The team explains how Flash provides a reliable way deliver video to the browser, securely; how Flash makes it easy for people to share videos and embed on other sites; how you can go fullscreen in HD with videos using Flash Player, and how the 1000's of people who record and upload vids directly to YouTube need camera and microphone access "which would not be possible without Flash technology."
Last May - Adobe, Hearst Corporation and Missouri School of Journalism announced winners of a student interaction design competition to produce interactive applications that solve real-world needs in the advertising / news-gathering sides of the journalism industry.
The winning teams and students from Shanghai came to Adobe San Francisco to present their projects and meet the team behind Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5 - the software at the center of their projects. Visit the Flash Catalyst product managers' blog (FlashCats) and learn more about these students, the competition and watch the video.
As we discussed earlier this week, Motorola just announced the Droid X for Verizon, which will include Flash Player 10.1 when the phone's OS is upgraded to Froyo later this summer. Ted Patrick, technical evangelist at Adobe, shows off the device running Flash content. Check it out below.
I was at the Droid X launch event in SF today and it's a pretty slick device. Big screen, fast, HDMI output for streaming HD video to your TV. (It also comes with a HD camcorder). Although the device will first ship with Android 2.1, and not Froyo until later this summer, the team's demo unit had an early version of Froyo and we were demo-ing Flash Player 10.1. Of course, I work for Adobe and the Flash Player team and I'm biased, but Flash content runs great on that device. We were showing off Kongregate and Mochi games, replays of the USA win on ESPN, videos from Sony Pictures -- and as long as we had a good signal we had great content.
Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile is here! Fully redesigned with new performance and mobile-specific functionality, mobile users will now be able to experience the full web -- games, animations, RIAs, data visualizations, music, video, audio and more.
Flash Player 10.1 beta is already one of the top free apps on Android Market today and will be available as a final production release for smartphones and tablets once users are able to upgrade to Android 2.2 “Froyo.” Supported devices are expected to include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, DROID by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S and others.
Flash Player 10.1 was also released to our mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS. We expect FP 10.1 will be an over-the-air download and even pre-installed on some smartphones, tablets and other devices in the coming months. Stay tuned to news from your device manufacturer.
It’s been completely redesigned and optimized for mobile, including new interaction methods that support mobile-specific input models, and support for accelerometer.
With Smart Zooming, users can scale content to full screen mode. Performance optimization work with virtually all major mobile silicon and platform vendors makes efficient use of CPU and battery performance.
New Smart Rendering ensures that Flash content is running only when it becomes visible on the screen further reducing CPU and battery consumption.
Sleep Mode makes Flash Player automatically slow down when the device transitions into screen saver mode.
Advanced Out-of-Memory Management allows the player to effectively handle non-optimized content that consumes excessive resources.
Automatic memory reduction decreases content usage of RAM by up to 50 percent.
Flash Player pauses automatically when events occur such as incoming phone calls or switching from the browser to other functions. Once users switch back to the browser, Flash Player resumes where it paused.
If you haven’t seen demos of Flash Player 10.1 on Android yet, check these out. You can also visit our demos page for more.
Google Nexus One
NVIDIA - Hardware accelerated HD video on netbook
Dell Mini 5 Tablet
NVIDIA TEGRA Tablet
Palm Pre
Be sure to check out the new Flash Player 10.1 product pages and ADC content to learn more. We can’t wait to see what you develop!
Today, Adobe announced that MAX 2010 registration is now open. You can read more about this year's event on the MAX blog. Platform evangelist Ryan Stewart is helping out on content and planning for MAX 2010 and he'll be continuously updating the MAX blog leading up to its October start.
Check out this video of highlights from last year's event:
Check out the video below where Neil Trevett from NVIDIA discusses GPU acceleration in Flash Player 10.1. He shows how by offloading the work from the CPU to the GPU (NVIDIA's ION chip), Flash Player now provides HD video on a range of devices -- even the smaller netbooks.
Through before/after demos on a netbook running Flash Player 10, first, and then Flash Player 10.1 after, you can see the performance improvements yourself. As Neil says, "Flash Player 10.1 is a real advance for Flash Player, actually much more than the 'dot one' would indicate."
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 for Windows, Mac and Linux - significant enhancements to the Flash Platform - are here. Click links above to get them!
A major update since its original release two years ago, AIR 2 improves overall performance, HTML support and includes new APIs for developers. A broad range of AIR 2 applications are expected soon, ranging from publicly available apps like the updated Avatar (movie) application from 20th Century Fox, to enterprise apps such as Intuit Spheres, a messaging and file sharing application. Read more about AIR 2 on the AIR Team blog.
Flash Player 10.1 has improved performance, power management and video features; new multi-touch and private browsing capabilities; and provides a better Flash Player experience for Mac users. Read more about Flash Player 10.1 on the Flash Player Team blog.
We'd like to invite all Flash Platform developers to a new series of webinars on June 22-24, 2010 for multi-screen web content and applications development. With the final releases of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 just around the corner, our evangelists and developers who have been at the cutting edge are preparing to reveal some best practices and tips on creating unique experiences for PC and mobile users by taking advantage of the new features of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. Here is a list of session topics:
Best practices in optimizing web content for Flash Player 10.1
Tuesday, June 22, 9AM - 10AM Pacific Time - REGISTER
The quickest way to build cross-platform apps with AIR 2
Tuesday, June 22, 1PM - 2PM Pacific Time - REGISTER
Rich Internet App development with Flash Builder 4 for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2
Wednesday, June 23, 9AM - 10AM Pacific Time - REGISTER
Multi-screen web content development with Flash Pro CS5
Thursday, June 24 9AM - 10AM Pacific Time - REGISTER
The Flash Platform Evangelist Kit is here! This new resource is for developers and technology decision-makers in companies who want to understand how to use the Flash Platform to create rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the enterprise.
We announced the public availability of the Adobe AIR for Android Developer Prerelease program. Any designer or developer can join to build Android applications using the Flash Platform with the beta SDK -- whether you are a seasoned Flash developer or just interested in learning. People who join will also have access to a new extension to Flash Professional CS5 that publishes directly to Android devices. Read more.You can also watch how to use Flash Pro to make Android apps and watch how to use Flash Builder to make Android apps.
We demonstrated how Adobe is working closely together with Google on Google TV -- Google's new Android based platform that brings the power of the web in to the living room. Google TV includes Flash Player 10.1 integrated directly into the Google Chrome browser delivering the full Web to consumers on their television sets. Learn more here and watch a demo of it in action on Adobe TV.
There has been strong developer enthusiasm around Flash Player and AIR for Android devices, and this is just the beginning - in the months ahead we'll see many of our Open Screen Project partners start launching new devices with Flash technology. As you start digging into the newest tools, such as Flash Builder and Flash Professional CS5 , we can’t wait to see what you deliver next across desktops, mobile phones, televisions, and other consumer electronics.
Check out this video - various highlights from the event taken by our own David Schmidt with his Flip. Flash Player 10.1 and AIR developer beta SDK demos, and of course some thoughts from developers and the good people at Google who put on a great event.
Adobe and Google are working closely together on a number of different efforts including support for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR across various platforms and devices. One of these new platforms is Google TV, Google's new Android based platform that brings the power of the web in to the living room. Google TV includes Flash Player 10.1 integrated directly into the Google Chrome browser delivering the full Web to consumers on their television sets. The digital home is a huge step for Flash and it represents an amazing new screen for developers and content creators to bring rich interactive content to the TV.
With support for Flash Player 10.1, Google TV customers have access to the full web. This includes the approximately 75% of online videos and web games that use Flash, the vast numbers of rich Internet applications, and content across social networks. Flash Player 10.1 will support hardware-accelerated video playback and deliver smooth, HD (1080p) quality video on Google TV devices. We're excited that having Flash Player 10.1 as a key part of Google TV will enable an additional screen for the more than 3 million Flash developers to create content for.
We are seeing widespread interest from our partners in the digital home space and we are working closely with them to include support for Flash. Today, consumers can experience rich Flash-based applications, content and user interfaces in televisions, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray players from Samsung, Vizio, Haier, BestBuy Insignia, and Tivo. Game consoles such as Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 also feature Flash technology.
Want to see it in action? Check out this video we shot on site at the Googleplex showing Flash Player running on Google TV.
For more information on how to optimize your
Flash content across devices, visit www.adobe.com/go/optimize.
As Kevin Lynch mentioned today at Google I/O, we are excited to include the
VP8 video codec in Flash Player in an upcoming release, which will help
provide users with seamless access to high quality video content on all of
their Internet-connected devices. Today, VP8 was released as
open source by Google as part of the WebM effort.
Companies distributing video online need the freedom of choice to deliver
the right experience for their customers and their business. We have a
legacy of embracing standards, such as H.264 and HTTP, in our video delivery
stack and are excited to be building on this with the inclusion of VP8.
Today, approximately 75% of video online is viewed using Flash Player
because it provides the reach and consistency that companies need as well as
additional capabilities, such as content protection, measurement and
monetization opportunities that are critical to driving their business on
the web. By adding support for VP8 to Flash Player we will extend the
ability to use these critical capabilities with this media format and
provide content owners the freedom of choice in how they deliver video.
We will drive Flash Platform innovation well into the future, partnering
with our customers to develop end-to-end solutions that enable them to
create, deliver, and optimize their content across any device or screen
using one, unified workflow. By including VP8 as part of the Flash Platform,
we're providing companies with a choice as to how they can work with and
deliver great experiences to the web. We are excited to work with Google and
others to ensure web video continues to evolve and better serve content
publishers, web developers and end users.
Today Adobe launched the "Freedom of Choice" campaign to share our thoughts on open markets and how open markets are critical for innovation. As part of this, we launched adobe.com/choice where we shared:
Our thoughts on open markets - a letter from Adobe’s founders, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, whose PostScript innovations were instrumental in the adoption of the Macintosh & desktop publishing
The truth about Flash
Adobe and the future of digital media
As stated by John and Chuck: "We believes open markets are in the best interest of developers, content owners, and consumers. Freedom of choice on the web has unleashed an explosion of content and transformed how we work, learn, communicate, and, ultimately, express ourselves.”
We love our 3 million Flash Platform developers only coding once. Hope you would agree.
Ben Forta started Developer Week with his introduction to the Adobe Flash Platform session on Monday this week. There were hundreds of attendees, and thousands more in sessions that followed. In fact, there have been over 3,500 attendees these past three days and we expect even more for the rest of the week.
Presentations have covered multi-screen and mobile app development, the Flex framework, new features in Flash Builder and much more. All of the sessions from the past few days have already been posted on the Adobe Developer Connection and the page will be updated daily as more sessions go on throughout the week.
Presentations for later this week include Advanced Features in Flex, AIR 2.0 development for the desktop, AS34J for Java Developers, and a lot more. If you have missed them, check out the recorded sessions.
In case you missed it, Adobe was at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this past week discussing and demoing some of the latest Flash Platform technologies running across devices. We showed Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 (available in the first half of this year) running on the Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid and Palm Pre, as well as the Dell tablet. Seeing the latest builds of Flash Player and AIR in action you could see firsthand how developers can deliver the same great experiences users expect on their desktops, right on their devices.
We are just three days from the Creative Suite 5 public debut. This afternoon, Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO shared a few insights to this new release on the Adobe blog. He also shared his views on Apple's revised SDK license and what it means to millions of Flash developers.
Highlights on the new features of CS5:
- Social Computing Innovation: Allowing closer team collaboration within the Creative Suite tools
- Cloud and client Innovation: New cloud-based services such as Omniture for optimizing content and apps to drive greater revenue
- Multiscreen features: Enabling authoring for upcoming releases of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 and making it easier for developers to target multiple devices and form factors
Thoughts on new restrictions from Apple
Kevin also pointed out that despite Apple's tightening restrictions on what technologies developers can use for creating apps for iPhone/iPad OS, multiscreen is spreading beyond Apple's devices. We will see a wide range of excellent smartphones, tablets, smartbooks, televisions and more coming to market. Developers can leverage the Flash Platform to create and deliver rich content and applications across a variety of these devices.
