From the onset of the internet, droves of informanics have been trolling the web for “cool stuff” to share. We mine the millions of pages that get updated every day for nuggets of gold that we can then impress our virtual circles with by being amongst the first to deliver it to the group.

The content pendulum has swung sharply over the years and has been gaining momentum resulting in a swing to one side much longer than it has in the past.

We find ourselves in a very interesting phase in both communications and technology. We can no longer create within a vacuum and simply expect people to eat it up. We cannot pull the wool over our client’s eyes and tell them that the public loves what has been done because they can now hear it directly from the public themselves.

What we have to become as marketers is really the role of facilitator to introduce ideas and then execute based on how the public reacts. The facade of the brand is now over and transparency reigns supreme.

If something isn’t communicating properly we will know within seconds of putting it out there. Social media adoption allows us to test the waters continually, nothing is ever final, it is an ongoing conversation that needs to be lead by a creative mind that can help steer the conversation in the right direction but that person can no longer dictate the message, it must become a truly collaborative process between marketers on behalf of the brand and the more vocal influencers on behalf of the public.

What I find particularly interesting is that for a hundred years our industry has been an agent of communication on behalf of our clientele. We have taken our client’s goals and objectives and tried our best to meet them through some logic, shaky research and lots of smoke, mirrors and magic. We have been seducing, enticing, manipulating and luring our audiences through the art of story telling and visual effects.

Now that the audience is in on the act we need to figure out a way to become agents of communication and feedback for our clients, we need to now work on the behalf of both brand and consumer in order to communicate properly.

This future is really unknown, the speed of change and the enhancement of technology is constantly keeping us on our toes and immediate adoption is typically a difficult thing for a huge brand that has established itself over decades to undergo.

Change is a very difficult thing to adopt so quickly but as the thought leaders within our industry we need to reformulate the way we work to regard change as a major part of the equation in everything we do.

A prospective client should be asking the agency “do you know what the public wants from us?” and that agency’s response should be “no but we are going to find out and then deliver it to them”.

There can no longer be this promise to deliver on something that hasn’t even been talked about and its our jobs to have those conversations with our audiences. There are countless ways to engage audiences in conversation and that is where the initial creativity needs to be focused, a pretty interface or a cool animation is not going to get us the answers we need unless its purpose is to get the public to react and tell us what they really want.

One of the ways we offer our own clients tremendous value is to be able to not only execute on a high level but to help them change based on the new paradigm that social media and consumer vocalization has introduced.

We have realized that results must be immediate and that is now the cornerstone of what our offerings are all about. We set out to get immediate results and then act upon them. We take the temperature of our audiences by engaging them in a two way conversation and then deliver based on that level of communication.

Sales has always been about introducing an idea and then carefully listening.

A great salesman listens to what his consumer wants and then tries to deliver based on how the consumer reaction is interpreted.

Social media and the like have given us the ability to go back to the traditional fundamentals of marketing to be able to listen.

A conversation is the most powerful tool in the communication toolbox, until now its been difficult to engage in that conversation because traditional media until now has been a one way transmission.

The future is now.

I see a future where we start creating conversational receptacles rather than brand destinations. A future where we are inviting the consumer to use their own persona to create a brand experience and where communication truly takes on a new meaning because its not just about telling people what we think they want to hear but actually listening to exactly what it is they want us to tell them about the products and services we are peddling.

Advertising no longer has to be a guessing game, brands pay good money for awareness and that awareness can no longer be shrouded in mystery. The web has become a powerful communications platform that allows everyone to amplify their voices. Brand perception is no longer hidden behind a beautiful person or a photoshopped image of your deepest desires.

Brand perception can no longer be manipulated, it is the public that now assumes control of the brand identity rather than the brand trying to form its own. It is the public that will tell us if something is resonating or not and it is our job to become interpreters of that message and then speak on behalf of the public to help brands steer their initiatives in the direction that has been communicated to us by audiences.

The web is now our most powerful tool and it is quickly re-shaping advertising, it is a multidirectional communications platform. A billion voices are speaking honestly about the goods and services we advertise and in real time within the actual context of their lives. We need to start listening in and taking these voices seriously so that we may better service the brands that entrust us with communicating on their behalf.

