Most importantly, you have all been very busy it seems, with thousands of applications shipping across these devices and more to come.

Blackberry

The Blackberry Playbook is really becoming a hit with developers, everyone at the Blackberry events here is building something.  We’re hearing great things from the community here, and this coming Friday we’ll have our yearly “AdobeDays” event at the Barcelona office.  Let’s hope I make it until then!

Everyone on the stand has been hugely impressed with the device capabilities, and we’ve spent a lot of our time speaking with Java and Blackberry developers that are planning to create their first applications in Flash for the Playbook.

Samsung

We saw the launch of the aptly named “Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″, and the Galaxy S II – which has really stolen the show in terms of design.  Here is Adobe’s David Whadhwani, SVP/GM Creative Interactive Solutions BU on stage at the Samsung launch and talking about the successful relationship that we’ve had with Samsung for years now.

David also take the opportunity to remind the audience about AIR 2.5 for TV, and Samsung’s commitment to delivering support for your applications across their latest ranges – and that includes BlueRay Players.  Samsung are almost the definition of why we created the Open Screen Project, we’ll obviously be talking a lot more about these devices later this year.

It’s almost that time of year again, the Mobile World Congress 2011 is set to be an amazing event with all of the major OEMs, Operators, Chipset vendors and our Open Screen Project partners in attendance.  Some 50,000 attendees from across the world descending on Barcelona, showing their new devices, services and Developer offerings.

This year we’re going to be meeting our various partners, and the Evangelism team will be presenting alongside RIM for the Blackberry developer day.  We’re really excited to be working so closely with our partners, and I can’t say I’ll miss the alarms going off at the device bar

As always, we’re working with our Mobile and Devices Spanish User Group to hold an event following the show.  This is our forth year running this event, and I’m happy to say that it has become a major part of our activities during the show.  As with last year, we’re going to make this a Spanish language event as much as possible.

So if you can understand Spanish, and delivery content for the Iberic region, this is a great event to attend.  I know that Marcos and Raul have worked really hard to bring you a range of speakers and topics, and there are not many tickets left – so sign up now!

Agenda:

09.30am Welcome
09.45am Cross-platform application development: Synctur
10.30am BREAK
11.30am HTML 5 for mobile: Maximiliano Firtman
12.15pm Usability/Productivity: Justinmind
13.00pm Meet the Playbook
13.45pm Close

Location:

Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya

SIGN UP

Surprise!  Today at Google I/O Vic Gundotra, Google VP Engineering announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.5 running on FroYo.  The launch today represents a milestone that we’ve been working towards for some time, and all of us at Adobe are hugely excited to see Flash Player 10.1 finally get into the hands of consumers.

The beta is now waiting on the Android Market for Nexus One and other Android 2.2 users to test out.  General availability is expected in June 2010.

While today’s announcement is all about Android, our target mobile operating systems for Flash Player also include Windows Phone 7, webOS, Symbian, and BlackBerry. Adobe provides a porting kit and Linux-based reference implementation to Open Screen Project partners to allow them to port Flash Player 10.1 to other platforms. These ports are subject to Adobe certification and must pass our standards for compatibility, performance and usability in order for devices to be marketed as “Includes Adobe Flash Player.”

Optimise your Flash Content

Flash Player 10.1 on Android

In all, Flash Player 10.1 has been built from the ground up, and not just for mobile phones but for the desktops, tablets, netbooks and even televisions, consoles and set-top boxes.  We have been working extremely hard on the runtime of course, but on top of that many of you have been working with us to optimize your web content for Flash Player 10.1.

Here is a landing page that features a number of websites that highlight the variety of Flash Player user experiences available on a mobile device. These sites and most popular websites that use Flash can now be accessed on smartphones supporting Flash Player 10.1.

Since we demonstrated the Flash Player on Android at the Mobile World Congress there have been a number of decisions made, changes implemented and tweaks applied to Flash Player 10.1.  These changes focused on usability, integration, performance and power management – so let’s look at some of these in more detail.

Installation and updates

I have documented the process over here in another post.  Suffice to say, the process is simple and demonstrates our commitment with the Open Screen Project to ensuring the evolution of Flash Player on mobile and devices.

Multi-touch

Due to time constraints with shipping FroYo it hasn’t been possible to make all of the Android browser changes required to enable multi-touch in Flash Player.  Web enablement has always been the top priority and so this (extremely complex) integration will happen later.  AIR 2.5 on Android is multi-touch enabled and so it’s still possible to use your fingers, thumbs and toes as necessary on Android.

Accelerometer

One of the cool new feature of Flash Player 10.1 is the accelerometer API, making Flash Player the first browser technology to support access to this hardware.  In Device Central CS5 we have added some emulation support for the API, you can read more here.