Also, the Packager for iPhone/iPad is just one of 250 amazing new features in CS5. Be sure to tune into the global webcast on Monday 8am PDT at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ and find out all the details.
In the video below, Christian Cantrell shows off a single Flash application running on 5 different screens - two mobile platforms (Motorola Droid based on Android and iPhone OS), a browser, 3 desktops (Windows, Mac and Linux), and the iPad. This 5 minute clip shows the value of the Flash Platform - build your application once, and then have it run across various platforms. Flash Player 10.1 brings this vision to life in the browser on mobile devices, and Flash Professional CS 5 allows you to compile these AIR applications for other platforms that don't support Flash Player natively, like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Christian plans on releasing the code for the game in the next couple of weeks. Keep an eye on his blog for the code.
We just posted a few new videos to give you an update on mobile apps and the breadth of Flash content on the Web available on exciting new devices, like the upcoming Dell tablet.
Standalone Apps Outside the Browser
With dozens of tablets and new smartphones coming to market over the coming weeks and months, developers want to know how to deploy and monetize their apps across screens without having to rewrite apps for every platform and device - from smartphones, to tablets, netbooks, televisions, and others.
Today, we announced that more than 100 AIR apps, coming out of a limited pre-release program with developers, are available on Apple’s App Store. Created with Flash Pro CS5 and wrapped as native apps (via the Packager for the iPhone, a capability of AIR 2), AIR apps can be distributed to the iPhone and Apple’s tablet today, as well as Android, BlackBerry and other platforms in the coming months. Check out two videos for more details at:
At the same time, Adobe and its partners believe in the free flow of content across screens and in enabling consumers to browse the full Web, including over 70% of games and 75% of video that are delivered with Flash. Check out this new video, which features different mobile devices including a sneak peak of one of Dell’s new tablets (5” tablet, not released yet) plus Dell’s 12” smartbook (Latitude Xt2) running a broad variety of Flash content.
We are excited to work with Dell to bring uncompromised Web browsing to its new devices. As previously announced, we’re also working with HP on their new line of tablets that will deliver the full Web with support for Flash Player 10.1.
This morning, James Borck posted his review of Flash Builder 4 on InfoWorld. Overall, it is a great summary of the key features in this shipping version. Here are some highlights from Jame's review:
A big step forward to bring designers and developers closer to bridging the production gap between data presentation and interface programmability of rich Internet applications.
Excellent client-side data management and paging features that bring efficiency to large data set handling. Further, the new speedy two-way data binding dramatically simplified database updates without extra coding -- a nice touch for a common task.
Easing the life of developers with the wizard-driven code generation on everything from services to event handling. This goes a long way toward helping devs avoid errors and improve code quality.
Regardless of which server-side technology you're using for data, Flash Builder has you covered, supporting ASP.Net, J2EE, HTTP/REST and SOAP Web services, PHP, BlazeDS, ColdFusion, and LiveCycle Data Services for streaming data.
Builder made it a cinch to introspect my data sources (whether WSDL or class files) and wire up UI components to the resulting data sets. Simple drag/drop of methods onto data grids, lists, and the like were all that was required to light up my UI component.
The onboard debug tools within Builder are quite helpful. They offer all the anticipated trace elements, as well as conditional breakpoints and complex expression evaluation for faster isolation of trouble points. They're so good, in fact, that I'd love to see Builder better tied to Flash Pro down the road, as it provides a much better interface for ActionScript coding.
Other improvements to the Flex 4 Spark architecture offer more flexible runtime layout opportunities, new transition animations, and the 3-D capabilities supported by the Flash Player 10
There are new additions for Adobe-centric design shops as well, such as easy integration and editing of Flash Pro content directly from Builder. Although this seemingly lends to a reblending of developer/designer stratification, it could be a helpful shortcut in small shops.
The bottom line: James rated Flash Builder 4 is a must-have tool for anyone developing data-driven applications on Flex. The IDE will demonstrably shorten the development cycle by exposing data, streamlining workflow, and simplifying change management so that your Flex apps will remain nimble.
To read the entire review, visit InfoWorld's website. If you haven't yet, you can download a 60-day free trial version of Flash Builder 4 and the Flex In A week free training video at Adobe Developer Center. We'd love to hear your thoughts about this release.
We are very excited to announce the final releases of Flash Builder 4, Flex 4 and ColdFusion Builder. These releases bring together two years of engineering effort and some big advances in how you can now build rich Internet applications. We’ve also released a ton of great new free learning resources to help you put these new tools to work in building RIAs. You can hear from developers at our recent Boston Flash Camp where Ryan, Deepa, and team provided a deep-dive on all the features, and even talked about the little stuff that we don’t talk about much but can really make a difference in your application development. You can watch all the sessions from the Boston Flash Camp on Adobe TV.
These releases provide tremendous new capabilities including:
The revolutionary Spark components in Flex 4 enable far more expressive interfaces to be easily created, and pave the way for Flash Catalyst.
The Data-Centric-Development (DCD) capabilities of Flash Builder make it radically easier to work with data and web services.
Flash Builder’s new developer productivity features such as advanced debugging and improved refactoring, coupled with compiler performance improvements make Flex development faster and easier.
ColdFusion Builder addresses the number one request of the CF community, providing extensive IDE capabilities and making CF development much more productive.
Serge Jespers has details on a Flash application that has been deployed to the White House Situation Room. Intelligent Software Solutions worked on an application built with Flex that will be used by the President of the United States to monitor critical infrastructure for the US Navy. Its a touch screen interface built on top of the SPAWAR touch table framework.
Not surprisingly the press release contains no images of the application.
However, as Serge points out in his blog post, there was a Adobe MAX session two years ago on another mission critical Flex application deployed by NATO. The video is below.
The Adobe Flash Platform continues to be the leading platform for building tools that help companies manage their social media presence. Radian6 today released the Radian6 Engagement Console, a new application built on Adobe AIR that helps companies monitor and respond to conversations about their brands online. TechCrunch has some more details on the application, or watch the video below to see it in action.
If you've been hearing the noise about Flash Player and CPU utilization over the past couple weeks, you'll want to check out Jan Ozer's post on StreamingMedia.com: Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends.
Instead of weighing in with his opinion, Jan rolled up his sleeves, did some tests, and performed a detailed analysis comparing Flash and HTML5 by monitoring CPU utilization during video playback. His conclusion? Hardware acceleration is key.
"When it comes to efficient video playback, the ability to access hardware acceleration is the single most important factor in the overall CPU load. On Windows, where Flash can access hardware acceleration, the CPU requirements drop to negligible levels. It seems reasonable to assume that if the Flash Player could access GPU-based hardware acceleration on the Mac (or iPod/iPhone/iPad), the difference between the CPU required for HTML5 playback and Flash playback would be very much narrowed, if not eliminated."
The analysis does not show that Flash is better than HTML5 or vice versa for all platforms. Rather, it shows that blanket statements and over-generalizations about CPU performance should be viewed with some healthy skepticism.
Jan adds:"Overall, it's inaccurate to conclude that Flash is inherently inefficient. Rather, Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't. With Flash Player 10.1, Flash has the opportunity for a true leap in video playback performance on all platforms that enable hardware acceleration."
The full post describes the test procedures and actual test results, so if you're interested in all the details, be sure to read the whole thing.
Created by SonicSwap.com, TuneVision is a new music video site that builds personalized music video playlists of your favorite artists using Flash Player in your browser. And now, there's a mobile version on the way for the Google Nexus One, which supports Adobe Flash Player 10.1.
In a recent posting by Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee, he has a video (embedded below) of SonicSwap CEO Dan Skilken demoing a sneak peak of the app optimized for Flash Player 10.1 on the Android-powered Nexus One.
He also included this quote from Skilken: "There is no question in my mind that the performance of Flash on Nexus is so good, that Steve Job’s ranting is motivated by the fear of this unlocking the walled garden."
There's an AIR version on the way in the next couple of months so watch some tunes and stay tuned.
Not only are we seeing more and more cool tablets come to market this year, but the features on the tablets are getting more compelling as well. Alan Tam from the Adobe Flash Player team got a sneak peak of the new HP Slate device last week. Check out his report on what you can do with it. Slate users will soon be able to enjoy their favorite websites, online games, and videos inside of a browser with Flash Player, as well as standalone applications with AIR. Stay tuned for more Flash-enabled mobile devices, smartbooks, and tablets in 2010.
With over 65,000 square meters of exhibition space to cover and 50,000 attendees to navigate, Serge Jespers goes on a mission to see how many Flash-enabled devices he can find in 10 minutes.
Yesterday TiVo announced the TiVo Premiere and the Premiere XL, part of their new Series 4 line of DVRs. Engadget has the details of all their features, but the great news is that the UI for both of them is built using the Adobe Flash Platform. Yes, the UI for the Series 4 systems is built with Flash. And as you can see from the gallery at Engadget, it looks awesome.
Sun Sachs from AOL Media explains how Flash Player 10.1 coming to mobile devices is going to streamline the production and publishing of over eighty-eight brands across multiple devices.
For more videos from Mobile World Congress, check out the MWC page on Adobe TV.
At Mobile World Congress, Adobe’s Julie Campagna caught up with Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. In this video on Adobe TV, she asks him about Flash Player 10.1, AIR, and the new tablet devices that are powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra family of mobile processors. Trevett had some good things to say about the Flash Platform, “Flash Player 10.1 is awesome—it’s enabling technology.” And what about AIR on devices? “It’s the most exciting thing at MWC,” he added.
The video includes demonstrations of HD video (hardware acceleration enables up to 1080p resolution) on tablet devices running Android as well as a very slick new interactive magazine experience based on WIRED magazine and powered by AIR 2.0. Watch the whole video below.
Hello again from MWC! As we are winding down on the second day of the conference, we'd like to share a couple of highlights of the show. The Flash Platform is clearly one of the hot topics at the conference this year.
Google Chairman & CEO Eric Schmidt's keynote this afternoon at Mobile World Live made it clear that Android will provide consumers the full rich-media web browsing experience with Flash Player 10.1. He also stated, "This means you'll get hardware-accelerated
compatibility with pretty much any Flash applet you encounter on the
interwebs." As part of the keynote, Eric Tseng, Google's senior product manager for Android did an amazing demo to show full-screen Flash videos on New York Times and Warner Bros. websites playing smoothly on Google Nexus One and fun casual games on miniclip.com. Watch the keynote.
Also earlier in the day, David Wadhwani joined Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM on the keynote stage at BlackBerry Developer Day to talk about two undeniable trends in the mobile market: increased consumer demand for content and apps and device manufacturers rushing to meet that demand. Increased demand is a good thing, but it is not easy for content publishers and app developers to reach all the devices that are out there, and the cost of developing specialized implementations for each platform is prohibitive. Adobe, RIM and other partners in the Open Screen Project are addressing these challenges today. David talked about how the two companies are working closely to make Flash Player 10.1 and AIR available on the BlackBerry platform.
As part of David's and Mike's keynote, two evangelists -- RIM's Chris Smith and Adobe's Serge Jespers -- previewed what Adobe Creative Suite can enable in conjunction with RIM's developer tools. Using the same tool chain, content publishers can build their app or content
once and deploy in the browser or through the app store with little or
no additional work
David also talked about the continuing partnering efforts of RIM and Omniture in mobile analytics and optimization, which will enable Blackberry developers to use Omniture products to measure the effectiveness of their content. Adobe is collaborating with RIM to help BlackBerry developers develop apps and content on all screens, deploy across all devices both inside and outside of the browser, and use advanced analytics to measure usage.
Also check Serge Jespers' blog for his experience in demoing the tools integration on the stage as well as talking to BlackBerry developers after the keynote.