What I’m thinking about is Apps. Like every buzzworthy “latest thing” to happen every two years (“Mutimedia”, “Broadband”, “Online Video”, “Immersive Brand Experiences”, “3D/PaperVision”, “Augmented Reality”) “Apps” are very hot.

You can’t go a day in advertising without overhearing, “You do Apps? We do Apps. Do they have an App? Can you make an App? That’s a killer App. We need an App.”

However, the real rage isn’t Apps. It’s the fact that personal computing has gotten tiny. And because it’s gotten so tiny, it’s gone mobile. It used to be awesome to carry around your computer in the form of a laptop. Now, at 40 years old, for me it’s nothing more than a pinched nerve in waiting.

What’s awesome is carrying my computer in my hand. Now I am on my computer almost every waking moment. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not alone. It’s an epidemic. It’s also a marketer’s orgy of possibilities too amazing to be true.

I can pull up by the curb
I can make it on the road
Goin’ mobile
I can stop in any street
And talk with people that we meet
Goin’ mobile
Keep me movin’

It’s this type of freedom (celebrated by The Who about the time I was born) that is driving the App craze. But I think Apps are a fad. I think mobile content is bound for the browser.

In 1998, we used to make Apps. They were called Projectors. We were doing very cool, processor intensive stuff using Macromedia Authorware and Director, but it wouldn’t run in browsers. And if it did, it took too long to download. So in order to run our work, our clients would copy files from CD-ROM to their computers. We’d drop a cute, customized “icon” on their desktop and when they double-clicked it would launch an interface full-screen, no browser.

Sound familiar?

Projectors went the way of the dinosaurs quickly. Our stuff started running in browsers, mainly thanks to Flash. Once that happened, it was unanimously preferable to access content directly at URL addresses. Who wanted to litter their desktops with bright, colorful, even attractive icons of Projectors? Nobody.

It’s been that way ever since.

Well, sorta. Ever since many months ago. Suddenly, our stuff isn’t running in browsers anymore because the browsers are primitive mobile versions made for primitive mobile computers. This is déjà vu all over again.

The moral of the story? The sooner we can deliver great mobile experiences in the browser the better. People want to search for brands and products “on the internet” not “in the App store”.

* I wasn’t bold enough to post this from my iPhone using the WordPress App. Needed to lean on my heavy, 15″-screened laptop browser.

In this day and age of web 2.0  development where a lot of the content that appears on the web is created by the end user, I wanted to ask , how do we as web developers protect the privacy of our users while still maintaining the experience that a client desires?

First and foremost, we have to look at the data we are going to be collecting for display on a site and how we are going to store that data in the database. We as developers have to remember that if we don’t have to store the info, we shouldn’t store it. Now that is a simple concept, but this does two things. 1) It protects us as a company from ever losing data that could compromise someone’s personal information. 2) It allows us to always have the most up-to-date information to display on the site.

When we connect to Facebook or Twitter, as a developer we only ask for the level of consent that we think we will use in our application. We never ask for full consent from users.  That would be like throwing open the floodgates to potential problems later on. We also try and be upfront with the site’s users about what data we are going to use and what we will do with it once we have it.  We  try to only store users information for as short a time as necessary. The good thing now is that social networks are beginning to understand this and have started to provide the tools needed to protect the privacy of their users.

One tool that has been almost universally adopted among social networks has been OAuth. For those who don’t know what OAuth is, it is a means by which we as developers can access the information the users give us access to, without the need for them to give us their username and password to the site.

It used to be that the only way we could bring a user’s twitter feed or a list of their friends from Facebook to our site was to ask them for their username and password, then store it for later use.  This could potentially be dangerous because many users guard these items like a dog guards a bone.

However with the introduction of OAuth, this has all changed. Now what we do is we set up an application on the social network’s site and we have the user log into the social network site and grant us permission to access their information. That consent comes back to us in the form of a very long encoded piece of data. This is the information we then store in our database.  At no time do we have possession of their username/password.

