Flash, Flex...on your iPhone?

I'm a Flash/Flex/Air developer primarily, with expertise in what I think of as "supporting" technologies (gateways and data layers built out of .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby, etc.). My usual contract gig is, I manage and/or work on an application's UI, using ActionScript technologies, and offer whatever assistance is needed to set up the gateway and data transfer backends. Sometimes I build all of it, sometimes I just have to work with the backend guys to understand how something like OpenAMF or Fluorine works, it depends on the client's expertise, but that's why they hire me. 

Flash/Flex, however, has been one of my greatest disappointments with the iPhone. We were promised "the complete web", and it's one of the reasons I jumped on the OG iPhone day one. Shortly after dumping my other phone and signing onto AT&T, I visited one of my ActionScript-based web apps...

...and discovered there was no Flash. Apple and their fanbois came back with a few short, lame justifications for this disclosure omission: "we support the open web, Flash is proprietary", "the Flash player is not really a Web 2.0 technology", were some of the things I saw bandied about. Fact is, it's the best solution for RIAs, and is getting stronger all the time. I've been doing this for 15 years, picked Flash/Flex for a reason, and the industry seems to support my decision; the NYTimes recently dumped Silverlight for Adobe Air, MLB did the same thing a while back if I remember correctly, and I'm currently working on a very large project that I can't talk that much about, but which will go live soon (and then I'll talk about it as much as I can). 

I have actually viewed Flash apps on my iPhone over VNC and RDP connections (check out WinAdmin in the app store). This lets me pull up a browser remotely, and access any web page I want, including ones with embedded flash apps. If the Flash app is designed properly, with a web page that properly sizes the browser, removed as many tool/status bars as possible, and so on, the experience isn't bad, but, I admit it's unreasonable to ask your average user to buy and install WinAdmin, or some other VNC client, to play a Flash game. I'd also have to provide the server for browser access, etc. 

It seems somebody has set out to solve this problem: Citrix. Take a look at this:

http://citrixcloud.net/

They offer a client for iPhone, called Citrix Receiver, which offers a 2-hour session, expires-in-24-hours, demo of access to the CitrixCloud. In their own words, the CitrixCloud, or C3 is "a complete set of service delivery infrastructure building blocks for hosting, managing and delivering cloud-based computing services. C3 includes a reference architecture that combines the individual capabilities of several Citrix product lines to offer a powerful, dynamic, secure and highly available service-based infrastructure ideally suited to large-scale, on-demand delivery of both IT infrastructure and application services. "

For the layman, that means more or less, "you can use our products to expose your apps to pretty much any client. With one of our viewers, a user can use any application on just about any client as if it was installed on their desktop". 

So, by now you may have guessed: The Citrix Receiver can provide access to Flash and Flex applications in a very compelling way. 

Ultimately, it's still the iPhone accessing web pages, but, it's not doing it through Safari, which can't run the Flash player. It's accessing a browser on a Windows machine remotely. The Citrix Receiver hides this though; you wouldn't really know it unless you were looking for it. The applications are sized full-iPhone-screen, some for landscape, some for portrait, and there's no browser toolbar or anything like that; you appear to be using a full-screen Flash/Flex app. 

So, when they go live with this (again, Citrix Receiver is a demo), does this mean I'll have to install the Citrix Receiver and understand all this cloud stuff to simply run an iPhone game?

Yes...and no. Here's a total hypothetical. Say you're an internet game company of some kind, something like a Pyzam. You're in the business of buying and developing Flash games, integrating advertising, all that. You create a branded version of the Citrix Receiver, and get your cloud infrastructure set up. Users go to the App Store, and get your branded viewer for free. They create an account, log in, and happily play Flash/Flex/Air games on their iPhone, with advertising and whatever else the developers build into the games/widgets/etc. 

I think that's compelling. Sure it needs more thinking through, and at this point is probably most useful to corporations or organizations housing large portfolios of Flash apps. But this is a direction that shows that, with some ingenuity, even today, you can offer applications built out of pretty much any technology on the iPhone. This also works with Windows apps, Silverlight, and so on, but I'm really interested in Flash/Flex. 

Also, it gets around a lot of the "pay for and we must approve" apps scenario, and enables use of ActionScript development resources, which are nowhere near the scarcity and premium of good iPhone development. If Apple doesn't like your content, they can reject your viewer though I suppose. 

So in the end...will phones just become all about the screen, and what viewer/cloud-access apps they can run? The thin-client finally plants its flag for good in the mobile world? Hmm...

Below are some screenshots from the Citrix Receiver demo. As always, thanks for reading Tcoz Tech Wire. 

Remember, these are Flash and Flex apps. They look great, and work as expected. These are screenshots right from the iPhone.

These two photos are of the Citrix Receiver interface for accessing different kinds of apps:

These images show some basic Flash/Flex apps from their demo. The first is a pretty standard reports app, the second shows network statistics in real time, the meters moved and everything just like a native app:







These images show a Shirt Configurator: you select colors, styles, logos, etc., and can save the profile. I found this very interesting.