While we still believe HTML/JS developers have lapped Adobe and flash in terms of efficiency and delivery viewports, this video from Adobe shows a glimmer of hope. This prototype “Wallaby” application converts Flash to HTML5, keeping animations and graphics, but losing some things like blending modes and other fancy special effects. Hmm… Very Interesting!

A start for Adobe. We’ll probably have to wait until CS6 to see this implemented. We also speculate that this is a re-working of the previously anticipated Flash to App converter that was to be part of the CS5 suite (now available since Apple lifted third party bans on dev). Can we beta Wallaby? It might be energizing to see old flash projects on my iPhone.

Last week Apple announced to all their developers, and the world, that they would be adjusting their terms for app development. They have made it more flexible for developers to make apps by allowing some third party development environments and languages, instead of using their proprietary version of Obj-C called CocoaTouch. While their Xcode environment is very sophisticated and powerful, app developers were also forced to learn a programming language that only a small portion of developers were using.

Technical languages aside, what does this mean? In a nutshell, developers writing in cross platform, web-standard languages (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS), can create apps now with only a minimal amount of programming in CocoaTouch.

For us here at Dirk+Weiss, this means we can make apps more efficiently. We can also make prototypes that could be styled with CSS to run in your browser, rather than having a physical device. Now, of course, this does not mean that you negate testing phases for apps, it just gives our clients a more realistic proof of concept and prototype.