Whenever a user comes to use our site, we then send that encoded data back to the social network and they allow us access to the information we have consent to use. We then may do a mashup of their data with data we have stored in their account, but once we do that we are then bound by the Terms of Service for that social network.

For example Facebook has the following terms that we must abide by http://developers.facebook.com/policy/ as developers. Feel free to read through these if you have the time, however for purposes of this blog post lets focus on Policies – section III. Facebook in this section makes it very clear about what data and what types of data we can store about the end user.

Users give you their basic account information when they connect with your application. For all other data, you must obtain explicit consent from the user who provided the data to us before using it for any purpose other than displaying it back to the user.

This is probably the most important item on the list. We as a company must explicitly ask for consent for all information we are going to store or use. If  they do not want to give us that consent, then that is their choice. It should not stop them from being able to utilize the site they are on. If we have access to a user’s information, we can then create a richer, more personalized experience. It does not mean we now have full control of all the user’s information, just that we can make their experience better overall.

Also another point made in the Policies is:

You will delete all data you receive from us (Facebook) concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. We may require you to delete data you receive from the Facebook API if you violate our terms.

Now, sure people can and probably will try to store your information for purposes other than what their needs are. Most companies like ours ,however, do not want to run afoul of these terms as the consequences can be severe. Essentially the relationship we have with social networks is an “at will” relationship. Meaning if they want they can cut us off from using their api at any time, and that also means all our clients would be cut off also. So its best for us to stay on the correct side of the TOS.

Now to the second point of my original question, how do we maintain a excellent user experience for the users (while protecting privacy)  that makes our clients happy? Well the easiest way is we should provide a means for the site to function without social networking that is almost identical to the social network connected version of the site.

Recently we did a twitter campaign for Daffy’s where we aggregated tweets whenever a user put #DaffysBang tag in their tweet, it was picked up by our servers. Now granted, no one gave us explicit permission to do this to their tweets, however we only used tweets that were publicly available using Twitter’s Search API. To maintain the users privacy, the information we stored did not relate to anything other than the specific tweet the person posted along with the profile image at the time of posting. Now during the campaign the site itself had a twitter feed, that was generated from those tweets we had stored, then after the campaign ended we reverted back to the original site. Now also we did not allow people to login to customize the site with their twitter info, but this is a good example of how we maintained the user’s privacy while integrating twitter into the site.

In conclusion, how do we maintain privacy of our users without compromising  a excellent experience on our sites? Well it is a balance, but if we make sure that the experience we create is respectful of the information that the users are allowing us to access and we take precautions when storing information, we should be able to provide a great experience that satisfies both the users and our clients at the end of the day.

What are you trying to hide?

Like many, I’m fascinated by the uproar over privacy on the Internet, but I think my opinion is opposite most.

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are really taking the heat for an entire industry of people and entities that trade in personal data routinely without being 100% transparent about it. They’re being vilified as if they’re literally committing crimes against humanity. Considering they host 500 million users, that’s a lot of humanity.

Humanity is fighting back. Social media frenzy, it’s turning out, is just as good as traditional media when it comes to instantly turning a hot topic into something worthy of its own logo and 24×7 coverage by every journalist, all hands on deck. Even in social media, there’s always got to be a story. We do love a story.

The coverage of Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “crimes” over the past few days has been intense, similar to the death of MJ or the busting of Tiger. It’s hasn’t quite reached Iranian student demonstrations or the earthquake in Haiti, but it’s hard to escape without going into solitary, device-free. [Heard they are working on Flash for device-free, btw, but that’s another post.]

I saw this http://tnw.to/16CQt and learned “that some of our largest fears have been realized.” Not only Facebook, but MySpace, Digg, and LiveJournal have been accused in a Wall Street Journal report of including user information in data sent back to advertising companies when a banner ad is clicked.

Is this really a shock? I’m shocked that you’re shocked. Did you think AOL doesn’t have backups of your IMs from 1996 when you were trolling chat rooms and ‘what are you wearing?’ was all the rage? Today the answer to that question is found on Chatroulette and the data exchange includes video. I’ve still made good on my attempt to never lay eyes on it. Whoever is perving out on Chatroulette right now – psst, assume they’re backing up data but don’t worry – they’re probably not recording. (You hope.)