Given all the attention on tablets right now, we'd like to share with you a preview by Alan Tam on Dell Mini 5 to demonstrate content developed for Flash Player running on the Dell's upcoming Mini 5 touch-based tablet. He shows the BBC news site delivering streaming video, and bowls a couple of frames in a game from miniclip.com. The cool part is that the content provider and app developers didn’t have to do anything to enable their products for the Mini 5, and as an user, Alan didn’t have to do anything differently either—he just surfed the web as normal and accessed the video and game as part of a full web browsing experience with Flash Player 10.1. Stay tuned for more news on the tablets.
Adobe unveiled AIR running on Android OS. Expected to ship later this year, AIR for Android takes advantage of mobile features from Flash Player 10.1 and is optimized for mobile screens. Developers can use Flash Professional to build apps for the iPhone and deliver those same apps to other platforms on AIR, including Android. Developers can also use AIR to leverage mobile-specific functionality—such as multi-touch, gesture inputs, accelerometer input, GPS and screen orientation—to deliver richer and more immersive user experiences across multiple operating systems through mobile marketplaces and app stores. To see what the buzz is about, watch a video of Kevin Hoyt below demoing AIR mobile apps - Tweetbox, Southpark, Connect -on the Motorola Droid.
As part of the Flash Platform news, we announced the Flash Player 10.1 beta was made available to developers and content providers worldwide, with general availability expected the first half of 2010. According to a Strategy Analytics analysis from January 2010, more than 250 million smartphones that support the full Flash Player are expected ship by the end of 2012. Flash Player 10.1 enables uncompromised web browsing of expressive Web applications, content, and HD videos on not only smartphones, but also new tablet devices, netbooks, smartbooks, desktops, and other consumer electronics. Android OS, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian OS, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile are among the mobile platforms that will support the full Flash Player. We are partnering with Microsoft to include the full Flash Player in future versions of Windows Phone 7. Developers can expect more news about the developer platform and browsing experience on Windows Phone 7 devices next month at MIX.
Check out one of the content publishers, Sling Media, is using Flash Player and the Flash Platform to pursue their three-screen strategy for laptops, TVs, and mobile devices.
The other announcement is about Adobe joining the LiMo Foundation and will bring the Flash Platform to the LiMo Platform-- an independent, collaboratively developed handset platform that is commercially driven by some of the largest operators and OEMs in the industry. Support for Flash within the LiMO platform will further enhance the ability of application developers and designers to use the Flash Platform to create next-generation mobile consumer experiences.
Several new partners have joined the Open Screen Project—including Symbian Foundation, Freescale, Vizio, PBS, Nickelodeon, ESPN, Wind River, Epix, and Gannet—pushing the total number of partners close to 70.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) is RIM’s BlackBerry Developer Day at MWC, featuring David Wadhwani’s keynote at 11:00 AM. Stay tuned for more news!
Barcelona is going to be the place to be next week as Mobile World Congress 2010 gets rolling. At the Adobe booth (Stand 1D45 in Hall 1), we will be hosting live theatre presentations together with our Open Screen Project partners. Adobe is looking forward to showcasing Flash Player 10.1 and the amazing work that developers, content publishers, and technology partners in the Open Screen Project have already done with it. Content publishers have been hard at work creating immersive web-browsing experiences, and they will be there along with device partners demonstrating their technologies optimized for Flash Player 10.1.
Stop in and see how developers and content publishers are using the Flash Platform to deliver to any screen, providing users with open access to rich interactive media, content, and applications on a rapidly growing list of devices.
Here is a list of just some of the sessions that partners will be presenting at the booth theatre: • Professional mobile web video made easy (Brightcove) • Unlocking Adobe Flash Player with mobile GPUs (NVIDIA) • Discovering the full web with Adobe Flash on Android-based handsets from Motorola • RIM and Adobe: Enriching web and app experience on BlackBerry devices • Optimizing content for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on Palm Pre (Palm) • La Vanguardia: Incorporating mobile web video content • Adobe, Brightcove and the development of the STV Player (STV.tv) • Creating ad-supported iPhone and iPad apps with Adobe Packager and Greystripe
You can also click here o download a full schedule of the theatre presentation.
Next week Barcelona, Spain will host the 2010 Mobile World Congress. Adobe and Open Screen Project partners will be there presenting and demonstrating the latest developments on the Flash Platform and the Open Screen Project that will help define the future of the mobile industry.
Adobe is working with more than 60 partners in the Open Screen Project to bring the full web experience to Android devices, tablets, smartbooks, and netbooks. Millions of designers, developers, and content publishers are already using the Flash Platform to deliver interactive media, applications, and videos to the web on desktop PCs. They are starting to leverage their existing popular content and applications to deploy on a range of other devices that is growing rapidly--enabling consumers to experience the web where and how they choose.
Join us at Mobile World Congress and experience firsthand full web browsing enabled by Flash Player 10.1 on Android and Palm WebOS devices, as well as several brand new tablets, smartbooks, and netbooks. Come see how application developers can develop and deploy native standalone applications quickly on iPhone and other mobile devices using Adobe Flash. And don't miss the chance to get a sneak-peek at the next generation of Adobe creative tools for creating cross-device web experiences with a streamlined design and development workflow.
Drop by the Adobe booth at Stand 1D45 in Hall 1 to talk to Adobe experts and play with some of the latest technology. And, be sure to reserve the 11 AM slot on your schedule on Tuesday, February 16th—that’s when David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Flash Platform Business at Adobe will be giving a keynote at RIM’s BlackBerry Developer Day in App Planet.
There will be a full slate of live theatre presentations from AOL Media, Google, Motorola, NVIDIA, Palm, RIM, La Vanguardia, STV.tv and others on how and why they are leveraging the Flash Platform to deliver compelling applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience. We will publish a full presentation schedule in the next couple of days.
In the coming year the competition in the smartphone and tablet market is going to continue to heat up. At Mobile World Congress 2010 you’ll learn more about how to make the most of it with Adobe and our Open Screen Project partners.
We look forward to seeing you in Barcelona! Be sure to follow Adobe at Mobile World Congress on Twitter @AdobeMWC.
In case you may have missed it, this past Tuesday Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch posted his thoughts on Open Access to Content and Applications. If you want to get a better handle on Adobe’s vision for Flash and web tools this is a must read. In response to the recent introduction of a “magical device” that has spurred so much talk online over the past week, Kevin talks about the future of Flash and how Flash Player 10.1, the Open Screen Project, HTML5, smartphones, and more fit into it.
More recently, Kevin responded to comments on this post and shared is thoughts on Flash Player performance as well as reports of crashes in some browsers. As he notes, Adobe works directly with browser teams for Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Google Chrome to resolve issues and ensure that Flash Player is not released with any known crash bugs.
If you’re following the wider conversation on the future of the Flash Platform, be sure to check back or follow us on Twitter.
On Wednesday I expressed some of my concerns about the new iPad, and the expanding footprint of closed platforms built by Apple. Since then, Apple has posted a video of the keynote, and it turns out that in a span of about 2 minutes browsing the web, there are at least 5 instances where there is broken web content. I've also spent a lot of time the last two days talking with people about how Apple could consider this a great browsing experience. It's perplexing.
Unfortunately, a lot of the speculation I'm hearing for why Flash Player isn't on the iPad doesn't make sense:
"Flash technology isn't open" -- The Flash file format specifications are open and unrestricted, so Apple can build their own Flash Player if they want. If Apple wants the source code to the Flash Player, we're happy to provide it, just as we have to many other device manufacturers.
"Apple doesn't want to pay for Flash Player" -- Apple can put it on the iPad (and iPhone) without paying Adobe or anyone a dime. The Flash Player has always been free to all consumers worldwide, and is available to device makers royalty free through the Open Screen Project. There are dozens of other devices that do that today.
"I don't want Flash on my iPad (or iPhone)" -- That's fine, we support your ability to choose, and don't want to require Flash Player on any device. But we do want it to be an option for the millions of people who have requested it.
"Flash won't perform well on the iPad (iPhone)" -- It's fast enough for other devices that have similar chips (and even less powerful chips) built on the ARM architecture. The Palm Pre, Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid, and other devices all run beta versions of Flash Player 10.1 beautifully.
"HTML5 is replacing Flash" -- This is a red herring to justify keeping a platform closed by drawing attention to another open technology. HTML5 and Flash are in no way exclusive. As with HTML4 and Flash, there are some use cases that can be served with either technology, but there are also many cases where the technologies serve different purposes. As on Android devices, HTML 5 and Flash can both easily be supported on this and future devices.
But I want to be very clear. My concern isn't just about Flash on the iPad. It's about a disturbing trend where Apple is starting to inhibit broad categories of innovation on their platforms. On the iPad, it looks like developers won't be able to write applications in Java, .net, Python, Ruby, Perl, or any number of other languages (including Flash). And users won't be able to install Firefox, Opera,IE, or any third party browser. There are countless other examples of applications and technologies that Apple doesn't allow. Why? Apple won't say.
And innovation isn't just about technology, it's also about business models. Developers on this new platform aren't able to innovate there either. At best, developers targeting the iPad are subject to a 30% Apple Tax in the App Store. And at worst, developers invest time and money building a product that can never be brought to market, because the only channel is one that is centrally controlled and entirely opaque. In every case, Apple is a gatekeeper on how developers are able to deliver content to their consumers.
Over time, restrictions on technology and business opportunity have a chilling effect on innovation on closed platforms.
Enabling innovation doesn't require magic. It requires open platforms. Apple understood this with the Mac OS. Remember the original Macintosh advertisements? On a Mac, any developer can build any app they want, and deliver it through any channel. At Adobe, we love our Macs and are one of the largest developers of software for the Mac.
iPad could be a great source for innovation. It would be a disappointment to see that wasted by keeping it closed to outside innovation to protect the Apple Tax.
At Adobe, we're seeing a similar shift towards the opening of mobile platforms. Google's Android OS is at the front of this effort, as are more than 50 participants in the Open Screen Project who are working to provide open access and a consistent runtime for devices.
We hope to enable platforms where developers can build what they want. Where they can freely choose which technologies they want to use. Where they have direct access to users, and flexibility in how they take their creations to market. The web has proven to be a powerful engine of innovation because it provided unprecedented freedom to developers and users.
As I drove by Yerba Buena Theater in San Francisco this morning, I couldn't help but be impressed. Apple certainly has the ability to excite people with great products, and with the iPhone they even managed to generate momentum for an entire product category. So it's no surprise that the iPad looks like it's a pretty good new device.
It was really exciting to see some of the technologies that Adobe has contributed to, like PDF and ePub support, taking center stage in the launch. Adobe technology is at the center of virtually every print and digital workflow, so undoubtedly a lot of what you¹ll see getting delivered to the iPad will have originated in Adobe creative software.
But, as a picture posted on Engadget shows (below), and many others have reported, there's something important missing from Apple's approach to connecting consumers to content.
It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple's DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.
Adobe and more than 50 of our partners in the Open Screen Project are working to enable developers and content publishers to deliver to any device, so that consumers have open access to their favorite interactive media, content, and applications across platform, regardless of the device that people choose to use.
To follow more from the Flash Platform Team about developments on all mobile devices, follow us at @Flash_Platform
Today Apple announced the Apple iPad and like many of you, we at Adobe are looking forward to getting our hands on one of these devices. This is an exciting time to be a software designer with an explosion of new devices and we look forward to helping Flash developers and designers bring innovative applications to these devices using our tools and frameworks.
We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.
Flash developers are used to being able to create rich expressive content that run well across multiple screens. The Flash Platform already provides developers with the ability to create applications without making assumptions about screen resolution and pixel density. Our very own Christian Cantrell has posted an in-depth article on the Adobe Developer Connection, Authoring For Multiple Screen Sizes, that details best practices in creating applications that run on multiple screens. If you want to prepare applications today that will work great on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, follow the guidelines from this article today.
