Frank's Cyber Cafe

Enjoy using and creating websites and above all "Have Fun!"

First Time X5er's......
When you first acquire this program and create your project, the only thing you will probably struggle with is the Exporting/Uploading at the end. We can HELP!

PRICE WATCH
AMAZON.co.uk - EVOLUTION 8 £49.95 - 2010

Apple iPad Flash with Flash In a Pinch – Proof of Concept

Apple [AAPL] has said it will never allow flash to land on the Apple iPad or any other iPhone OS, iOS device. This is just something iOS users have to live with... that's until a company called Artefact come along and create Flash In a Pinch.

What Flash In a Pinch does is allows Flash to run on the iPad in a default Safari browser with no modifications and no jailbreaking. The system works as a web-based thin client. The iPad off loads the Flash video to a server that renders the flash content and sends it back to the browser in a format recognisable.

We’re using Google’s open source Chrome browser (Chromium) to render images on a server and transmitting the image to Safari. Using Javascript on an overlaid layer, we’re able to send all touch interactions to the server and react to them, making it fully interactive.

On the downside, this requires more CPU time on the server and it’s not as fast as running Flash directly would be. Also, this only delivers images, currently. We’re working on a version that speeds up delivery by using the h.264 codec to deliver images and sound.

Some problems with the system have been spotted which revolve around the networking capabilities of the iPad. The conclusion Artefact draw up is that either Apple use bad WiFi hardware, bad OS software or have purposely added limitations to the WiFi to prevent apps like this from working to their full potential. The limitations limit the service to 15 interactions per second. Images can be bundled in to packages though to cut down usage.

Going forwards Artefact want to work on delivering high end 3D flash that will have very little impact on the iPad due to the CPU power being used to generate the iPad Flash version/clone being performed server side.
More On The Internals
Boiled down, this is a web-based thin client and, since it offloads the rendering to a back-end capable of running any plugin, we’re also able to render Silverlight, Unity3D and other plugins. I gotta say: it’s a bit of a trip to see Silverlight (such as the Artefact Animator) on an iPad.

We’re using Google’s open source Chrome browser (Chromium) to render images on a server and transmitting the image to Safari. Using Javascript on an overlaid layer, we’re able to send all touch interactions to the server and react to them, making it fully interactive.

On the downside, this requires more CPU time on the server and it’s not as fast as running Flash directly would be. Also, this only delivers images, currently. We’re working on a version that speeds up delivery by using the h.264 codec to deliver images and sound.

Findings

During this project we learned some interesting things about WiFi and TCP/IP on the iPhone and iPad. For some reason, these devices have roughly 10x longer latency than any other WiFi devices we could find. Some have had luck, to some extent, by using older 802.11b routers. There are only a few possible explanations for this:

•Bad hardware: Maybe all versions of iPhone / iPad use cheap, outdated wifi radios
•Bad software: Core bugs in Apple’s Mobile OSX are causing this - and have gone unfixed for at least 6 months
•Deliberate limitations: Perhaps Apple foresaw applications like this and decided to slow down their entire stack to make them harder to implement.
This means currently we’re limited to about 15 interactions per second out of an iPad, though we can stream images faster than that by bundling them into fewer packages.

What’s To Come?

Longer term, we hope to use this deliver high-end 3D experiences to all kinds of mobile devices with minimal impact on battery life since the device no longer has to render the most expensive content. Additionally, we’re looking into how this tech can be leveraged at both the enterprise and consumer levels.

Designing your Website?

When you start your first website.... enjoy creating and publishing it to the internet. Your friend's will tell you whether it appeals to them or not. Suggestions will come through and this is where the real fun starts? Trying to insert idea's of your own into the website itself! You have to be a Graphic Artist, Programmer, Designer to be a webmaster. It's a massive learning curve... enjoy!