According to the Journal report the information sent to the advertising companies could be used to hunt down the individual accounts of the person who clicked the banner. From there, depending on what the user makes public, an advertiser could find out that person’s real name, age, hometown, occupation.

So what? Seriously. So. What?

Again, this is nothing new. If you think your data hasn’t been mined based on every credit card purchase you’ve made over the last 20 years, think again. If you put it out there, it’s out there. If you’re going to storm off and leave Facebook to protect your privacy don’t expect to have solved your problem. It’s a grain of sand on the beach.

There’s not much you can do in the Western world that can’t be traced. If you’re engaging in some activity or behavior that you don’t want to be caught doing, there’s a better chance than ever before you’ll be caught. There’s a digital trail that leads to you. This isn’t Facebook’s fault. It’s a fact of modern life and technology. Andy Warhol and George Orwell are pretty brilliant, huh? In today’s world, everyone’s famous and Big Brother is always watching. They were right.

There are still some shreds of privacy to be found. If you’re discussing sensitive matters, go Tony Soprano and get off the grid. You know, have a conversation face-to-face. Maybe outdoors somewhere. Like the middle of Montana. Power off your phone if you’re on the lam. Don’t post your college party pics. It’s easy if you try.

Since today’s reality is what it is, I don’t have a problem with Facebook’s policy. It’s Facebook’s website. It’s not ours. We’ve been given this amazing and revolutionary gift. For free. One, Facebook is just going with the flow of reality. Two, Facebook has to pay a lot of bills.

Have you ever once heard someone say, “Gee, I wonder what it costs to run Facebook. It’s a pretty complex app. And wow, that’s gotta be a lotta data. 500 million users. Pretty cool it’s free. Hmm, wonder what their hosting bill is like?”

No. You haven’t. Well it costs a jillion. And we’re getting it for free. But nothing is free, of course, so someone somewhere is paying for our ride. It’s venture capitalists. And venture capitalists want their money back and then some. And if it doesn’t come, rest assured, the ride will end, too.

Facebook has to make money. The way I see it, there are two choices – marketing/advertising or subscription. If it’s advertising, I want my ads to be targeted to me. I don’t want to see ads for brands and services that don’t interest me. I want to see that Drive By Truckers are playing in Tarrytown on June 4. So I happily expose my information to advertisers. After all, what are they doing with it that’s harmful? At most, annoying me? At worse … what?

If it’s “private”, then it’s got to be subscription. I seem to remember a whole “I’m going to quit Facebook” thing when that was rumored. So, really, there’s no pleasing those 500 million disgruntled customers, is there? Actually, 499,999,999 disgruntled customers. I’m totally gruntled.

He's gone and he might not be coming back.

We’ve been a “Flash Shop” since inception. This hasn’t been because we are inherently about Flash. It’s been because the web was inherently about Flash.

We’re about delivering brand communications to consumers for our clients. For the past 7-10 years, that has meant “rich, brand experiences” in Flash. Before that, it was delivering these types of experiences on CD-ROM, where the limits of bandwidth weren’t an issue.

In the past several weeks we’ve seen a monumental changing of the guard with regards to the web and Flash’s place in it. I’m not a technologist and I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about the details that I see a lot of developers Tweeting and debating.

It was maybe six or nine months ago that I began noticing that Brian Kadar was starting to poo-poo Flash in favor of “Web 2.0”. We’d been resisting a transition for the last couple of years. This is a kid who has an authentic Mets jersey with “FLASH” on top of the number 83.

Now a veteran, Kadar programmed http://demos.freedomandpartners.com/pearljamtengame about a year ago. He was a snot-nosed punk from Queens, just graduated from the University of Delaware, when he interned with us and whipped together http://demos.freedomandpartners.com/calamity with Shea Gonyo about five years ago.

I asked Shea what he thought. His response was kind of like, “Yeah, dude.” Shea? He just came off http://demos.freedomandpartners.com/freedomandpartners_v1/. He’s one of the premier veteran ActionScript developers in the world.

