Last Friday an unsuspecting Fedex delivery arrived with a Xoom tablet, the first Android 3.0 device from Motorola.  Terry Ryan, a fellow Evangelist at Adobe and I will be going on tour with Motorola starting next week joining the MOTODEV App Summit tour.

We’ll be traveling to some of our favourite cities and helping attendees to get started with Adobe technology for Motorola devices.  I know that Terry and I are going to cover a number of different topics including, Flash, AIR, Flex and Livecycle Collaboration Services.  I’m also planning on showing some new Digital Home applications, hopefully to get you thinking about how tablets like the Xoom are being used in the home.

I hope you to see some of you around on the tour and I know Terry and I are very much looking forward to it.  Here are some of the key dates and I’ll be presenting and attending all of those in red:

• April 11th – Berlin, Germany
• April 15th – London, UK
• April 26th – Beijing, China
• April 29th – Shanghai, China
• May 2nd – Seoul, Korea
• TBD – Sao Paulo, Brasil
• TBD – Buenos Aires, Argentina
• May 25th – Mexico City, Mexico

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This year I’ll be missing Adobe MAX in person, heading to Ireland tomorrow for a family wedding, so it has been an interesting experience to watch from afar.  I guess the most obvious thing to point out is that “I can” – that is, watch it from afar.

The keynote this year is being approached differently, it’s all about solutions.  You’ll notice that ‘devices’ don’t have a predictable section of their own, instead they are presented together across a set of five innovation vectors, Web Development, Video, Digital Publishing, Enterprise Applications, and Gaming.  The dynamic has shifted from technologies to solutions, as presented by Kevin Lynch and guests Martha Stewart, Mark Goldberg of EPIX, Joe Simon of Condé Nast, Mike Lazaridis of RIM and David Nuescheler of Day Software (soon to be an Adobe company).

The conference this year is powered by Akamai and distributed using Flash Player to desktop computers, mobile phones and tablets and all major browsers.  In addition, this years MAX is also streamed using Peer-2-Peer technology, found in Flash Player 10.1 – which is now available on 74% of desktop computers and just 3 months after launch.

These changes sum up our ongoing strategy to enable the creation of applications that are fit for purpose, expressive and multi-screen.  As part of this we re-organized our teams at Adobe, folding the Flash Platform business unit into the Creative Suite Business Unit.  Together our new group is called CIBU – Creative & Interactive Solutions.

Web Development

Earlier in the year at Google IO we showed a new HTML5 extension for Dreamweaver CS5, created to enable the production of web properties across screens.  Within this new HTML5 pack we have added support for CSS3 and media-queries that allow your web pages to be easily transposed to different screen sizes.  Simply run the Adobe Updater to get started.

Kevin also showed a new prototype, codename “Edge” that is effectively Flash Catalyst for HTML and uses the popular JQuery JavaScript library.  Using Edge you will be able to create HTML5 applications and sites with animations and media, drastically shortening the development time for web properties, widgets, and not to forget, great prototypes that run across screens.  I can’t wait to start creating AIR applications and mobile websites with Edge, it’s going to be huge.

Finally, with our recent acquisition of Omniture we also showed NetAverages, an amazing product that forms part of the suite of applications including analytics, optimizations, conversion and acquisition tools.  With NetAverages you can now gain access to a wealth of data around HTML5 support, devices, platforms and various technologies – all of which is presented in a stunning Flex interface.  Statistic are gleaned anonymously from a large range of the worlds most popular websites.

Digital Publishing

This year we’ve seen the introduction of the Tablet form factor, which is a great leap forward for the publishing industry – enabling a new distribution and monetization model for the publishing industry.  As part of this great work we’re going to ramp up our contributions to webkit, delivering improvement in layout control – including precision text wrapping around shape/images and enhancements for dynamic rendering of content for different form factors.

Today, almost all major publishing houses use Adobe InDesign to create their print pieces and deliver these to consumers at news stands.  So it makes a lot of sense for this workflow to be enhanced to encompass the packaging and delivery of Digital Publications.  We’re calling this solution the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, a set of tools, deployment and SiteCatalyst reporting services that make it incredibly easy to target these new devices in a sustainable way.

