Archive for category Flash Lite
Distributable Player Beta ends
Posted by Mark Doherty in Distributable Player Solution, Flash Lite on November 17, 2009
As many of you heard in my recent e-seminar we have decided to stop work on the Distributable Player beta.
We didn’t take this decision lightly, and as many of you know this product has been my focus for a long time, so I’m a little sad to see it go. However in light of our new strategic direction here at Adobe, it is time to focus all of our attention on the goals of Open Screen Project, specifically with Flash Player 10.1.
The goals of the product were to:
- Enable the distribution of Flash Lite 3.1
- To open up opportunities for application distribution on S60/WM devices
- Provide a consistent platform for development as we work on Flash Player 10.1 and AIR
The solution was a success in many ways, we have had 135,000 downloads of the Mobile Packager to date. We learned a huge amount in building a complex tool and provided a footing for many of you to create mobile applications for the first time. My personal measure of success was that tens of thousands of developers and designers who were able to target mobile platforms for the first time, not to mention the great applications that were created.
Admittedly in some ways the product didn’t quite hit the mark, and we learned a lot from that. In fact the reasons that led us to create the Distributable Player now play a core part of the plan with our Open Screen Project partners. We are each playing a part to drive consistency, establish update mechanisms and enable wide distribution. Nokia has already established an OTA update mechanism for the Flash runtime, which is a great example of their commitment to the community.
Finally, some of you have asked for some guidance on applications that you had planned to launch. As you would expect we don’t intend to simply shut down the delivery mechanisms, so don’t panic.
What will happen to the product now:
- The server solution for device detection and player downloads will remain in place for 1 year (active until November 30, 2011).
- The Mobile Packager tool will be removed from Adobe Labs
- Our Labs pages and discussion Forum will be removed
- I will of course be working with some of you to enable your upcoming launches as planned
What Next?
Over the summer I have been learning all about Actionscript 3, creating my first AIR application with Flash Builder. My first application was to create a desktop interface for SWFPack.com , and a Mobile phone projector based on demofone.com for my presentations.
Additionally in the past few weeks I have also began work on my first iPhone application built with Flash Professional CS5. It’s an application that I hope we can all contribute to in time with video tutorials called “Flash Training for devices”. The first set of videos will come from Dale’s fantastic video series over on vimeo.com/adobeflashlite .
As we move through the quiet holiday period I would suggest investing in some AS3 books and training, or catching up on the Flash Player 10, Flex and AIR content available at tv.adobe.com . Investing your time now is a great way to ensure that you’re not left behind.
My best advice is the same that I follow myself:
- Set yourself achievable goals for learning this new language
- Create a sample project, one that you can get excited about and share
- Keep communicating your thoughts and experiences, we can all learn together
Here are some sneaks from my sample app to get you warmed up:
Adobe and RIM to simplify the delivery of rich content and applications
Posted by Mark Doherty in Conference, Devices, Flash Player, Industry News on November 9, 2009
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.
Creating Graphics Optimized for BlackBerry in Adobe Creative Suite
Further to the announcement of the alliance between Research In Motion and Adobe, this video illustrates the creation of graphical assets optimized for BlackBerry smartphones using Adobe Creative Suite. (6:17)
Building BlackBerry Widgets Using Adobe Dreamweaver
Further to the announcement of the alliance between Research In Motion and Adobe, this video illustrates the creation of a BlackBerry Widget using Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-leading web content authoring tool. (2:38)
Our new iPhone page at Adobe.com :-)
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Devices, Flash Player on October 13, 2009
We receive literally millions of requests at our Adobe.com pages from iPhone OS users looking for a Flash Player download.
Given our support from the top 19/20 OEMs across multiple device platforms we thought it prudent to provide “more info” to those poor iPhone users that got stuck with a limited browsing experience.
Hope you like it
Flash content on the iPhone OS
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Devices, Flash Player, Industry News on October 5, 2009
So you heard it right, we have brought the Flash Platform to the iPhone OS for applications. In fact some of the applications are already on the Apple AppStore for you to download
We thought it was fun to put them up in secret and working with a very very small set of developers, and our engineering teams I think we’ve really proven that Flash can run effectively on the iPhone without changes.
The applications are:
- Just Letters
- Finger Paint
- Red Hood
- Chroma Circuit
- FickleBlox
- That Roach Game
- Trading Stuff
- South Park Avatar Creator
Enabling the Flash Platform to run on the iPhone has been a really tough task, and one that results in some limitations. Though you have told us that this is a top priority for your mobile projects, and so we’ve worked for over a year to build this solution.
For developers the new tooling will be made available with the Flash Professional tool, which will also be in pre-release later this year. So today you can begin your work on mobile devices targeting Flash Player 10, or Adobe AIR 2.0 Apis in time.
One caveat of this Ahead of Time compilation method is that we can only use AS3 code. AOT compilation means that we have no interpreter on the device, as per Apple’s restriction. Without the interpreter you won’t be able to load SWFs unless they were packaged with your application, boo Apple
This new tool set and a subset of apis from Adobe AIR will have all manner of features enabled, along with the hardware acceleration, battery, memory and rendering performance increases that we have worked on in Flash Player 10.1.
Some typical iPhone features that are not supported are:
• Photo selection from file system
• Contact selection from the address book
• Camera
• Cut/copy/paste
• Accessory support
• In app purchase support
• Peer to peer
• Maps
• iPod library access
• Compass
• Push notifications
• Audio recording
• Video recording
• Parental controls
Of course because of the huge amount of work involved, and lack of public API access from Apple we have to drop a few Flash features too.
• Embedded HTML content
• RTMPE (this was our call)
• H.264 Video (you can use URLRequest)
• Dynamically loading SWFs (containing AS3 code)
• PixelBender
So what about Flex? Well here at Adobe MAX we’ll have a session specifically around Adobe Flex Mobile Framework, codename “Slider”. We expect that in time we’ll enable this version of the framework to run effectively on the iPhone. You’ll be using the same tools, Apis and core framework elements.
Although there would be nothing technically stopping you from using Flex, you would suffer huge performance penalties, and have to re-write the components for mobile and device interactions.
Go and get started then today!
Flash Player 10.1 – Hardware Acceleration Ahoy!
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Devices, Flash Player, Industry News on October 5, 2009
Some key announcements around our work with Qualcomm and NVIDIA with Flash Player 10.1, the version number for our new desktop and mobile runtime. Some would argue (and I’m sure some did) that if .1 means only incremental changes then we should have called it Flash 11! The work that has gone into this runtime, we have doubled the number of supported platforms including Symbian, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
It’s a huge investment made possible by the incredible talent that is Adobe’s Flash Engineering team. Let’s see the Silverlight team rock something like that out!
One of the biggest challenges has been performance for constrained devices. GPU acceleration and optimizations by ARM, Intel and our OEM partners have enabled us to create a better player, one that uses less RAM, less battery and renders faster on constrained devices.
Don’t you just love the Open Screen Project??
A big round of applause for our engineering teams!