I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t understand it. How can you do what Flash does in HTML? C’mon. Why would you want HTML-like design and experience when you can have Flash? It didn’t make any sense.

But slowly it started dawning on me. I have an iPhone. I got one the first week the first generation came out. I love it. Obviously. Anyway, I never missed Flash on the phone and again, wasn’t buying into the whole “Flash is dying” thing. However, over the past couple of months, I have started missing Flash on the phone. I’ve been on the web more and more.

Then, while I was at a biz dev lunch near Rockefeller Center, I started seeing the Tweets during the iPad presentation. No Flash. He’s making a big deal of it. HTML5. What? I think I’ll remember that lunch like I remember where I was when John Belushi died.

For now, I can’t recommend doing web-based work in Flash. That is, unless our clients understand the limitations they are placing on their audience. Or unless they want to pay for “both”.

For years, we used to have to defend Flash, “97% of browsers have Flash!”

Now, we have to let our clients know that we’re looking at 50-50% at best.

We’re about delivering brand communications to consumers. We can’t leave 50% of them out.

Our own President used it as his campaign anthem because he was acutely aware of what was going on. Our nation is going through a tremendous revision and its happening in every single area of our lives.

From the hallowed halls of our government offices to the noisy trading floors of our financial institutions, the way we eat, the way we work and the way we communicate, and even deep within our own industry, change is occurring.

We are in the midst of an evolutionary shift that we are all experiencing at the exact same time.

Change is good, change brings about growth and renewal, it signifies the passing of  what was and it welcomes in what will be. Change is the catalyst that advances us as a people and change is the instinctual cue for us as human beings to begin our own process of bettering ourselves and the things we are passionate about.

We at Freedom + Partners are no different.

We have decided to change, not because what we were doing was wrong or bad but because we are also acutely aware of what is going and and we have committed ourselves to help usher in this new age of change.

Its been a tremendous journey from the early days of 1997 when advertising and innovation started flirting on the web.

Flash was just a fledgling technology, and even then our team was innovating and exploring ways to take it to the extreme. Everyone was jumping on the animation bandwagon in order to tell stories and peddle goods on the World Wide Web. Its been exhausting but fun, and now its time to change, to apply everything we have learned and to take a step back and look around at what this new landscape has to offer.

We are now standing at the crossroads of a new era, an era that empowers everyone, an era that gives our audiences what they really want rather than what we think is good for them. It is an era where social media has quickly toppled the giants of technology and entertainment. An era where a once tiny computer manufacturer grew up to become our main source for personal technology, music, movies and books. It is truly an exciting new age.

Fast forward to now, we are experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Social interaction, community, commerce and technology have all made its way back to the center of our culture but each one looks very different than it did a decade ago.

We have become a community again, reconnected with old friends and gained new followers along the way. We adopt technological advancements almost as fast as fashion and have become well nested in the digital world around us.

Freedom + Partners is excited about this change, we are so excited that we have decided to do something about it.

As you may have noticed we have a new website. A more succinct, direct and informative website. We have released ourselves from the complexities of our craft and have embraced a more transparent and direct way of communication.

Our expertise has also changed. Starting with social media, we have not only helped our clients to enter into the new realm of social media and executed campaigns that embrace and maximize the power of social media but we have gone so far as to even start a new company that is a social media advertising and marketing platform based on our beliefs in the power of the new medium, we call it Pushkart.

Over the years Freedom + Partners has been renown for our ability to execute complex Flash websites and applications and couple it with equally impressive technology solutions and that has not gone away. Evolution has not passed us by and now we have expanded our expertise and we have embraced the beauty and communicative aptitude of other technologies such as advanced HTML, Ruby on Rails, mobile applications and data aggregation, social media integration and above all coming up with smart ideas that make our client’s businesses grow.

Leonardo Da Vinci one said that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Simplicity by definition, is freedom from complexity; the absence of pretentiousness. That is the theme of our new website.

Simplicity.

We hope you enjoy the redesign as well as our invitation to join in on the change.

Feel free to email us, call us, Tweet us or Facebook Wall us, “Like” us or “Follow” us because we are about change and leading the charge for what is going to be a new decade of innovation and inspiring ideas.

