. I believe in many ways I have plateaued with ColdFusion. At least as far as my job is concerned I have definitely plateaued. There is no up, no growth from here. As a result I find myself looking in other directions. After attending a Microsoft Firestarter event on November 8th I have decided to pursue .NET as my next programming platform. Yesterday I purchased a book of ASP.NET with C# and am hoping to put together at least a “Hello World” site today. If all goes well I will slowly begin to move all of my sites over to ASP.NET. At the center of my personal projects is a new web game. The game takes a lot from Sundog and Freelancer but brings it to the web. Basically, the idea is to have a fully fledged space trading game online. Hopefully, I will be able to implement some more exciting elements of the game like combat with something like Silverlight. I think I will avoid Flash for this since I can program a Silverlight application in C# instead of having to learn ActionScript. Somewhere tied up in my game is my tired old Blog/Wiki/Forum project that never seems to get off the ground. Perhaps .NET will make that a slightly less horrible project to take on. At this point however my game itself is going to take precedence. I have started thinking about breaking it up into several smaller parts so it will be easier to handle. later, -junc

I have moved the site to a new web host. The move was pretty much perfect. The new server is a Windows Coldfusion Server that supports PHP. Wordpress runs great on it. As a result of the move I'm no longer offering any sort of web services or hosting. So any mention of that in previous posts is now null and void. Not that I had time to deal with that crap anyway. On the gaming front I found this little quote on Gamespot: "Considering that Guild Wars Factions was released earlier this year, it might seem that ArenaNet has packed a lot of new content into Nightfall in such a short development time, but Strain said that the company's development strategy is starting to pay off. ArenaNet has two teams working on Guild Wars, and each team has 12 months to develop a new chapter. Because the goal of each new chapter is to introduce a new way to play the game, it's safe to say that the future of Guild Wars looks bright. For now, Guild Wars Nightfall is scheduled to launch on October 27." -GameSpot I interpret this to mean that at least once a year we will have a Guild Wars "expansion". Perhaps twice a year. Which makes me giggle with glee. Over the past week I have been thinking about Guild Wars and the Nintendo Wii. It has really got me wondering if there is any point in buying a new game system when I'm so addicted to a PC game. Then I found a list of launch titles and went through them. I came up with the following ten games as must haves at launch: Need for Speed: Carbon Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII Call of Duty 3 The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Rayman Raving Rabbids Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent Rampage: Total Destruction Excite Truck Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Metal Slug Anthology These are all set to be released on the 19th of November along with the console. Except Rampage which will be released on the 20th. The lack of a big RPG is pretty glaring there. This will hit Nintendo pretty hard I think. There is also a glaring lack of Mario and Metroid in that list. If they were launch titles they would have found their way into it. Putting together that list built up my excitement again though. I will most definitely be picking up my Wii on the 19th. later, -junc