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Adobe Edge Prototype Demo
Looks impressive but from the demo the UI appears to be Air or similar to the Flash parts of the Flash IDE, judging from the dodgy tooltips and font rendering. Now thats perfectly fine for a prototype, but from my experiences with the non-native elements of the Flash UI and the Fireworks UI are horrible to work in.
I’m not saying all UIs should be Aqua or Aero, I mean I love the After Effects UI. *I’m just saying they shouldn’t be running in a vector engine originally designed for cartoons and slideshows.*
Wonderfully articulated, emphasis mine.
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But at a technical level, is this really something Adobe should be crowing about? The game requires an iPad 2 for performance reasons, even though the animation is 2D, not 3D. The game was originally written in Air for play on the PC, so I have little doubt it was less work to port it to the iPad within Air rather than rewriting it natively in Cocoa Touch. But it doesn’t seem right to me that this game doesn’t run on first-gen iPads. Commenters on Brimelow’s post seem to agree.
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Daring Fireball Linked List: Machinarium, iPad Game Built With Adobe Air
This is exactly right. There’s no reason that a game like Machinarium couldn’t run on hardware that powers extraordinarily detailed games like Infinity Blade or Dead Space.
It may make economical sense to use a cross-compiler in the short term. You make money on many platforms with minimal work customizing the app to each platform. But it’s a shitty shortcut that sacrifices speed and stability because it’s easier.
The bigger problem is that it is just the beginning of the issues. When you carefully craft an application from design up you create a much more compelling experience for users. It isn’t just about performance or even taking advantage of features for each individual device, it’s about making design decisions to create an application consistent with the platform. This isn’t as dramatic in games since UI’s are so non-standard but it’s imperative for other apps to fit in the native ecosystem.
Is user experience important to you? If it isn’t — like all non-native apps for any platform — you’re playing a short-term game.