Publishers create “stacks”, which are essentially articles/pages/ads in InDesign CS5 in portrait/landscape/both and publish these individually.  Each stack can include interactive elements, buttons, links, scrollable frames and slideshows to enable rich experiences and drive innovation in their digital pieces.  In addition, you can also use the Interactive Overlay Creator to produce 360° views, panoramas, image pans, audio, video, and web views.  Web view is very similar to StageWebView, described in my previous blog posts

Video and audio are added very easily and use the H.264 format in addition to standard mp3 formats.  You can integrate audio as part of the experience, maybe clicking sounds or swoosh effects – although I hope you can be more imaginative!  Each interactive element has associated parameters to enable you to control the interaction for the user, such as looped slideshows, handling swipe events, fading, hightlights, transition timing and delays.

Finally, you can use the Adobe Digital Content Bundler to take the stacks and create an issue of your publication by simply adding each of the publication content folders and stacks.  Publications can then be viewed in a generic viewer application and later deployed in a custom viewer for each publication.

From a publishers perspective, managing the technologies, deployments and interactions is pivotal to success in this new multi-screen world.  With the Digital Publishing Suite, content creators can spend more time driving their content and brand – instead of worrying about the ever increasing costs of reaching their users across devices.

Enterprise Applications

For the Enterprise we are now focused on “Customer Experience Management”, a new set of solutions that are targeted directly to enhancing the productivity and experiences for our largest customers.

At MAX we announced the availability of Flex 4.5 “Hero”, the latest version of Flex that has been highly optimized to enable the creation of mobile applications for Android, Blackberry and of course desktop computers.  This new framework includes additional mobile components and skins to speed up the production of multi-screen apps and deliver new experiences on devices.

Flash Builder Burrito / Flash Catalyst Panini

Attendees received a DVD with a new version of Flash Builder, with some amazing new features for creating mobile applications.  These include device debugging for Android (inc. USB support), integrated Android SDK tools and simulation for a host of supported devices.  Flash Builder Burrito ships with Flex 4.5 embedded and you can download the trial here.  Among the many new features are improved coding features, performance improvements and much improved support for working with Flash Catalyst Panini.

The Catalyst team have also been hard at work improving the workflows for designers and developers using Flex.  With “Panini”, the team have focused on delivering the first steps towards full round tripping between Photoshop and Illustrator and Burrito.  The results are looking great, enabling resizable applications and components, custom skins, code generation improvements and improvements for animation control and styles.  You can download the trial of Panini here.

Day Software

Earlier this year we announced that we are to acquire Day Software, a Swiss company with offices in Boston.  Day are a global leader in content management with customers like Audi, Nissan, Volkswagen, MTV, Virgin Media and McDonalds.  David Nuescheler was on hand to show CQ5, an amazing solution for managing content in multiple languages and for multiple screens.  Customers can simply drag and drop assets and pages, type content directly into the pages and leverage approval and localization workflows directly from the tooling.  I can’t wait to see more of our new EMEA team

Video

Flash is now enabling the playback of 120 Billion megabytes of video every month, an astounding number that presents huge challenges for the Flash Player team.  Today Flash supports numerous formats, resolutions and audio codecs being mixed together and delivered using DRM, encrypted streams, the open RTMP and it’s variants.  In the latest player we also support playback over HTTP and RTMFP for P2P distribution of large events, thus driving the industry forward.

So what’s so big about video on a TV?  – Well, what we actually showed is DRM protected and encrypted video running across the internet in HD format to a television.  We’ve all sat at home watching video on our computers with 30″+ televisions in front of us, it’s just annoying.  Today we showed that EPIX can leverage the Omniture analytics suite and industry approved Token based DRM (Flash Access) to present high-value content from the studios directly into the home.  This signifies an industry change, for the first time you can deliver video across screens, whilst protecting it, measuring it, and enabling users to gain access to a full web of video currently missing from the living room.

At MAX we announced two things, Flash and AIR for TV and a new way to display video – StageVideo.  StageVideo enables the use of hardware decoders, much like VLC does today, and this results in huge improvements in the CPU usage – but with limitations.

The API enables video to playback on a graphics plane, delivered straight to hardware, as opposed to being pipelined back into the Flash Player.  Because of this, videos rendered with this API cannot support transparency and objects will not render behind the video.  Flash content, such as overlays for video controls are rendered on top of the video in a separate graphics plane.  In fact, on TV this will be the defacto rendering method and all video objects will render this way.

Moving forward, all devices using the Flash runtime will have access to this new API set.  The Blackberry Playbook is the first tablet to implement this support to deliver an incredible video experience on their hardware, demonstrated for the first time at Adobe MAX.

