Archive for April, 2010
Device Central CS5 – Accelerometer Emulation
Posted by Mark Doherty in Android, Flash Player on April 15, 2010
Many devices now come with Accelerometer, in fact back in late 2007 it was “discovered” that the Nokia N95 had one that wasn’t exposed through an API. Nokia were in fact using the chip to create better images from the camera by removing the dreaded shakes, and even today it’s one of the best devices for taking pictures and video.
Lately we’ve seen these chips used to rotate the UI or to provide interesting models for user interaction through gestures like shaking. So we thought it timely to introduce the flash.sensors.Accelerometer API into Flash Player 10.1 and AIR. With the new API you can create games and applications that make use of the API consistently across device platforms.
In Device Central CS5 we have also added a new feature to help with the testing of applications and content using this API. The team tell me that this new feature is actually using Flash Player embedded in the panel!
The video below covers this new feature, including the APIs, testing and deployment with Device Central, as well as a demo on the Google Nexus One.
Device Central CS5 – Multitouch and Debugger
Posted by Mark Doherty in Flash Player on April 14, 2010
Of course one of the most long standing and important pieces of integration for Mobile and Devices has been with Flash Professional CS5. The new version of Flash Professional is what I would call “back on track” after a major gutting, while still adding new features to support mobile and devices.
One of the nicest new additions is the code snippets panel to help you transition from Actionscript 2, as well as a new FLA format based on XML that will help with source control. Changing the file format is never taken lightly, but I’ve received so much great feedback already for this feature.
In the following video I’m going to walk through the new Multitouch APIs briefly and look at debugging applications between Device Central and Flash Professional. For some of you that don’t know, with Flash Lite we’ve been without debugger support for five years. This is like a miracle!
With AIR on Android available later in the year it’s a perfect time to prototype some AIR applications. You might also begin testing your Flash Player 10.1 content for different browsers using the various instrumentation tools provided; some of which I’ll cover in the next videos.
As with all mobile development it’s much more exciting once you get started!
Thanks to Maso Lin for getting involved in the Pre-release and providing such a nice looking demo.
Straight from Engineering: Tinic Uro
Posted by Mark Doherty in Flash Player on April 14, 2010
I wanted to drive your attention towards Serge’s recent post about 6 lesser known features of Flash Player 10.1. As Serge points out, one of our Flash Player engineers Tinic Uro is also a keen blogger with some detailed articles on performance, porting and certain compromises that we have made.
The most important articles are as follows:
Timing is Right
Tinic discusses the process of changing the Timer mechanism for Flash Player 10.1, the development of which is now in the beta release candidate. With this new solution it will be possible to save power and reduce the CPU load for non-visible content.
Press Any Key To Continue
An article about screensaver timeouts and SWF throttling for non-visible content. This means that Flash content running in background tabs or browser windows will use much less resources, and as such things should become more stable over time.
Following Tinic’s advice I have now downloaded the Webkit nightly build and frankly it just works, I can’t wait to see this implemented elsewhere over time.
Core Animation
A post that discusses the move for Flash Player 10.1 to use the Cocoa porting layer with a Carbon fallback to accommodate Opera and Firefox browsers. This should give you some idea as to why Mac performance isn’t what it could be.
Hopefully that will have given you some background and got you thinking about the Flash Player engineering process.
You can download the components discussed here.
Device Central CS5 – Dreamweaver Integration
Posted by Mark Doherty in Creative Suite 5, Device Central Updates on April 14, 2010
Device Central CS5 represents a huge leap forward for mobile development. It’s going to take some time to get around the key features, and so I have decided to break it down into a few video posts starting with Dreamweaver.
Flash Player 10.1 in the context of mobile devices will require some basic changes to ensure that the user experience is maintained for your new audience. The first step is to get some basic device detection working, and I don’t mean every device; focus on your key visitors. A rule of thumb in mobile is that 20% of the top devices will give you 80% of the audience, we call that relevant reach.
Luckily with the integration of Flash Player 10.1, webkit and Dreamweaver integration, creating mobile web sites for your Flash applications couldn’t be simpler.
Why not have a play around:
Packager for iPhone
Posted by Mark Doherty in Flash Player on April 12, 2010
As many of you know, the new version of Flash Professional CS5 will ship with a toolchain called “Packager for iPhone“. The tool is created to enable you to produce AIR applications that run on the iPhone, and within the terms that Apple laid out for v3 of their OS.
With the announcement of iPhone OS 4, it has become clear that Apple are changing these rules and are denying our joint customers the right to use their tools of choice like AIR, Unity, Ansca and OpenPlug technologies. Of course this was a surprise, and a disappointment, to everyone and clearly we’re seeing a major revolt against these new terms.
<Personal Opinion>
I believe that we have witnessed a deliberate smear campaign against Flash to drive content providers towards improved web browsing support for iPhone OS devices. A purely competitive measure driven to ensure that Apple devices can appear to compete with impending releases of Android that include Flash Player 10.1.
</Personal Opinion>
At least the terms can still change, but I remind Apple of this:
We’ve made the choice to ship the Packager for iPhone with Flash Professional CS5 because we believe that our joint customers can create great iPhone applications using it.
I hope you enjoy the new tool.