Earlier this morning, I posted about TringMe and the coming flood of Flash-based Web phones. I forgot to mention Ribbit, which is about to publicly unleash an entire development platform for building Flash phones on December 13. Ribbit’s development platform is already in private beta and allows programmers to build Web phones that can make, receive, and record calls, send voice messages, and manage contacts. Ribbit runs the back-end VOIP service, and it supports applications built on both Adobe Flex and AIR. (Read more about Ribbit here).
One developer, Joe Johnston, used Adobe AIR and Ribbit to create an Adobe AIR iPhone that looks just like a regular iPhone and can actually make calls from your desktop. This is not a Flash phone because it opens up as a separate Adobe AIR app in your browser. But it gives you a good sense of the types of interfaces that are possible, and that we may be seeing a lot more of soon. Here is a video of the phone making a call that shows how it works (and a slicker demo of the same app can be found here):
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hahaha this is pretty neat!
And after watching the video… I can say that it looks pretty darn realistic!
very cool. AIR is definitely a great platform for mobile devices. I’ll be interested to see what they come up with
AIR apps do not run in the browser. They runs as standalone apps just like any other app (Word, Firefox, iTunes).
I would like to try to put this application on my browser on my actual iPhone, for a more Kafka-esque experience…
OMG voip from my PC, where will it end. Y2K has finally arrived. Prince was right, let’s party like it’s 1999.
is it me, or is flash making a comeback?
@6
Der… Flash was what made Macromedia worth $3.4 billion. The transition from just pure animation into full development platform is going to be the strategy that cements Adobe as the web’s most important company. Flex for the win!
i guess i don’t get the point of a flash interface. why would i want to dial from my comuter? why not just pick up my voip enabled phone?
Joe and his crew presented his AIR iPhone at our user group last month (Michigan Flex User’s Group, http://www.theflexgroup.org). His app is something that really has to be seen and played with to be amazed. The fact he wrote the shell of the phone without the iPhone even being released (and got it really close to the final product) speaks to him as a devloper.
What is a flash phone?
Oh boy, that’s just what I need, a non-portable virtual phone. I’ll add to the Alice in Wonderland experience by downloading the AIR iPhone onto my hacked iPhone (if i had one) and then crawling inside the black hole that doing so creates, where I’ll no doubt meet Steve Jobs in a bunny suit and some geezer who makes lead lined top hats… yee ha, the end of the world is nigh!
Flash this bunny boy!
This application will not run on an iPhone. Its an iPhone “emulator” of sorts that runs on your PC or Mac. As far as I know, there’s no plans to get the runtime on any mobile phones.
doesn’t run on Iphone….