AIR applications can now be built for TV using AIR2.5, the applications runtime deployed for Android and desktop platforms.  These applications are typically video based, although we do see some great opportunities for gaming and social connectivity moving forward.

Flash Player and AIR on TV are supported on Samsung TVs and Blueray Players, Google TV and BBC Youview hardware.

Gaming

The most exciting piece from the keynote today was probably the advancements in gaming and 3D support planned for an upcoming Flash Player release.  On the top of the tick list is game controller support, the ability to simply plugin your USB joypad or steering wheel and start playing games!  I’m so excited about it

Needless to say, gaming on the web is set for a omplete overhaul, with 3D capabilities that use leverage GPU hardware and rendering millions of triangles per second.  What’s more incredible is that the demo below uses 0% CPU, and if our current stats hold true, we can get this out to 3/4 of the online world in three months after launch.

Check it out…

The tools covered will include Flash Builder, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, Flex 4 and the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 runtimes. In my own session we’ll also be covering Device Central and some asset optimization guidelines for targeting mobile phones.

We’ll also look at P2P with Flash Player 10.1 as well as Livecycle, PHP and Java integration on the backend.

Schedule:

June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn
Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

We’ve been busy for the past week building “EVA” to demonstrate all of the above.  I think you’ll be really impressed with it and of course we’ll be providing the code after for you to use in your own applications.

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The Mobile World Congress is a massive event with some 50,000 attendees from around the world. Each year there are around 50 Adobe employees from across the organization in attendance, including all the key members of the platform team at Adobe.

This year we’ve managed to delay a few flights and tweak some schedules to create a fantastic line up for the Spanish Mobile and Devices User Group event “DeviceDays”. Raul, Marcos and myself will be joined by Richard Galvan, Product Manager for Flash Professional, Enrique Duvos who leads Evangelism in EMEA.

I’m also really excited to tell you that some of our Open Screen Project partners, and advertising aggregation providers GreyStripe will attend as guests. You’ll get a chance to speak with them directly, and additionally GreyStripe will present on ad-funded applications.. really exciting!

This day long event will be ~70% in Spanish, so a great improvement from last year

Timing/location:

• Torre Mapfre – Avinguda Litoral, 08005 Barcelona, Spain
• 09.30am – 5.00pm 19th February
• Space for 100 attendees

Note: Passing security takes time, arrive 15-30 mins early.

Schedule:

• 09.30am Welcome intro from Marcos and Raul
• 10.00am Overview of Adobe’s announcements at Mobile World Congress
• 10.30am BREAK
• 11.30am Open Screen Project new and Fund update, demos of funded applications
• 12.30am Contextual Applications – best practices, optimizations and inspirational demos
• 14.00pm LUNCH
• 15.00pm Testing Flash based applications with Device Central 3
• 15.30pm Creating iPhone applications with Flash Professional Next
• 16.00pm BREAK
• 16.15pm Creating ad-supported iPhone Applications with GreyStripe
• 16.45pm Closing remarks from Marcos and Raul

The event website is here, so start registering.

CES 2010 in Las Vegas saw a very interesting device launch from UK based Light Blue Optics.  The great news is that they’ve received really positive press and comments from users that are eager to get their hands on the Light Touch.

So what is it?  Effectively it’s a projector for rich media, but it’s laser based which gives it the ability to project onto different surfaces while maintaining a sharp focus and bright colours.  LBO used the Flash Platform to provide a rich user interface engine for applications, games, photos and even H.264 video playback.  The device is also multi-touch enabled using infra-red, but employs an invisible grid projection onto the surface, which enables much more accurate and speedy response times.

As a user you can envisage a huge array of different use cases, maybe your calendar projected onto your desk, or video playing on your bedroom wall.  We saw a huge array of 3D TVs, ever larger, thinner and brighter televisions this year at CES.  Could the future require no screen at all?

Just think of the options for this kind of device in the auto-industry, gaming and entertainment.  The great news is that the device spec’s make it capable of running Flash Player 10.1 in the future, reaping the benefits of our consistent Open Screen Project runtime for all platforms.

Specs:

• Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 on WinCE 5
• ARM11 CPU @ 600Mhz
• 10-inch touchscreen with WVGA resolution
• Laser based pico projection
• Infrared multi-touch detection
• WiFi and Bluetooth radios
• 2GB of on-board storage (+ microSD)

Check it out in action:

Today our Open Screen Project partner RIM kicked off their annual Blackberry Developer Conference in San Francisco.  This year we’re seeing a central theme from the conference and that’s Blackberry as a web platform, and announced more details around the support that you can expect for the Blackberry platform within the upcoming tools in Creative Suite 5.