Focused Mode (single tap)

The Android and other browsers support multi-touch for viewing web pages, so that you can pan and zoom around non-optimized sites with ease.  To ensure that touch events are received by Flash or the browser appropriately we have created focused mode.  It works very simply using a priority system, so if you tap the Flash content that you want to interact with Flash receives the touch events, if Flash doesn’t pick up the event then it’s passed to the browser.  Tapping on the HTML will revert this focus priority back to the browser.

Smartzoom (double tap)

When a user double taps a piece of Flash content it will zoom to fit the screen, while maintaining the correct aspect ratio.  The content is still viewed in the context of the HTML, rather than launching into full screen mode.  This ensures that content remains in embedded mode – which makes sense given that this is the predominant usage of Flash on the web.

FullScreen (AS-only)

Another change to our previous showing is that FullScreen mode is now controlled via actionscript, just as it is on the desktop.  So if you want your video player or game to playback using the full screen, then you’ll need to use this code: stage.displayState=StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;

Smart Rendering

We have already seen some of the benefits of this effort on the desktop version of Flash Player 10.1.  Essentially it means that Flash content that’s not visible to the user will not be rendered and will receive limited CPU time.  SWFs that are off-screen and/or consuming required resources can also be put to sleep and resumed on demand.  You can control this behaviour by applying priority values to SWF files using the embed tag.

Video Hardware Decoding

One of the hardest features to get right has been video hardware decoding, and for the beta version this will not be enabled.

Sleep Mode

The player will be put to sleep along with the device to conserve power.  So if you fall asleep watching youtube then you won’t wake up to talking cats at 4am – tried and tested.  cats…

Out-of-Memory Management

For me, this is the kick-ass feature that should always have been arbitrating the use of the Flash Player.  If your content is not optimized correctly, has serious memory leaks and manages to use too much CPU power then it’ll go in the “sin bin”   These SWFs will render with a “click-to-play” button that the user can control as necessary.

Device Events

As with Flash Lite before it, Flash Player 10.1 has to be a good citizen on a mobile phone.  So if you receive a call or change application then Flash Player will respond appropriately, which typically means shutting down or pausing depending on the platform.

Minimum Spec

As has been documented before, our minimum spec for Flash Player 10.1 is ARM11-Cortex A8/9 at 550mhz.  For Cortex-A8 processors we require NEON, which enables improved multi-media playback for a lower mhz rating.

If you don’t know what any of that means then I wouldn’t be too concerned.  These chipsets represent the bulk of what our OEM partners are shipping, or planning to ship moving forward – and this list will undoubtedly expand.

Demos

Use Flash Builder to develop Adobe AIR apps for Android
Use Flash Professional CS5 to develop Adobe AIR apps for Android
See Flash Player 10.1 running on Android

AIR 2.5 on Android

Also announced today is an expanded pre-release of AIR 2.5 for Android devices.  Many of us on the Evangelism team have been playing with this for several weeks now, and it’s seriously cool.

More info here

While I was at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year I recorded a quick video of sample tablet hardware running a beta version of Flash Player 10.1.  It has taken a “little” while to arrive on Adobe TV, but in the video I’ll show some popular websites covering video and gaming.

The hardware is a development board sporting the ARM based NVIDIA Tegra Next Generation chipset, which is a dual-core ARM-Cortex A9 device.  Although I didn’t show it here, at the conference we were also running AIR applications beautifully on the hardware.

Our Open Screen Project partners NVIDIA announced that some 30+ tablet computers are expected to ship in 2010 with this chipset.  One of the advantages of having NVIDIA and ARM as Open Screen Project partners is that we can all contribute collectively to Flash Player acceleration for these devices.  So as OEM begin to adopt TEGRA they can rest assured that the Flash engineering is already taken care of.

My favourite so far would have to be the NotionInk Adam, which is an Android based tablet created in India.  The screen apparently has transmissive, transflective, and reflective display modes that will serve the device well in different lighting conditions.

Flash Player 10.1 will become available in the first half of 2010 for all supported platforms.  In fact, the desktop beta 3 is already looking incredible and proving to be a huge hit with developers testing their content.

One of the most important parts of our work with our Open Screen Project OEM partners is to enable the seamless discovery, installation and update of Flash Player 10.1 on device platforms.  I know that some have asked questions on this, and so I’m glad to bring you some responses, if a little late.

Extending the reach

In the “marketecture” diagram below you can see that Flash Player 10.1 is extending it’s platform reach, doubling it in fact.  It’s worth noting that recent reports around minimum spec’s for Flash Player 10.1 are alluded to here also, because working with our partners, we are targeting the latest chipsets available.

To explain, smartphones have a typical lifespan that is less than half that of a desktop computer, and so hardware choices are made by planning for the future.  Over the past few years we have shipped over 1.5Billion devices with Flash Lite using this simple rule.

Therefore the choice to target the ARM Cortex-A8 chipsets will result in greater efficiency, and most importantly a wider range of consistent experiences as uptake grows.  To be clear, that uptake is already happening, and it will expand rapidly just like it does every other year.