While we put the finishing touches on the Packager for iPhone, we have invited a few developers and designers to join a closed pre-release program. As they are testing it and giving us feedback, they also have been able to use it to build some applications that they have submitted to the iTunes App Store. Here are some recent iPhone applications that you can find in the App Store now:
Gold Strike This popular action/puzzle game has been around for nearly a decade and played by millions. You are a miner who has struck gold! But the mine is unstable. Remove gold by finding groups of blocks as tremors fill the mine up.
Brush Dr. Alan Acierno has created a Brush application which times every tooth and section of the mouth to help you brush 3 minutes twice a day
To follow news from the Flash Platform Team about the iPhone Packager and other new developments, follow us at @Flash_Platform
Update:
As a result of Apple’s updated legal terms (section 3.3.1 of the Apple iPhone SDK License Agreement), Apple is no longer permitting these applications to be delivered to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store. This a legal restriction imposed by Apple and is not a technical limitation of Adobe AIR or Adobe Flash Professional CS5.
At this time, we have ceased further development of the Packager for iPhone, and we plan to keep this completed work in CS5 to demonstrate the capabilities of the Flash Platform to support multiple platforms and devices. We have already started the pre-release of AIR for Android and will shift our investment there and to other technologies, in addition to the work we have already been doing on Flash Player 10.1 for Android. We believe Android will enable a series of very competitive devices in the market and are working closely with Google and other Open Screen Project (OSP) partners on this.
With the year just begun, we've got a lot of new material in the ADC for you to sink your teeth into.
Get ready to build and distribute games for the Adobe Flash Platform. Danielle Deibler describes the recently launched Flash Platform Game Technology Center, which should become a vital part of your game development process. Nick Avgerinos highlights concepts that many RIA developers may already be familiar with and shows how they can be applied to build a simple four-in-a-row game. Also, Mariam Dholkawala explains best practices for creating games for touch-screen handsets.
With its new data-centric development features, Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta provides efficient ways for traditional web and novice Flex developers to import, explore, and use web services—the popular mechanism for exchanging data between applications and platforms on the Internet. Learn about these capabilities from Srinivas Annam as you build an application that uses the Zenfolio web service to display photos.
Finally, check out the latest demos highlighting various aspects of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on mobile platforms, including the Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, and Google Nexus One.
In part 1 of the year in review I talked about some of the great applications and content that have been created on top of the Flash Platform. In part 2 I talked about the partnerships and what that has enabled this year. Now I'm going to turn to the tools and technologies from Adobe. When I look back at my own personal history with Flex and the Flash Platform, coming with Flex 1.5 and Flash Player 7, it's amazing to see the progress we made this year.
The biggest news came at MAX. We provided beta versions of Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst, and ColdFusion Builder. Three tools that cover a broad spectrum of RIA development. Flash Builder 4 built on top of our momentum with Flex Builder and introduced a new data-centric development methodology as well as some long-asked for productivity enhancements. Flash Catalyst is a completely new tool that lets designers bring in designs from Photoshop and Illustrator and turn them into working, interactive Flash content without writing any code. And of course ColdFusion Builder provided ColdFusion developers an Eclipse-baesd tool from Adobe that works seamlessly with Flash Builder and lets ColdFusion developers quickly work on ColdFusion and HTML projects. The three tools work together to let designers and developers collaborate around all parts of an RIA project. And the next generation of Flash Professional also got a sneak peak at MAX with the announcement that Flash CS5 will support creation of native iPhone applications.
We also started to lay out our vision for services at Adobe in 2009. Before and during MAX we provided betas and some new information about the Adobe Flash Platform Services. This includes things like LiveCycle Collaboration Services which lets you easily add real-time collaboration components to your Flex and Flash applications. We debuted a Distribution service that lets you track and distribute Flash content across a number of popular properties. There was also the Try/Buy service codenamed "Shibuya" which will help Flash developers directly make money from what they build on the Flash Platform.
Both of our runtimes, AIR and Flash Player, saw beta versions of the next generation. We provided beta access to Adobe AIR 2 which provides developers a lot more access to native functionality as well as adding next-generation HTML support and performance optimizations. Developers had access to a beta of Flash Player 10.1 later in the year which is the first version of Flash Player that is intended for smart phones. Developers got to see how this version of the player would run on the desktop with new memory optimization and support for multi-touch gestures. Flash Player 10.1 will be released for Mac, Windows, Linux, and smart phones like the Palm Pre and Google Android later this year.
Adobe was also busy in the server space. ColdFusion 9 was released this year and it included much deeper support for Flex and AIR applications as well as the ability to tightly integrate with Microsoft Office documents (including SharePoint) and some nice code enhancement for long-time ColdFusion developers.
And finally, this was a big year in openness for the Flash Platform. We've worked hard to keep the Flash Platform as open as possible by doing things like open sourcing the Tamarin virtual machine and providing the SWF and AMF specifications in addition to contributing to existing open source projects like the Eclipse foundation. This year we open sourced two new projects, the Open Source Media Framework and the Text Layout Framework. The Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) provided a standard way to create and extend the way video content plays on the Flash Platform. The Text Layout Framework (TLF) brought world-class text capability to the Flash Platform. It included support for right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic and gave developers very detailed control over exactly how text was rendered by the Flash Player. Both technologies are available with all of Adobe's open source initiatives on http://opensource.adobe.com.
Between the tools, new services, the runtimes, the servers, and our open source efforts, it's been a big 2009 and we've set the stage for a bigger 2010. We can't wait to see what our community does with these technologies. You are the ones that keep the Flash Platform moving and keep us cutting edge. Thanks for a great year!
Mobile World Congress 2010 is just around the corner. Held in Barcelona, Spain in February, it is the world’s most influential mobile industry event. This year, Adobe will be demonstrating uncompromised rich web experiences in Flash on the latest smartphones, netbooks, and smartbooks with some of the Open Screen Project partners. If you plan to attend the show, come visit us in Hall 1 and experience them firsthand. We’re also offering Flash Platform developers a limited number of complimentary exhibition visitor passes (a value of € 599 per person) on a first-come, first-served basis. Email us with your name, company name, and email address if you’re interested. For more details, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/mwc2010. We hope to see you there.
Over the weekend there was a great article in TechCrunch about the large number of Flash developers who are ramping up to deliver apps on the iPhone using Flash Platform tooling.
As you know, since we announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX, we've been running a small pre-release program for Flash Pro CS5. Adobe pre-releases give a small set of developers early access to builds of our tools (in this case Flash CS5) to test and to create content. Developers in our pre-release work closely with our product teams to give feedback and submit bugs. The fun part in the case of the Flash pre-release is the end product of working with our developers, they end up building and getting apps into Apple's App Store.
We wanted to share a couple of the apps that were built by our pre-release developers that we thought would be interesting to our readers.
Alchemist
Alchemist is an addictive puzzle that challenges player's memory, reaction and logic. You are playing an apprentice who has to help his Alchemist master to test our secret formulas and find the one that produces the most gold.
Boost Your Brain
Are you smarter than your friends? Boost your Brain is a collection of fun and addicting games including logic puzzles, mental calculations and memory trainers.
iGevalt
iGevalt is a 3D dreidel simulator for Hanukkah. A dreidel is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.
We're starting to see our developers coming to the CS5 pre-release with existing web apps and games they have that they want to build for the iPhone. Our own Ted Patrick made his Sudoku game run as an AIR app and an iPhone app from the exact same code base. Want to do the same? If you have an app you want to build, shoot us a mail at iphone-prerelease@adobe.com. We've got a few spots open on the pre-release if you have a specific app you'd like to port.
Today at CES, Palm demonstrated Flash content in the browser on a Palm Pre. Palm's press release states that developers can expect to download a free Adobe Flash Player 10.1 plug-in from the Palm App Catalog in the coming months. Palm webOS will be one of the first mobile platforms to support the full Flash Player in the web browser. Here you can check out a quick demo by Adrian Ludwig showing various Flash games from Armor Games and Miniclip.com on a Palm Pre.
It's been a big week for us here on the Flash Platform Team, with Flash Player 10.1 being shown publicly on a number of Android devices for the first time. Earlier today Motorola announced that we've been working with them on delivering Flash Player 10.1 for the Motorola DROID. Below is a quick video showing some great content that you'll be able to access on the Droid, including the BBC, New York Times , and even some really cool animation done by the folks at AngryAlien.com
The partner ecosystem of the Flash Platform has grown tremendously over the past year and led to some great advancements for Flash designers and developers. Our partners have helped us bring Flash to 98% of internet-connected desktops, netbooks, smartphones, cable boxes, game systems, TVs, and other consumer devices which has broadened the reach of the platform. One of the strengths of the Flash Platform has always been a consistent experience for both developers and end users. Without our partners it wouldn't be possible to create that consistent experience across the various chipsets, processors, architectures, and operating systems on all of those different devices. One of the biggest of those partner initiatives is the Open Screen Project which is bringing Flash content to web browsers as well as standalone applications across all of those devices.
The Open Screen Project started the year with momentum at CES. We announced partnerships with Broadcom and Intel that will bring Flash to the 3rd screen, televisions. We followed that up with an announcement at Mobile World Congress that in conjunction with Nokia we would create a $10 million dollar fund to foster the creation of content for multiple screens using the Flash Platform. In 2009 we received over 700 proposals and have funded more than 50 multi-screen applications. At NAB in the spring we moved further into the living room by delivering technology to our OEM partners that extended the Flash Platform to devices in the digital home such as set-top boxes and Blu-ray players. This included optimizations for using Flash technology for HD video and rich applications on those devices. During the summer we announced that we were working with NVIDIA to optimize Flash content and applications for netbooks, smartphones, and smartbooks that make use of NVIDIA GPUs. Finally, to cap it off, at MAX Qualcomm came and showed that their Snapdragon chipset was ready to support Flash Player 10.1 on smartphone and smartbook devices from companies like Toshiba. At MAX Google and RIM also announced they would be joining the Open Screen Project.
A big part of the Open Screen Project is making more moves to open up the Flash Platform. This year we took another big step forward by publishing the RTMP specification and releasing open source media and text frameworks for the Flash Platform.
The Open Screen Project now has almost 50 industry leaders that are working together to create a consistent platform for developers and users to create and consume cutting edge applications and high quality media. The members of the Open Screen project come from a wide section of industry and include companies. Some major companies announced their support for the Open Screen Project this year including Disney Interactive Media Group, Fox Mobile Group,Google, HTC,NVIDIA, Palm, Paramount, RIM, Texas Instruments, and The New York Times. This video provides a great summary of the goals and partnerships around the Open Screen Project.
Our partners allowed us to greatly expand the reach of the Flash Platform and take it to screens big and small as well as the next generation of computing devices. But the platform itself is just one part of the equation. We've also been working on enhancing the tools and workflows that let designers and developers create Flash content. In Part 3 tomorrow I'll finish the series with the tools, services, and other platform technologies that we were working on in 2009.
Earlier today, Google announced their new Nexus One . As part of the Open Screen Project, we've been working with Google to make sure that the Nexus One will have Flash Player 10. It's got a very powerful 1 GhZ chip made by Qualcomm, so you'll be able to play a ton of games, watch video, and browse other Web content built with Flash. We're still working on the finishing touches so Flash Player 10.1 isn't available publicly yet, but we'll deliver it over the air to existing phones once it's available. In the meantime, I thought you might like to see this video of some examples Flash content running on this great new phone.
This has been a huge year for the Flash Platform and with 2009 drawing to a close we thought it would be great to go back and look at some of the things that happened this year. I'm going to break it down into 3 parts this week and next, first talking about some of the applications that you all have created. Second I'm going to focus on some of the news we made around the Open Screen Project and our partners. Last I'll talk about some of the technical enhancements and innovation around our tools, the runtimes, and our new service initiatives.
The strongest part of our technology stack has always been you, the community. It's the applications and content that you create which keeps pushing the entire web forward and makes our tools and technology shine. There are millions of you who have helped make the Flash Platform the absolute best way to create innovative and cutting-edge applications and in 2009 we had some great examples of that.