This year Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen was there to talk about our upcoming support in Creative Suite 5 for the Blackberry platform. This builds on the vision for our joint collaboration in the Open Screen Project and the work we’re doing to get Flash Player 10.1 running in the Blackberry browser.

Today RIM & Adobe also announced that we’ll be optimizing Adobe AIR and the Flex Mobile Framework for the Blackberry platform , making RIM the first OEM to announce support for Adobe AIR and Flex Mobile.

From developers the most obvious integration point will be in Adobe Device Central CS5, which enables the easy development and testing of content for Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Fireworks CS5.  These new tools aim to enable the production of content for use in Blackberry’s Java Plug-in for Eclipse, BlackBerryWidgets, and the BlackBerry Theme Studio tools.  In fact the new Theme Studio supports Flash and Photoshop files through its handy import mechanism, so you can easily create themes alongside SVG support in Illustrator.

Additionally, for consumers we’re also going to enable use of our Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.com products for sharing and editing videos and photos taken on Blackberry phones.

(The BlackBerry Bold runs a 624Mhz Marvell CPU)

So let’s have a look at Blackberry in more detail to give us an idea of where the opportunities are.  Recently we’ve seen the launch of Blackberry App World back in April, the addition of a new Widgets SDK, the Blackberry Theme Studio tools and of course the continued work on their Java platform for applications.  These strides toward a more open web platform have enabled users to access rich Internet content like never before, and as you’ll see below; they love content.

From an addressable market view, Blackberry devices are sold in vast numbers in the US market.  So let’s look at some key stats from Comscore on their behavior there,  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised:

• 14.2m devices
• 50/50 male and female audience
• 25-34 age range
• 43% earn over $100k
• 64.7% of RIM users are browsing the Web
• More than half a million are using dating services
• 15% are interested in Tech news
• 20% are accessing Maps (they travel more than most users)
• 14% are downloading games (triple the norm!), with card, casino and arcade prevalence
• 20% have changed their theme or wallpapers, 3x higher than normal
• 1/4 are using online media storage / facebook etc

So on average a Blackberry user earns, spends, travels and browses the Internet about 3x more than users of other platforms.  This makes them a high value target in your development of applications and services, and important customers for niche and business oriented content.  With the Blackberry App World growing steadily (200,000 developers) in partnership with Verizon I can see a clear opportunity there with their joint customers, and one really nice feature is the $2.99 minimum price for a paid application!

You can watch the Keynote recording here, and yes it’s done with Silverlight for some reason

Why not drop on over to www.adobe.com/go/blackberry to learn more and see some videos previewing the upcoming tooling integration announced today.

This September I’m going to travel to Toronto to present at the FITC conference.  It’s set to be an exciting show with all of the major mobile platforms being supported including Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Flash Lite, Blackberry, OpenGL ES and of course iPhone development.  There’s even going to be a session on SMS Applications, something that is probably a lot more interesting that you’d think!

Flash Sessions

• Martin Barclay & Robert Burdick from Nokia: Develop and Distribute for Nokia smartphones
• Scott Janousek: Practical Design and Development with Flash on Mobile Devices
• Scott Janousek: Leveraging Accelerometers on Mobile Devices
• Thomas Joos: Tips and Tricks for Flash Lite Optimization
• Weyert de Boer: Android for Flash Developers
• Mark Doherty: Flash Lite Distribution and the Open Screen Fund

So as you can see there are going to be a number of presentations on Flash topics.  In my session I’m going to probably break the rules and just sit and have a chat with everyone.  Distribution is a complex topic and one where many misunderstand where money is made.

On top of that I’ll also be showing off sneak peaks, so if you’re in the Toronto area and not coming to Adobe MAX then I suggest you start booking

Prices are very low at $209 and $89 for students.

This week Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen announced during our earnings call with investors that we will release a beta version of Flash Player 10 for smartphones. Predictably this will happen during Adobe MAX 2009, where mobile will be front and centre.

It will be a developer release and for web browsers, this will enable us to collect feedback, fix bugs and give you a chance to get started and speaking with your customers about this new technology.

So, like I said in my previous post during the slow summer season it’s a perfect opportunity to begin learning AS3 and Flash Player 10 features. I have already started learning more and more over the past few months, and the good news is that life is much much easier with AS3!