Stay tuned.

My goal as a blogger will be to share observations about our industry in a very transparent way from my own personal point of view. I like to be straightforward and honest. Sometimes this makes people uncomfortable. But that’s alright with me. I don’t think we need to suffer bullshit in order to be successful in our industry. I may be wrong. I may have a different definition of success than others.

Those that work closely with me know that I’m always ready to get on my soapbox in-house and start pontificating like I know everything and I’m the smartest person in the world. After all, if I’m the “boss” it follows that everyone humors me. Truth is I know a lot of stuff about the business of digital marketing, design and development so I go on and on for 5-15 minutes about something and then a couple hours or days later contradict myself. I know this about myself. It’s not one of my better traits, but nonetheless I’m guilty of it. I imagine I’ll be guilty here, too.

I suppose this blog will serve as a record of my opinions, predictions, theories, certainties, and absolutes as they arise — and then concession posts when at least 50% of things turn out different than I imagined, slowly or sharply. I admit when I’m wrong, I’ll take it as much as I dish it out.

So what shapes my point of view? I’ve been generally doing the same exact thing on a daily basis since 1997. As an entrepreneur responsible for running a small agency that means for 10-18 hours a day I am juggling a steady punchlist of selling, writing, managing employees, managing clients, creative directing, project managing, bookkeeping and dealing with benefits, legal issues, and accounting. And then trying to keep my InBox as close to empty as possible. I’m always in awe of my contemporaries that fit in speaking engagements, serve on jury panels, attend conferences, etc. (How the heck do you find the time?)

13 years of the same thing with different characters and brands and stories every month of every year. There’s always something just on the cusp of being great for us, some latest greatest project we’re pimping, some potential disappointment around the corner, some new technology to learn, some new buzzword, some hot shop competitor, some drama, some victory and some defeat.

Whatever we are worrying about today will be a distant memory when we’re worrying about something else at this time next year. Whatever we’re celebrating today will be a distant memory as well.

The reason I keep coming back every day, every week, every month and every year is simply that I love the game. I wake up wanting to play. I love to blow up an idea and follow through on it and make it happen. I’m a producer, a detail-oriented project guy. I love a project. I love work. I love going after big ideas and ambitious plans.

I try to come to play everyday and not worry much about the scoreboard. Rule number one is show up. Just show up. Be there. Be present. Play. I believe if I focus on playing the game the right way, fundamentally sound, with passion and with effort, and with talented teammates, the score will take care of itself.

With the launch of this new website, I’ve had a chance to take a good long peek at our scorecard, our body of work. Pretty good. Pretty, pretty good.

Now back to the game. I got next. Who’s in?

A good example is a recent marketing campaign we did for Daffy’s and twitter. The campaign consisted of people tweeting My #DaffysBang was X for X bucks. The campaign required us to not only build a CMS so that our client could manage those tweets made and to approve them for display on the Daffy’s website, but it also had to randomly choose a winner among all entries.

Now an out of the box CMS would not be able to do that. We could have done it with PHP or .NET however for most of our CMS’s recently we have used Flex. The main reason is that it is platform independent. It can be the presentation layer when the middle layer can be PHP, JSP, Coldfusion or .NET. This way we can adhere to the clients technical requirements for the type of technology used, but not have to worry about how we are going to present the data back to the end user. Flex also allows us to leverage  our knowledge of Actionscript 3 to create a CMS. Flex has allowed us to come up with unique user interface designs that don’t require screen refreshes between data loads. It also allows us to create a desktop app version of the CMSs with the use of AIR.  Another benefit of using Flex is that code snippets we write for front end Flash websites can be repurposed for our CMS. For instance, we needed a way to resize an uploaded jpg on the fly. Now in a normal PHP driven website we would have have GD installed  and we would have to go through the process of resizing a file on the server. With Flex, we were able to reuse a JPGEncoder script that was originally built for a Flash website and then send a byteArray over to PHP where we just had to save that to a file.

I’m not saying that Flex is the be all-to end all of how we should do CMSs in the future, however for us we find it helps to leverage the resources we have to create excellent CMSs.