London Borough of Southwark - A great enterprise example, Southwark created the One Touch system that made it easier for citizens to access government services. One Touch was built with Adobe LiveCycle ES and deployed on the Flash Platform.
Marathon Technologies - Built an RIA management console that shows how RIAs can make it easier and faster for customers to get things done.
Tweetdeck - A great example of how Adobe AIR lets web developers take advantage of new services, Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter and raised over $2 million in funding this year.
FLARToolKit - Augmented Reality became one of 2009's buzzwords and FLARToolKit created by Saqoosha, a Japanese Flash developer, was a big reason for that. It helped spawn great demos like GE's Ecomagination and John Mayer's Heartbreak Warefare video which debuted at MAX 2009.
TimesReader and GlobeReader - Digital publishing had a wild year in 2009 and these two applications, built on Adobe AIR, gave us a look at what the future of the newspaper might look like.
SlideRocket - An early adopter of the Flash Platform, SlideRocket makes it easy to create great looking presentations on the web. They raised an additional $5 million this year and showed how beautiful and functional a Flex user interface can be.
Flash Games - We started talking a lot more about the Flash gaming community this year and it's going to be a hot topic in 2010. As Adobe brings Flash to more mobile devices it's going to open up new options for deployment for Flash game developers. Continuity is one standout example of why Flash is still the best platform for game creators.
There are literally thousands of applications that were developed this year on top of the Flash Platform. You can see more examples of what people are building over at the Flash Platform site. If we missed your favorite, let us know in the comments below.
Tomorrow we'll talk about the Open Screen Project and some of the news it made this year.
Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 for desktops and netbooks is available for download on Adobe Labs.
In addition to the normal stability and bug fixes in a beta refresh, beta 2 includes the new global error handler feature, the most frequently requested enhancement in our public bug and issue management system. Now you can write a single function that collects data on all errors, even unexpected runtime errors.
We have also added debug versions of Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 to Labs so you can see errors at runtime and intercept them by registering a global error handler. You can view two examples of using the global error handler via Tour de Flex or using the desktop version. Tour de Flex includes other new samples that will help you get started with gestures and microphone access, another community-driven feature in Flash Player 10.1 and its superset, AIR 2.0.
Adobe is no longer planning to release a public beta of Adobe Flash Professional CS5. This is a change from the plan that we announced in October at Adobe MAX 2009.
Since the original announcement we have seen a ton of interest in Flash Professional CS5 and the included Packager for iPhone. Developers in the pre-release program continue to provide great feedback and take advantage of the new features. We've also seen a number of new applications built using ActionScript 3 and delivered to the App Store.
We are changing our plans in reaction to this strong positive feedback. We want to make sure that we can provide the earliest possible delivery of the final software to the large number of designers and developers interested in Flash Professional CS5 and the included Packager for iPhone.
We understand that some people will be disappointed. Many of us were looking forward to a beta. But in the end, we think that what is most important is to get the release version completed and in your hands as quickly as possible.
In this episode, Tinic Uro from the Adobe Flash Player engineering team talks about the advances in the use of the GPU for hardware decoding of H.264 video in Flash Player 10.1.
You can learn more about Flash Player 10.1 and download the beta at Adobe Labs. Let us know what you think.
Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta includes a new feature called the Network Monitor, which you can use to debug network traffic between a Flex application and an application server at runtime. Read David Gassner's article and try out this new feature by using Adobe ColdFusion and a set of sample Flex applications. Meanwhile, follow Sujit Reddy G and learn how to build a Flex application that connects to a BlazeDS Remoting destination using Flash Builder 4 beta.
Just released, Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES2 (version 3) simplifies the development of web applications using Flash and Java. Download a trial version of the software and read Anil Channappa's article to get an overview of the new capabilities in the release.
If you are finding yourself with some developer holiday downtime during the next few weeks, get inspired by some of the amazing Flash websites picked by veteran website reviewer Rob Ford as the best Flash experiences in 2009—and then cast your vote for the best site of the year. In the meantime, Rodney Smith continues his series on using ActionScript 3 to bring 3D motion to your Flash projects. This time, it's how to pan, zoom, and move objects within a 3D space.
Also, improve your understanding of search engine optimization by watching SEO gurus Jay Middleton and Damien Bianchi discuss best practices for optimizing SWF-based content for search engines.
Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Flash Platform evangelist, has launched a series of tutorial videos on Adobe TV about the challenges of developing rich Internet applications. In this first episode, he explains how virtual lists improve application performance by reducing rendering time. More episodes are on the way. Let us know what you think.
In this episode of the "Under The Hood with Adobe" series, Tinic Uro of the Adobe Flash Player engineering team accesses binary data coming from the microphone to create new types of audio applications in Flash Player 10.1. To download Flash Player 10.1 beta, visit Adobe Labs. More episodes will be featured here in the next few days.
If you want to learn more about some of the most exciting new features in Flash Player 10.1, check out the series of "Under the Hood with Adobe" videos on Adobe TV featuring the Flash Player engineering team. In this episode, Jim Corbett discusses Flash Player 10.1 optimizations in SWF loading and playback to address mobile CPU and memory limitations on smartphones.
Here is a video that demonstrates this instance management feature in action on a Palm Pre:
If you're interested in learning more about 3D, you'll be happy to know that the new 3D support in Adobe Flash Player 10 does a lot of the work for you. Rodney Smith explains how to use ActionScript 3 in Flash CS4 to make a user-controlled 3D animation. For a different effect, Keiichi Yoshikawa describes the process behind his interactive business cards that take advantage of augmented reality technology in Flash to display 3D animations based on 2D block patterns.
Creative teams of designers and developers are continuing to garner attention with the cool experiences they're building using the Flash Platform. This past week, 20th Century Fox released an interactive trailer, powered by Adobe AIR, for the upcoming release of the sci-fi adventure "Avatar" that you should check out. Download and install the trailer app to experience how you can use the AIR runtime to appeal both to your users and to brand owners.
One reason for the success of e-commerce is that the Internet can provide people with a secure medium for making payments. However, for RIA developers the challenge of integrating payment services into RIAs comes from the fact that current payment services such as Amazon FPS are designed to work in a request-response paradigm, while RIAs are stateful. Read Miti Pricope's article to see how his approach can help you beat the challenge with Flex and Adobe AIR.
Many developers see the advantages of Test Driven Development (TDD) but hesitate to use it due to perceived time constraints. In his article, Test Driven Development using Flash Builder 4 beta and FlexUnit, Elad Elrom shows you how to use TDD to simplify future application maintenance while reducing your development time.
In a recent interview with Beet.tv, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch talked about trends in the design and creation of content. As smartphone sales outpace PC sales, he expects more and more consumer entertainment content and applications to be created for mobile devices first, in a reversal of today's PC-first approach. Kevin points out that given the explosive growth of video content available on the Web and that a growing number of smartphone users are expecting to access more video content over the Web, videos will be soon produced and optimized for small screen devices before the traditional personal computers. You can watch the entire video interview with Kevin on Beet.tv.
To read more on creating a new breed of rich Internet applications optimized across devices visit Adobe Developer Center, where you can download whitepapers and learn about best practices for designing contextual applications. Let us know if you notice this trend as well, and share your thoughts and experiences in creating content and applications across different devices.
It’s been a big week for the Web with the launch of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 betas. Our announcement was just one day prior to Microsoft announcing the latest beta version of their runtime. Serendipity aside, the Microsoft offering is actually a bit flattering for us on the Flash Platform team. Quite a few of the new features of the Silverlight beta appear to be following in a path created by the Flash Platform confirming that Microsoft sees the need for solutions that the Flash community has been using for years. They are also strongly affirming the role Flash has played in enabling the rise of rich Internet applications and helping people create more capable and usable line-of-business, data-centric applications. But more than anything, I was struck during the PDC with how far the Flash Platform has moved the standard for application development forward over the last two years.
As our CTO Kevin Lynch has been talking about for a few years now, the future of software innovation requires consistent platforms that work across devices. Work on the new Flash Platform runtimes, Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2, is a direct part of the Open Screen Project efforts, which is an industry-wide initiative with one vision: enable people to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere.
In addition to Flash’s innovation leadership, our work with the Open Screen Project demonstrates another way Adobe is unique among technology platform providers. Flash has a long history of supporting technology integration and industry collaboration, and Adobe has been investing in mobile and the digital home as an enabling technology, not as a competitor. Adobe is in a unique position because our business model complements those of the almost 50 Open Screen Project partners across their many lines of business, and thus Flash can achieve the cross-platform and cross-device reach unlike any other platform. When Flash Player 10.1 ships in 2010, we will double the number of operating systems that the full Flash Player can reach, to include a broad range of mobile devices — not just Windows, or Mac and Linux, but also Solaris, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm webOS and BlackBerry. The same mobile-optimized Flash Platform applications can even be compiled as iPhone apps, providing the most productive way to reach users across all leading platforms.
Flash Platform innovations lead the industry and surpassing its core strengths will be no easy feat:
Flash Player is on over 98% of Internet-connected PCs (source: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html)
Flash Player 10 was on more than 93% of PCs in under 10 months
Flash Player powers approximately 75% of web video (source: comScore)
Over 70% of Web games are built using Flash (source: internal Adobe survey)
Adobe is working with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers worldwide to bring Flash support to their devics
7 of top 10 ISVs use the Flex framework (source: internal Adobe survey)
Cross-OS/cross-browser consistency
Best-in-class design-develop workflow and cross-OS tooling
Adobe has always been and will continue to be committed to backward compatibility
Flash Platform integrates with heterogeneous IT environments
We have a variety of new resources for developers and business decision-makers to learn more about the Flash Platform. Check them out:
The Adobe Cookbooks application is your one-stop shop for finding and sharing community generated code samples. One of the great new features of the recently re-designed Cookbooks application is the recipe request feature. This allows users who cannot locate their desired code sample to put out a request for it to other community members. Additionally, fellow community members can vote for specific requests so that users can determine at a glance which requests are the most popular.
A list of recipe requests can be seen on the home page for each of the technologies that the Adobe Cookbooks support. Currently, the Flex Cookbook has the most unanswered recipe requests. You can also easily stay current on the queue of requests by subscribing to the uber RSS feed, or you can get notified of requests for specific technologies like Flex.
And while answering a recipe request won't bring you fame and fortune, it will give you:
That warm fuzzy feeling you get from assisting your fellow developers
The potential to have your recipe included in an upcoming version of the O'Reilly Flex Cookbook
Visibility on adobe.com via the Adobe Cookbook recognition features for contributors
Also, for a limited time, every person who addresses a recipe request will be sent a free copy of the Getting Started with Flex 3 Pocket Guide. Just email Ed Sullivan with a link to the recipe request you plan on addressing and then after you publish it, just sit back and wait for your book to arrive!
One of the popular features in the prerelease versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 is the multi-touch capability. If you haven't seen it, you should check out this video of Kevin Lynch showing a couple of innovative examples using the multi-touch and "gestures" capabilities on the HP TouchSmart during the keynote at the MAX developer conference last month. We hope you will be able to explore and innovate using the new features in Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. See what you can do with them.
At the Adobe MAX developer conference last month we unveiled the next release of Adobe Flash Player that delivers on the promise of the Open Screen Project - a consistent, cross-OS runtime across desktop and mobile devices. Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the first public developer prerelease of Flash Player 10.1 on Adobe Labs. While this initial prerelease is for desktop operating systems, we will be updating the prelease between now and general availability in the first half of 2010 to add more features (e.g., global error handler), performance improvements, new tooling options and support for mobile platforms.
Developers can test their existing SWF content and start working with some of the exciting new capabilities that result from bringing the full Flash Player to mobile devices. For example, as users increasingly interact with devices using their fingers, developers can now create entirely new types of applications that use multi-touch points and gestures on touch screen devices, including those running Windows 7. And because AIR 2, also available today as a prerelease, is a superset of Flash Player 10.1, those same capabilities can be used outside the browser.