I’ve also began to learn Flex, which is such a great product and I can recommend these to get started:

Flex in a Week (very optimistic!)

gotoAndLearn from Lee

As we move through the summer you’ll start to hear more about my experiences as I find out new tips and tricks.

Today Pikkoo was announced in Beta form enabling a new form of social personalization for Flash content.  Pikkoo is a Finnish company based in Oulu (very cold) who focus on rich content production, by users and for users.

The Flash Player itself is used to produce rich wallpapers and screensavers within your desktop browser using a host of dynamic tools and images.  Of course you can roll your own and create highly personal content to share with your friends.

In the example below I’ve used a beautiful background image, a clock widget and a another clip of a snowboarder from this theme.  Themes allow you to produce your content using assets that are perfectly suited, so no more searching randomly.  Pikkoo has been designed to enable users to create the best possible looking content, with minimum design knowledge.  I can resize each of them movieclips, change their colour, animate them and group them when I want to use effects.

Personalization content using Flash Lite is rich and dynamic, so the clock and network signal widgets are live on my device.  Notice also that the stage here is 320×240 pixels because that’s the resolution of my device, making it easier that ever to produce relevant content.

Once I’m done I can create a simple thumbnail for the website, download the SWF as a screensaver or wallpaper to my computer.

Pikkoo also has aS60 3rd Edtion and 5th Edition Screensaver Manager to help me download, share and setup my screensavers.

Here are some screenshots, check out the stunning user interface created with Flash Lite.

One of the great features of this product is that Brands and Agencies can use the service to produce Themes, so that end users can create their own experiences using assets from their favourite brands.  You can imagine Disney and Nike being great candidates for user generated content created with Pikkoo.

So what are you waiting for?  Get over there and start creating!!

In this release we focused our efforts on created a cleaner installation, creation and signing workflow for the tool.  We received a lot of feedback regarding the difficulties in getting setup and producing your mobile applications, and I’m really excited to see those answered in this upcoming release.

Installation

Many users found it difficult to install the various SDKs and associated technologies to enable them to build SIS and CAB files.  This was due to a number of issues, for example the Microsoft CAB SDK ironically is distributed as a zip file.  In Mobile Packager 1.1 we have integrated this SDK completely so alleviate these difficulties.  To make the installation of the S60 SDK and Perl easier we have linked directly to those distributions, and we’ve provided a useful “Test Configuration” button to provide feedback on your setup.

Creating a Package

One of the great things about the Flash community is that many of you are great with interaction and design.  The Create Package workflow is a direct result of your input, it’s now easier than ever to create a package for S60 or Windows Mobile quickly.

You simply pick a platform from the selector, select and Main SWF and the fields shown below will pre-fill with your project data.  If it’s a new project then they will pre-fill with defaults based on the file name of the Main SWF, you can easily change the defaults.  Notice that you no longer have to create a self-signed certificate or specify UIDs until you’re ready to sign.

Symbian Signed Ready

One of the biggest concerns from developers is getting through the signing processes.  So in the new Mobile Packager 1.1 we focussed on simplifying the steps before you go through Symbian Express Signed.  This step is where you apply your developer certificate and assigned UID to your application.  We’ve also provided helpful links to help you get UIDs and these and your Publisher ID will be remembered for the lifetime of your project.

note:  Experienced developers will see that we don’t use CER and KEY files, but simply the Publisher ID, exactly the same as Adobe AIR signing.

I think this is huge help for productivity and for new developers who would find it impossible to create CER/KEY combinations.  Though as well as driving these new features I have been quietly working with the Symbian Foundation to streamline their workflow.  Those of you that have been through this will notice the changes, there are more to come later in the year that can only be described as game changing.

Preparing for SymbianSigned

Once the Packaging process has completed all you have to do is zip up the SIS file, pkg file and a Readme.txt.  You can simply rename the metadata file for that purpose since it holds all of the relevant information.

Finally you click on the SymbianSigned button on the Packager and you’ll go to their website for the final online signing steps.

As before our reigning packaging queen Liz Myers is hard at work producing video tutorials on our new workflow.  In these new tutorials we’ve focused on covering all the nasty (and boy were they nasty) unknowns like attaining Publisher certificates.  We’ll also have a really interesting video on icon production and design with Adobe Illustrator, and ideas for marketing your applications.

Like I said, it’ll be with us soon and 40,000 of you need to remember to update.