ok.. I'll continue the thread that Mike Huntington started and Chad Udell continued..
My guesses/wishes for Astro:
Bi-Directional text support (Arabic) 8/10
Hardware acceleration 6/10
Better text/font handling and control 8/10
64-bit version (I think the digg/linux crowd were really screaming for this?) 4/10
Totally open sourcing the Flash Player (again, digg/linux crowd screams for this..) so others can work on porting to other platforms. 2/10 (I hope more like 1/10 since this would be a nightmare imho)
Flash Player on iPhone 3/10
Flash Player on gPhone (does it exist?) 2/10
Hooks for direct access to hardware for custom devices like chumby. Think of buttons, motion sensors, outputs, etc that the Flash Player could directly access just as it is aware of keys on your keyboard.. without some localconnection-javascript trickery. 3/10
Guesses/wishes for Astro (Flash Player 10) Thursday, September 13, 2007
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13 Sep 2007 at 01:26 pm | #
How about GPS access?
13 Sep 2007 at 01:28 pm | #
FYI, you can already use ASNative calls for the Chumby to access hardware specific features (squeeze, motion sensor etc.) I can't see them adding specific API's for every possible device with Flash Lite support becoming available.
13 Sep 2007 at 05:07 pm | #
Mike K -- you can already hack together your own solution that passes GPS data into the Player kind of like what Peter is talking about they did for Chumby. However there's nothing built into the Player for GPS. At least nothing I'm aware of..
Peter-- would there be more devices like Chumby if each one didn't have to come up with it's own API? It's super easy to have some fun with web cams in Flash because there's a standard, built in method for accessing them and interacting with them. Why not the same for a handful of analog and digital sensors that could be used for squeeze, motion, weight, light, temp, etc? If a new hardware device maker knew that it just needed to connect with the Flash Player and provide it some data and the Flash Player already had an API and lots of experienced developers ready to interact with said data then they'd be much further along in the game. As it is the hardware maker has to get the data in and then expose a custom API (one specific to their device) that they have to get developers to learn and we end up with stuff like this:
(from http://wiki.chumby.com/mediawiki/index.php/Developing_widgets_for_chumby )
That said.. I'm kind of with you.. it's currently possible to roll your own solution, so it's probably a fairly low priority.
20 Sep 2007 at 02:02 pm | #
fwiw.. if you're interested in why it would be interesting to see some standard hooks in the Flash Player for hardware then you might want to read..
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070629_002360.html
note the bit about Flash on a chip.