Consumers are welcome to try the beta to preview hardware acceleration of H.264 video on supported Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks. The release notes provide details on supported graphics cards and drivers that support video hardware acceleration.
Increasingly the Web is social. It is becoming important to make applications social. To make it easier to integrate your application with Facebook, MySpace and other social networks, we made the Social service available through Adobe Labs.
The Social service (currently in beta) enables you to write applications that integrate leading social networks such as Facebook and MySpace into your apps. The service, implemented through an easy to use API, provides an abstraction layer that connects with different networks. This removes the complexity and repetitive work of having to implement multiple APIs in order to integrate social features from multiple social networks into your application. The service also insulates developers against underlying social network changes, as the underlying APIs at the supported social networks change, the service adapts to those changes so you don’t have to rush updated versions of your app to market.
Today, at RIM's annual Blackberry Developer Conference in San Francisco, Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen were there to jointly announce the upcoming support in Creative Suite 5 for the BlackBerry platform. As part of the announcement, Adobe and RIM will also be working together to optimize Adobe AIR for the BlackBerry platform, making RIM the first OEM to announce support for Adobe AIR. This alliance between two companies builds on the momentum we started in early October when RIM joined the Open Screen Project and committed to bringing Flash Player to BlackBerry.
You can read more about the tools support for the Blackberry platform on Ryan Stewart's blog and see a preview of the tools' workflows in action on Adobe Developer Center. In addition, Adobe platform evangelist, Mark Doherty posted some great insights to the latest stats on the BlackBerry market and what it means to Adobe designers and developers who are interested in taking advantage of this new opportunity.
Yesterday a number of blogs started to discuss the content on the Flash Player download center for iPhone users. There have been some questions about the site, so I want to provide a little background on the page.
We currently get nearly three million visitors to this page each month from people who are looking for the Flash Player for their iPhone or iPod touch, many of whom were leaving the download center believing that either (1) Adobe didn't want Flash on the iPhone or (2) the iPhone was somehow technically incapable of playing Flash content. Since neither of those is true, we are now explaining to those visitors that Apple holds the key in getting Flash Player onto the device.
The language was compact and to the point both because of the constraints of the page (this is displayed only to the iPhone) and the audience (consumers who are looking for the Flash Player aren't interested in reading a long piece of text). I also want to mention that Apple and Adobe have a strong partnership in many areas, but, Apple has not provided the level of support required to deliver the Flash Player to the iPhone. Nearly every other industry player is working with us in getting Flash technology onto their devices and platforms. These partners are making critical, high value investments in delivering Flash Player on mobile devices, on netbooks, and in the digital home.
To be clear, Adobe wants to make Flash Player 10.1 available for the iPhone and with Apple's support we're ready to do the work -- just as we and our partners are doing for Blackberry, Palm webOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and many other platforms to give users uncompromised access to the web.
Flex developers interested in new opportunities may want to look at the developer preview of Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. Flash Builder for Force.com is a new development tool for building cloud-based, rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be deployed in the browser through Adobe Flash Player or on the desktop leveraging Adobe AIR. In the tutorial series, Building a desktop application with Flash Builder for Force.com, Jeanette Stallons steps developers through the process of building an application from start to finish, covering salesforce.com, Stratus, Flex, and AIR fundamentals.
Also be sure to check out the newly released Day 4 of our popular video training, Flex 4 beta in a Week, to learn about extending events, accessing remote data, and creating a typed data model.
Apart from the data-centric capabilities, Flex 4 support, and other great features, Flash Builder 4 beta 2 introduces some new and updated features to improve developer productivity and make writing MXML and ActionScript code faster and easier. Read the article by Jason San Jose, Developer productivity improvements in Flash Builder 4 beta, to learn about the Call Hierarchy view, enhanced states syntax support, changes to code hints, and editor improvements.
Developers interested in sharing open standards and best practices for video player applications built on the Adobe Flash Platform may wish to check out the Open Source Media Framework and then follow R Blank's tutorial presentations, Building video players in Flash with the OSMF, to get a feeling for how the OSMF helps standardize the way that media players—particularly video players—are built on the Flash Platform.
The Omniture acquisition officially closed today. This marks a new chapter for Adobe as we begin work on key product integrations to deliver a complete solution from content creation through optimization. For designers and developers, this means you will be able to build user-centric applications that incorporate measurement and optimization into the early stages of the creation process and refine them to increase usage, satisfaction and monetization. You can get an executive perspective from Shantanu's blog posting on the Adobe Corporate blog.
For the Flash Platform, here is a highlight of the strategic integrations that our teams will begin to work on:
Integrating Omniture’s analytics and optimization solutions with the Flash Platform to make engaging content and applications running in Flash Player and Adobe AIR measurable and easily optimized - and extending the Flex framework to include easy-to-use analytics components.
Integrating Omniture video analytics and optimization capabilities with the Flash Platform. Also, continuing to invest in advancing this complete video capability based on emerging customer requirements to support better targeting, engagement and monetization.
Integrating Omniture solutions to analyze and optimize experiences and content consumed across multiple screens, including smartphones, Internet-connected televisions and other devices.
Today we announced the partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe. The new offering, Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed IDE that provides a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR. This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform.
As a developer, you'll be able to get a combined Force.com and Flash Builder tool so you never have to switch environments to create Flex applications on top of the Force.com platform. The new tool exposes a new project type, the Force.com stratus type, and lets you automatically connect your applications to the Force.com
platform using a WSDL file. Then you can use the data features of Flash Builder to connect your data in the cloud with Flex components. It also has support out of the box for creating AIR applications that support online/offline synchronization and LiveCycle Data Services integration.
The new tool and the partnership really simplify the process of connecting your Flex apps to the Force.com platform so that you can focus more time on building a really great user interface that exposes those services. We're looking forward to seeing what kinds of applications you create with the Flash Platform and Force.com.
We are pleased to announce that the current version of Adobe AIR (1.5.2) supports Windows 7. For additional information on supported operating systems, please see our Adobe AIR system requirements page.
With the official release of Microsoft Windows 7 today, we are pleased to report that the current release of Flash Player 10 (10.0.32) already supports the new operating system. See the Flash Player system requirements for further information.
At MAX 2009, we announced the commercial availability of the Collaboration service. The service is available as Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS) and is part of the Adobe Flash Platform Services.
With this service, developers can easily add real-time, multi-user collaboration and social capabilities into their applications. Social interaction over the web has moved beyond just e-mail and messaging with friends and family. Users now expect in-context collaborative functionality in a wide variety of applications across business, education, and entertainment. Social games are a common example, but users increasingly require similar real-time interactions in other areas, such as online customer service, e-learning applications, and alongside news and sports broadcasts.
See examples
A number of developers are already using the service to power their applications. See the examples in this showcase.
Get started for free
Visit the LCCS developer portal and create an account. Just use your existing Adobe ID or create a new one. Then, download the SDK Navigator, which will guide you through the LCCS SDK.
The service is available worldwide and can be purchased today with a payment card. For detailed information on our pay-per-use pricing model, please check out our Pricing FAQ.
Learn how to use the service
We have created a number of videos to help you get started including one that tells you how to build your first application with the Collaboration service. You can access the videos and get more information at the Adobe Developer Connection.
Have you seen the October issue of the Edge newsletter? It's now live on Adobe.com. Produced by the Adobe Developer Relations team, the Edge has 1.7 million subscribers worldwide. It features video, articles and tutorials for developers and designers who create content and applications for the web.
In this month’s video, Edge Managing Editor Julie Campagna is on the scene at Adobe MAX 2009. See a snapshot of this year's lively event, including announcements, technology previews, and commentary from attendees.
Today at Adobe MAX we previewed the next version of Adobe Flash Player, 10.1, that runs on mobile devices, netbooks and PCs. This is the full version of the Flash Player, with the same set of the features as the desktop based Flash Player. That same Flash Player was also shown running on a variety of netbooks as well. With the release of Flash Player 10.1, you'll be able to create contextual applications that provide a customized experience - applications that are aware of the device that they're being run on, and modify their UI accordingly. While it's not available in a public beta just yet, it will be available before the end of this year for Windows, Mac and Linux, along with Windows Mobile and Palm Web OS.
At MAX we also showed off a new feature of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 that allows designers and developers using ActionScript 3 to create applications for the Apple iPhone. Flash developers will soon be able to submit applications to the Apple App Store -- and there are already a bunch of applications available in the store now including: Red Hood, Chroma Circuit, Trading Stuff, Fickleblox, That Roach Game, and Just Letters. While, unfortunately, this isn't Flash Player for the iPhone, it's going to open up a lot of opportunities for developers to be able to build applications for the iPhone using Flash. There's more information about applications for the iPhone available on
We also announced the 2nd betas of Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Flash Catalyst and ColdFusion Builder beta 2. Available for download today, Flash Builder 4 adds refinements to many new features from beta 1, and will help you become more successful using the new Flex 4 framework, providing more clarity between the use of Flex 3 and Flex 4 throughout the IDE. The new data-centric development features have also evolved and expanded based on beta 1 user feedback, providing improved UI and workflow for common tasks.
(Note that the Flash Builder 4 beta 2 release expires after 60 days. See below on how to extend it.)
The easiest way to change the look and feel of those applications is to have your designer design the application using Adobe Flash Catalyst beta 2. It lets designers create rich user interfaces easily using designs from Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks and then lets developers open those projects up directly in Flash Builder 4 to add other code (things like database connections etc...). The new Flash Catalyst beta 2 adds support for video and enhanced interaction options.
Today and tomorrow's keynote will be streamed live at max.adobe.com. It will include demos of applications from many leading brands, showcasing how they're improving the user experience of their websites with the Adobe Flash Platform. We've also made 3 sessions per day from MAX available online. All the sessions from Adobe MAX will be available on the MAX website in the next few weeks.
** To extend Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 **
To continue using Flash Builder 4 beta 2 after 60 days you need to own a copy of Flex Builder 3 and use that serial number to get a serial number to remove the timeout in Flash Builder 4. If you don't yet own Flex Builder 3, you can buy it with maintenance, which will provide you with a free upgrade to Flash Builder 4 when its released. Yyou can purchase that by calling a Flex sales rep. Email Eardley Walker or phone 206-275-2831 for more details. Flex Builder 3 maintenance cannot be purchased through the online store.
Are you a Dollhouse fan? Now you can download a new desktop app
Fox released last night called "Virtual Echo." Developed by the marketing agency, Blitz using the Adobe AIR, the app activates nine different Echo personae—like “assassin” or “dream date”—that traipse across your desktop including augmented reality functionality. You can print out the marker and “interact” with the main character in 3D via webcam. The augmented reality in this app is unique in that it's using higher quality video than what has been used with Adobe Flash in the past.Congratulations to the design and development team at Blitz for creating this innovative app using the capabilities in the AIR technology!
At MAX this year we will have a bunch of session specially devoted to the Open Screen Project. We've been working on OSP for quite some time now with new partners, the OSP Fund and of course on the product side on delivering a consistent runtime that works across multiple platforms and devices. While you will hear a lot about the product related updates in the Keynote and other sessions, we've designed the OSP sessions to provide you with a chance to see how other developers, agencies and brands are already working on delivering applications across multiple devices. We really hope you find these sessions helpful!
Learn what the Open Screen Project is and how it furthers Adobe's
vision of a consistent runtime environment across desktops, mobile
phones, televisions and other consumer electronic devices. See demos
of content and applications spanning multiple devices and find out how
you can tap into the US$10 million Open Screen Project Fund.
Twitter Hash: #adobemax313
Date/Time: October 7 at 02:00PM
Room: 503
Paramount Digital Entertainment is working on a new movie format that
plays out on multiple devices. The first movie to come out on with
this new movie production model is the 'Circle of 8', due for public
release late October. Keith Quinn and Sean Naughton have both worked
on the actual production of this movie and its digital delivery
through the Flash Platform. They will be talking about how they
essentially re thought the movie making process and seamlessly brought
in delivery to multiple devices. This incidentally is a project partially funded by the Open Screen Project Fund.