After spending the first 5 years of my career making Flash websites, this past week I jumped in the deep-end and started learning how to develop for the iPhone OS. In case you’re wondering, this post has nothing to do with whether Flash is dead or not (for that answer, go here.) On the other hand, there is no question that the iPhone and iPad are very, very much alive and kicking. For Flash developers who are used to rich, immersive experiences (and often criticized for it), moving onto the iPhone OS is a natural leap.

Crossing over into a new, unfamiliar language like Objective-C can be intimidating. But what I’m quickly realizing is how easily one can apply concepts from ActionScript to understanding Objective-C (I will be writing about this more extensively in upcoming posts.) Noticing the strengths and weaknesses, similarities, and differences of these (or any) languages will make you a better programmer overall.

But not everyone feels the same.

The Wrong Way

There are a lot of ways you can make iPhone apps without ever learning how to make an iPhone App.

With Adobe CS5, you can automagically convert your Flash files into an iPhone app. Problem solved, right? You can also use Javascript/HTML5 (Appcelerator), Unity3D, or learn a new scripting language with Corona.

Sounds enticing. My advice to you: AVOID THESE AT ALL COSTS.

Let’s pretend you’re moving to Paris. Instead of learning French, you hire a translator to travel with you. You’ll get around, but you’ll always experience things second-hand.

Imagine how much more (and better, and faster) you can accomplish if you actually understand the language, instead of relying on an interpreter? You’ll discover different dialects, and learn the nuances of language that can create meaningful conversation with the locals. And who’s to say that nothing gets lost in translation? You give up control.

This isn’t just a philosophical argument; there are plenty of technical issues as well. Certain paradigms of language cannot always be directly translated to another. Take memory management—that’s somewhat of an afterthought (mystery, really) in ActionScript, while in Objective-C it is a core, underlying principle with explicit methodologies.

Using these utilities immediately puts you at a technical disadvantage. You’re unable to leverage the nuances of the language that are crucial for performance and problem solving. Early users of Adobe CS5’s iPhone Builder are warning of poor optimization/performance, the lack of supporting libraries, and inability to implement features like in-app purchase support—and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Buy a second-hand TV and chances are you’ll be missing the remote and manual.

One misguided selling point says that you can “…quickly develop… without having to learn Objective-C, Cocoa, and the intricacies of the iPhone SDK.”

Knowing the “intricacies” of something is what makes you an expert; it gives you fluency in a language—whether romantic or programming. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time (and in most cases, your money). These 4th-party SDKs and conversion utilities are the path of least resistance, workarounds, and nothing more than a brick wall between you and understanding the iPhone OS.

Nevertheless, a lot of developers are willing to compensate for these inadequacies in exchange for faster development: “Deploying to the iPhone is the easy part. The hard part is getting your content to run silky smooth and in an iPhone-friendly way.” I rest my case.

One Adobe presentation on this topic leads with a quote by Mies van der Rohe: “Less is More.” In this context It seems less of a creative philosophy and more of an attempt to mask limitations.

The Right Way

Learn Objective-C.

Keith Peter says it best in his post on the same issue:

I still believe the bottom line is, if you are serious about developing for the iPhone, you must learn Objective-C. For God’s sake, it’s NOT THAT HARD! Be a professional. Learn a new language. If you are even moderately skilled with AS3, you will be able to pick up Objective-C inside a week

A lot of critics say that ActionScript isn’t a real language (and early on, they were right). But as ActionScript has grown up over time, it has adopted concepts global to more formal OOP languages, allowing Flash developers to embrace patterns like MVC, Encapsulation, Polymorphism, and Inheritance—in that sense both ActionScript 3.0 and Objective-C (and many others) speak the same language. If you understand the terms in the last sentence, then you are well on your way to mastering Objective-C.

Resources

Apple is seemingly going out of its way to provide tons of resources for learning Objective-C—after all, in the end it’s money for them too. You can even watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures (and practice assignments) from a Stanford University iPhone development course. For free. Taught by Apple Developer’s themselves. For free.

Le Fin

Concepts are the key to mastering any programming language. Bridging the mental gaps between different languages reveals insights that make you a better programmer in any language.