Twitter Hash: #adobemax78
Date/Time: October 6 at 09:00AM
Room:505
Richard Lent, CEO of AgencyNet and an acclaimed speaker will take us
through the multi-screen paradigm showcasing how each device delivers
against a unique user context and requires a unique value proposition.
He will explain, through real examples, how the high-level strategy
was turned into cool applications and campaigns for world-renowned
brands such as Oxygen, Pepsi, Fox, Atlantic Records and Bacardi. From
strategy, to pitch, to deployment, he will break down how AgencyNet
accomplished and often exceeded their clients' objectives.
Twitter Hash: #adobemax207
Date/Time: October 6 at 03:00PM
Room: 505
Learn what it took to implement the Netflix browsing and movie-
streaming experience for TVs in Flash. Matt McCarty from Netflix
along with Michael Hoch from Sodascope explore user experience
constraints for the TV, engineering and user experience challenges for
network data-driven user interfaces, architecture, and special
performance issues for embedded devices.
Twitter Hash: #adobemax395
Date/Time: October 5 at 05:00PM
Room: 505
Come to this session to hear more about the OSP Fund and the progress
we've made with the initiative in the past nine months. There will be
four demos of apps funded and now ready to hit market. Also we are
super stoked to annouce that David Blaine will be present himself to
showcase a Flash Lite based app developed for taking his brand of
tricks to Nokia devices. David will be available after the session in
the OSP Fund Circle in the Main Pavilion to talk more about the
application and maybe show the audience a trick or two!
Date/Time: October 5 at 05:00PM
Room: 503
The Flash Platform is used to create a large amount of applications and content on the Web. One of the challenges that developers face after they have created applications is getting users to notice them and use them. The Distribution service helps solve this problem by providing ways to promote applications and content to users.
In the last few years we have seen a clear shift in how people use the Web - they are spending a lot of their time on social media sites and on mobile devices. The Distribution service was especially designed to promote applications to social media and mobile users.
How do you use the Distribution service?
1. Establish an account
Install the Distribution Manager (available here through the install badge) and login using your Adobe ID. If you don’t have an Adobe ID, create one here.
Find your partner ID in the lower right corner of the Distribution Manager
2. Add sharing to your application
Install the extension for your preferred authoring tool (Flash Professional, Flex Builder 3 or Dreamweaver). It is easy to make your applications sharable by adding the Share menu (tutorials).
Here is an example of a sharable application with the Share menu.
You can share your applications to over 70 destinations including Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, mobile devices and the desktop. A complete list of the supported destinations is available here. Note that you will have to create native versions of your applications on mobile platforms where Flash is not supported.
3. Manage the application
Approximately 15 minutes after you've loaded the Share menu during your application testing, the application will appear in the Distribution Manager. Once your application appears in the Distribution Manager, there are 3 main activities you can perform (tutorials):
a. View the analytics
b. Earn money with your application by opting in to host cross-promotions
c. Assure installs for your application creating a new campaign
Here is a screenshot of the Distribution Manager with some analytics:
Who should use the Distribution service?
The Distribution service is broad enough to be used by anyone who is creating applications targeted towards social and mobile users. Advertisers, publishers and game developers will find the Distribution service particularly attractive.
Advertisers
Advertisers can use the Distribution service as part of an effective, predictable and scalable social media and mobile campaign. Advertisers are finding that branded applications are the most effective ad-unit on social media sites.These applications blend interesting content with an advertising message.
The Distribution service lets advertisers make their branded applications sharable on social, mobile, and desktop destinations. When users on social sites embed them on their pages, they are implicitly endorsing the brand to their friends. Their friends can then take this application and place it on their own pages or send it to their mobile devices. In addition to getting distribution through "earned media," advertisers can use paid promotions to get guaranteed installs for their applications within the specified timeframe. Advertisers also get persistent real-estate on the user's page and can push new messages. The Distribution service collects analytics data that advertisers can use to measure the success of their campaign.
Publishers
With the growth of social media, online publishers have to find ways to go beyond their own web destinations to reach their audience on social networking sites and mobile devices. Publishers are increasingly letting consumers take pieces of their content to their social pages or mobile devices. An effective way of syndicating content is to build widgets and applications.
The Distribution service lets publishers syndicate their applications to more than 70 destinations, including Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, desktops, and mobile devices. Once a consumer has installed an application on his or her social page or mobile device, the publisher can push new content to the consumer.
These applications often help publishers indirectly monetize the content by driving users back to the main website. To help publishers directly monetize their sharable content, the Distribution service has built in ad hosting. By turning on ad hosting, publishers can make money with their applications.
Game developers
Game developers often distribute their games by listing them on game portals. This approach is effective but can miss the opportunity to get games to users via social networks and on mobile devices.
Game developers can use the Distribution service to make their games sharable distribute them on social media sites, mobile devices, and desktops. The Distribution service also provides ad hosting, which enables game developers to make more money. This ad hosting does not conflict with other advertising in the game, so game developers do not have to remove existing advertising. Finally, game developers can track distribution and engagement and use the data to improve the engagement and viral lift of the game.
The Adobe Developer Connection is excited to announce that the brand new Adobe Cookbooks application is now live! This uber Adobe Cookbook application replaces the individual, product-specific cookbook applications that we previously had in place for Flex, AIR and Mobile. The new application will still support those technologies, in addition to a dozen or so additional technologies, all within a single application. For those new to the cookbook applications, they are a searchable repository for community-generated code samples.
You can read more about the new application in this Logged In article on the Adobe Developer Connection.
The new application has an updated design in addition to several new features:
Many more products/technologies supported
Improved navigation and search
Recipe requests - for developers who can't find the code sample they are looking for
Related recipes - that appear in a side bar of all recipe pages
Cookbook Explorer - a visual display of top cookbook recipes and contributors
New contributor recognition features - profile pics, links to blogs, links to community profiles
Community participation is the backbone of the cookbook application, so whether you are coming to contribute, request or locate a recipe, or comment on and rate existing content, your participation in this community application is greatly appreciated. Contributors should be sure to have their Adobe.com community profiles filled out before publishing any recipes as that is where the application will pull in a lot of the author recognition features. To fill out your community profile, login here and click "View your profile."
We will be updating the Adobe Cookbook after the initial launch with new features and new functionality. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so after you check out the new Cookbook, please feel free post your comments and suggestions in our Cookbook Feedback Forum.
Additionally, be sure to watch this blog going forward as this is where we will be announcing Cookbook contests and promotions from time to time.
I am excited to announce that the Flash Platform has added services to its collection - Adobe Flash Platform Services. Adobe Flash Platform services are online, hosted services that allow developers to add innovative capabilities to applications with a predictable, cost efficient deployment model.
The first three services that are being delivered are Distribution, Collaboration and Social (coming soon).
Here are brief descriptions of each of the services: Distribution: Distribute, promote, track, and monetize applications on social networks, mobile devices, and desktops. Collaboration: Enhance applications with real-time collaboration features, including chat, audio, and video. Social: Enable applications to integrate with leading social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
In the next few weeks, I will describe the services in greater detail and show how customers are using them.
Flex developers often use a combination of tools as part of their workflow, and Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta takes that into account. Follow Tim Buntel’s article to learn how well Flash Builder 4 can play with four other Adobe products in both data-centric and design-centric phases of a project: Adobe ColdFusion Builder beta, Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 beta, Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, and Adobe Flash Catalyst beta. Then move on to Elad Elrom's article on how to use Pixel Bender with Flash Builder 4 beta as a number crunching engine.
Augmented reality (AR) made a big splash this year when GE's Smart Grid reached mass-market appeal. Experienced Flash developers can dig into Samuel Asher Rivello's AR project, which overlays a 3D model of the Eiffel Tower onto a 2D marker using FLARToolkit code libraries and a webcam. For those just getting up to speed with Flash CS4 Professional, check out Dan Carr's five short presentations to learn about working with timelines, symbols, instances, buttons, Motion Editor, and ActionScript 3 in Flash. Finally, check out Paul Robertson's new QuickStart on understanding the benefits of using the Vector class in ActionScript 3.
Web video producers might want to explore Lisa Larson-Kelley's updated web video player template, which makes it easy to publish multiple videos on the same web page without authoring a new SWF for each one. Also use Jens Loeffler's live dynamic streaming and digital video recording sample app to set up a dynamic streaming environment without any coding.
There are a number of places people in interested in Flash Platform technologies can go to find events that Adobe is sponsoring and/or speaking at. But finding one place for designers and developers to go to find these events hasn't been easy. Until now.
We've pulled together a Google calendar of Flash Platform events for everyone to use. We hope you like it.
Feel free to subscribe to the calendar, or embed it on your blog, user group site, or anywhere you think others may be interested. To do so, you can go to the calendar's settings, and copy and paste the calendar's html embed code.
You can also subscribe in a number of ways including:
- via XML
-via iCal
We'll be adding and updating events all the time. Note that we may not be able to list every single event that covers Flash Platform technologies, but we'll certainly try to. Our basic guidelines are that Adobe needs to be sponsoring the event or someone who is an Adobe staffer needs to be speaking. And the emphasis is on Flash Platform technologies.
Enjoy. If you have any feedback, suggestions, etc, please comment away...
The New and Improved Adobe TV has been launched this week. Main improvements are in navigation, search, sharing & customization options, tagging and more. It is the first website in the world to deploy a video player built with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (a.k.a Strobe), and one of the first sites built using Adobe ColdFusion 9.
Highlighted features include:
User-customizable homepage
Vastly improved navigation & search
Save your favorite episodes to “My Library”
Share videos on social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, and StumbleUpon
Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite shows
Pop-out video player to view videos at any size
Commenting & Rating
Tags
Now you can easily find video content on your favorite product by rating, by popularity, and by how recently it was posted. Watch an recent episode on the Adobe Flash Platform. See more at tv.adobe.com.
The initial release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) includes an earlier version of Adobe Flash Player than what is available from Adobe.com. We recommend all users update to the latest, most secure version of Flash Player (10.0.32.18) -- which supports Snow Leopard and is available for download from http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.
We have planned a series of free Flash Platform online seminars in September for Adobe AIR and Flex developers. Below is a list of topics and schedule. Hope you can join us. Discover the benefits of the Flash Platform for developing contextual applications for multiple devices, building rich enterprise applications quickly, and distributing and tracking your social applications. Learn about upcoming beta releases from Adobe. Register today!
Contextual Applications: Building Rich Internet Applications that Leverage Multiple Devices
Thursday, September 10, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific
Adobe Flex for the Enterprise (LiveCycle)
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific
Flash Builder for Java Developers
Thursday, September 17, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific
Achieving Success with Social Applications
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific
Are you a baseball fan? Major League Baseball today released MLB.com OnBase, a new AIR application that helps fans to stay informed about games, news and tweets on their favorite baseball teams and players right from their computer desktop. It's another great example of using Adobe AIR to keep your audience engaged online and offline. With MLB.com OnBase, it's easy to know when exciting events are taking place, or when there is high-level of activity around a player, team, or topic.
I recently read a published paper "The Best Practices in Online Video Across Industries" from Forrester by Bobby Tulsiani and thought that it would be useful to share some basic dos and don'ts from the article. I'd like to invite you to share your best practices with us as well.
The Dos:
Enhance the ease of playback by providing a simple and frictionless playback experience
Highlight the information being presented by providing a thumbnail preview and the total running time which could earn user trust and increase clickthrough rates
Provide users more control to enhance user's interactive experience
The Don'ts:
Don't isolate the videos without context
Avoid obtrusive experiences such as automatically start playing without any warning
Avoid barricaded experiences such as requiring users to download new software, register, or sign in before viewing a video, especially for videos with ads
Have any burning questions about Adobe Flash Platform or Flex? Get them ready. Chat live with Lee Brimelow today, August 25, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The chat will be happening on the wall at http://www.facebook.com/adobeflex.
As an Adobe Flash Platform developer, you're probably frequently integrating video and sound into your projects. In this issue we have new sample projects on using Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash to work with media.
For those of you gearing up for the next release of Flex, check out Tim Buntel's article, Five great new features in Flash Builder 4 beta. Meanwhile, Flex developers who are interested in mapping should not miss Matt Sheehan's article. It teaches you how to build a basic interactive map with zoom and pan functionality, and then extend the application to include multiple providers and markers.
On Monday, August 17 at noon PT, I will be a guest on “Tomorrow Will Be Televised,” and encourage you to tune in. The show will be an interesting one, focused on the interactive TV movement, and Cisco’s director of product marketing for its Service Provider Video Technology Group (SPVTG), JT Taylor, will be interviewed alongside me. The progress we are making with the Open Screen Project will be a major focus of the discussion, as Cisco is a participant of the Open Screen Project.
Following our 30 minute interview, live questions will be opened up to the audience, so feel free to call in via the number provided on the show. You can listen to the interview live on Monday at noon at www.blogtalkradio.com, but you’ll need to register for the site first by clicking register. If you miss it, you can download or play the interview beginning at 2pm at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/simonapple04. Hope you can join us and submit questions.
Adobe Wave lets users opt-in to the content they care about, such as updates from MySpace or new stories hitting the Digg homepage. Publishers can use Adobe Wave to stay in touch with their user community by sending notifications that show up as alerts on the desktop.
Adobe Wave is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications for web publishers, large and small. It helps you stay connected to your community and lets users avoid the email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update messages.
If you're a user, check out the Labs page and install Adobe Wave. We'd love to hear what you think. If you're a publisher or developer, you can find out more about setting up your own feed on the Adobe Wave developer page.
A new tutorial video, featuring Duane Nickull, has just been released by Adobe Developer Connection on Adobe TV. This 7-minute step-by-step tutorial will show you how to quickly set up web services, specifically SOAP-WSDL in Flex Builder. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Even though there are some signs of economic recovery, the job market continues to get worse. With the offer of free Flex Builder 3, we'd like to make it easier for unemployed developers to add Flex skills to their skill set, which even now remains in high demand. For details and to apply for the program, please visit https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/
The beta version of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 delivers many new features and improvements. One particularly exciting feature is a new technology, code named Fiber, which enables Flex developers to use a model-driven development approach for faster and easier data-driven application development. With Fiber, data management is implicitly supported and does not require developers to create custom assemblers or employ complicated LiveCycle Data Services specific configurations. And as part of Flash Builder 4 beta, Flex developers can easily create a fiber Model to simplify development and enhance productivity of data-driven Flex applications.
Flex developers: Secure your applications with the Flexible Chimp project and Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Ryan Knight and Jon Rose show you how in their article, Enterprise security for Flex.
If you want to learn more about ActionScript programming in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, you'll want to watch Doug Winnie’s recent ActionScript video tutorials. In these videos, Doug teaches designers how to code interaction and animation, as well as basic programming concepts. Also be sure to check out the Components Learning Guide for Flash CS4 It will help you reduce your development time and effort by using building blocks for creating rich interactive applications on the web.
For the more advanced crowd, ActionScript expert Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript Weekend turns a fireside chat with friends into a series of real-world lessons about ActionScript 3.
Every year, we celebrate creative and forward-thinking uses of Adobe software with the MAX Awards at the annual Adobe MAX user conference. This year, Adobe MAX Awards feature new categories, industry judges and dynamic online voting. Specifically we are interested to see more innovative project submissions for Social Computing and Mobile, which are the two of the fastest growing sectors in the industry.
New to this year, we have increased awards to eight categories: Advertising & Branding, Education, Enterprise Productivity, Entertainment, Mobile, Public Sector, Social Computing, and Social Responsibility. Category winners will also be chosen online via people’s choice voting. Online voting will open September 21st and close during MAX Los Angeles. The three finalists in each category will be invited to attend MAX North America in Los Angeles, where the category winners will be announced live. All finalists will receive complimentary admission to MAX.
We are excited about the progress we are making along with Nokia with the Open Screen Project Fund (OSP Fund). The Fund as you may know is a 2 year long, $10M market development channel to fuel development of a wide variety of multi screen applications using Adobe Flash.
Since the Fund launched in February, Adobe and Nokia have funded over 20 projects that make an interesting mix of multi screen apps and some really cool mobile apps.
Some of the apps we've funded are:
1. LiveTalkBack: This is a real-time audience voting system to collect feedback from mobile devices, web based widgets and the desktop - all using the Flash Platform. The application is soon going to be tested at large Media and Broadcast conferences in Europe and North America and we are excited about the progress the developer is making.
2. uvLayer: Think of this as a minority report-"ish" interface to manage all your favorite online media and share it with friends and contacts across different IM and social networks. Unknown Vector, the company behind uvLayer, had already built the AIR based desktop version of their web based service (www.uvlayer.com). The OSP Fund came in to fund the mobile version of the product to extend the experience to devices on the go.
3. GolfBox: This is a mobile app that allows golfers to book tee times, invite friends to play, read golf related news. It is being built by a team from Little Big Ideas, an interactive agency out of Denmark that has done many pioneering mobile projects in the past with Flash.
4. Mileblaster.com: A great utility application for frequent travelers that tracks frequent flyer miles and award goals, finds mile offers, and sends alerts when miles are about to expire. From the get go this application was built as a Flash widget for the web and has been funded to complete production of not just the web version but also a mobile and desktop version of the very same experience. This will allow users of the service to stay on top of their miles and awards from any Flash supporting device.
These are just some of the apps and information about them and others in now available here. We continue to seek more such interesting utility and media based experiences and are also specifically on the lookout for multi-device games built in Flash. There are already thousands of awesome Flash based online games. We are looking to developers to extend those experiences to more devices to let gamers take game play with them no matter where they go.
If you would like to apply for funding or simply learn more about the OSP Fund I would encourage you to Click here.
For our inaugural Flash Platform blog posting I want to begin with some important news. The Flash Player penetration statistics have just recently been updated and Flash Player 10 is now installed on 86.7% of Internet-connected desktop computers in mature markets, which is the fastest the Web has ever adopted new innovation.
Since the first release of the Flash Player, Flash has been a leading source of innovation for the Web. From salesforce.com to facebook, from Nike to picnik, from Google to The New York Times our users are constantly finding a new ways to use Flash to make the Web better. That is why Flash has become the most popular way to deliver applications, video and interactive content on the Web.
It's gotten to be such a big tent, that it's hard to find a single place that covers the highlights across the full range of Flash Platform tools, technologies, partners, and communities. This blog should help with that -- as we find out about important news related to Flash, we'll post it here.
Today Adobe announced two exciting new Flash Platform open source initiatives that will help media companies and publishers reinvent themselves and jumpstart innovation on the Web. Specifically, we have released as open source the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), previously part of the "Strobe" project, and the Text Layout Framework (TLF). Both are now freely available under the Mozilla Public License as part of our broader strategy called Open@Adobe, which Dave McAllister describes below.
OSMF gives developers standard video player functionality, like playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming, including an API that partners can use to drop in plug-ins to add advertising and reporting features. The flexible OSMF framework embodies best practices for media player development, allowing the developer more time to focus on the overall user experience. With OSMF, content publishers can build advanced and feature rich media players, along the lines of what Hulu has created or CBS TV player, with much less work than it takes today. It is now available for free at www.opensourcemediaframework.com
TLF is an extensible ActionScript library that runs on the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Leveraging the publishing expertise of the Adobe InDesign team, TLF offers a level of typographic control and sophistication that goes well beyond what can be done with HTML and CSS.
TLF is being used today in The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe's GlobeReader Adobe AIR applications, and represent an excellent use of TLF's reflowing text, multiple columns, and top notch typography features. The new text layout features in AIR are enabling the New York Times and Boston Globe to create an experience like the real paper and opening up new types of apps and subscription models.
makebook has built a community content creation, collaboration and collection platform that makes extensive use of TLF, BlazeDS for remoting to a Java backend, the Flex framework for the frontend, and other open source technologies. With this online authoring network, makebook users can create content and write stories using advanced text capabilities, add multimedia content, and publish content to a library or share content with friends--all within the browser. Subscriptions are available for collaboration and co-authoring.
Adobe is also practicing what we preach by using TLF for all text objects in the new Acrobat.com Presentations service that provides a great way for people to collaboratively create and share presentations.
I look forward to seeing the next generation of Web applications that the OSMF and TLF projects will enable.
As part of our weekly content launches in the Adobe Developer Connection, we’ve recently published some new articles for Flash Platform developers.
The new skinning architecture in Flex 4 beta makes it easy to completely change the look and feel of an application. Follow Ryan Frishberg to learn about the new improvements by writing a basic skin for a button and then delving into skinnable components. Building on what you’ve learned there, Evtim Georgiev addresses a number of pain points in skinning, CSS, components, states, animation, text, and graphics tags. He also shows you how to create a custom layout in his article, Spark layouts with Flex 4 beta. Meanwhile, read Tim Buntel's article to learn how a brand new approach in Flash Builder beta can simplify the development of data-centric applications.
I am really excited about the FITC San Francisco Flash conference, coming up in about a month. First, it is a FITC conference which means all of the top Flash designers and developers in the world will be speaking and... »
Właśnie dostałem link do świetnego bloga w języku polskim na temat Flex’a i AIR’a. Adres tak jak w tytule flexair.pl. Polecam wszystkim szczególnie tym zaczynającym swoją przygodę z Flex’em. Dodatkowo powiem, że bloga redaguje dziewczyna Olga Grabek co w naszej... »
by Duane.Nickull@gmail.com (Duane "Chaos" Nickull)
I got an email from Dave McAllister I want to post here. It really makes me proud that we are moving in this direction. It was also written up here."Today, we formally launched phase 1 of open@adobe, our new portal... »
Here is the second episode of the Flash Builder’s Lost Features show. This time I chose to talk about Flash Builder’s profiler and give you enough info to feel comfortable using it if you haven’t already used. Profiler helps... »
Today I published a microsite (http://amf.riaspace.com/) on my blog dedicated to AMF communication. The goal of it is to gather necessary information needed for quick start with AMF. You will find there: Publicly available AMF services for the start without setting up... »
This summer you have many contests to pick up from if you want to create Flash content for mobile (Android 2.2) and win something while doing it. You can win fame/money/software/mobile devices not neccesary in this order and not... »
Object Replication Object Replication is the most low-level P2P access available in Flash Player 10.1 (next to Multicast, Posting and Directed Routing) It basically enables you to send chunks of between peers. Object Replication is the only one, that guarantees... »
I have finally released the source code for my PewPew game. PewPew is a game I started working on over a year ago to help me understand what optimizations would be required to convert a web based Flash game to... »
Chris Scott (author of Swiz Framework) visited Prague and while here, he did a very nice presentation about Swiz at Adobe User Group Meeting. We were lucky to have him here and before his UG session, we did a little... »
I am so looking forward to this trip! I’ve been lucky enough to be able to visit Tokyo a few times in the past and it really is one of my favorite cities in the world. On this trip I’ll... »
Distributing and Monetizing Adobe AIR AppsOn July 21, learn what Adobe and Intel are doing to help you distribute and monetize your AIR applications by understanding the business opportunities and discovering how you can take advantage of the service... »
This hits two of my favorite things; Flex applications and in-browser RIAs. Picnik, the Seattle-based startup that was purchased by Google a little while ago built one of the coolest photo editing applications on the web and were very... »
The official Flex team blog reminded me that Effortless Flex 4 Development is now available. It’s the perfect book for Flex and PHP developers and I got an inside look at it as I did the tech-reviewing for it.... »
4