It’s like a Moore’s Law of mobile phones

Yet some devices will not be able to support the full Flash Player 10.1 due to low hardware capabilities, and for many of those devices we have a new version of our optimized runtime, Flash Lite, to fill the gap.  In fact the alpha version has already been spotted running Farmville on Android Eclair here.

Driving the Distribution

Working with our OEM partners we have enabled the Flash Player to be installed in a manner consistent with the desktop experience.  When visiting websites that have Flash content, users can click on the “Flash Player required” images/links provided by content developers to begin the installation process.

As with the desktop, the browser then redirects to the Flash Player Download Center, and in the case of mobile phones we pass these requests to the requisite device application stores such as the Android Market.  Today’s application stores have extended abilities to correctly identify devices, and to manage the update of applications and plugins like Flash Player.  Users can of course visit their application store directly if they wish.

In addition, those users purchasing new devices from a retailer may already have Flash Player pre-installed, made available in over-the-air software updates or through the browser directly.

Delivering Enhancements

As with the desktop install process, with each version of the Flash Player various updates are applied throughout it’s lifetime to ensure a high level of quality.  Users can expect these updates to be provided automatically on some platforms via their application store update process, as well as through over-the-air software updates.

In the example above you can see the update notifications that users are familiar with on Android devices, and it is expected that this will be used for Flash Player 10.1 during it’s lifetime.  Though I should point out that Nokia have been providing their own update mechanism, directly in the browser for some time now with a huge user uptake.

During the past few days Palm have also begun to lay the ground for Flash Player 10.1 support by delivering their software update.

Player Detection

On the desktop today developers use a combination of methods to detect the Flash Player and version.  Recognizing the need for a consistent approach, these same methods can be used on mobile phones in the future.  Adobe recommends SWFObject2, an open source project that provides cross-browser support.  It is also supported fully within our Creative Suite tools.  SWFObject works across browsers and device platforms to detect the Flash Player and it’s version.  Should an update been required, the tool can enable the ExpressInstall experience or provide fallbacks as required.

Historically I know some have invested considerable time and energy in device databases such as WURFL, which helped us to accurately distribute application installers to devices.  With Flash Player 10.1 we need only be concerned about the browser use case, and so I would argue that we do not need to continue this effort long term.

I hope this information will help you build a picture of the huge efforts that our engineering and product teams have made.  The mechanisms for discovery, install and update of the Flash Player 10.1 are a fantastic achievement, even though for some of you these may seem rather obvious.

With the Open Screen Project partners we are literally changing the ecosystem, enabling a more complete and consistent web experience on devices, and driving the industry forward with the Flash Platform in 2010.

Many of you may have read that the HTC Desire ROM has become “available” via Modaco Forums and their chef Paul.  As reported Taimur from Remond Pie has uploaded a video demo of the HTC Nexus running Farmville within Facebook, and as he discovered, it wasn’t quite baked for mobile devices.

The story is a little more complex than simply being an alpha build running content that hasn’t been optimized for small screens; although that’s true as well.

At Mobile World Congress Adobe demonstrated the full Flash Player (Flash Player 10.1) running on Android, Palm webOS and other smartphone platforms.  As a high end smartphone, the HTC Desire will ultimately support Flash Player 10.1 when it becomes available in the first half of 2010.  As a user you will be able to upgrade the free player over the air with a simple software update.

Currently however, the HTC Desire ROM (shown below) is running a new alpha version of Flash Lite that supports AS3, it is not Flash Player 10.1.

At the Mobile World Congress 2010 Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt discusses the incredible browsing experiences coming to the Android platform. As EricT states, a critical component currently missing on mobile devices is Flash Player.  As members of the Open Screen Project we are working with Google to bring Flash Player and AIR to Android devices, enabling an open ecosystem connecting developers with consumers.

Of course the demo demons were in attendance, but ultimately Eric was able to show video and gaming experiences running beautifully on Android. Of course gaming experiences on the web are largely created in Flash, in fact some 75% of online games run on the Flash Platform.

Later in the year it will be possible to mix and match your distribution and monetization models using Adobe AIR on Android, and repackage those applications for Apple devices targeting the AppStore.

I arrived back from this years Mobile World Congress far more exhausting than normal, hence the complete lack of blogging during the event; apologies for that.  So here I will aim to roundup the various announcements and hopefully add to the huge amount of blogging and articles written during the event.

In general this years event had a more positive mood with attendees and exhibitors all looking to the future of mobile and devices.  New this year was the inclusion of Tablet and Netbook devices in the show many of which use the same hardware as high end smartphones.  Our goal is to enable the Flash Platform to extend to these devices too, and so it should be no surprise that we had many partners previewing Flash experiences on their hardware, more on that later.

Open Screen Project Update – “Connecting Developers with Consumers”

At the conference we announced that we now have some 70 partners, with new additions like Burda Group, RTL, Stern, Addicting Games and EPIX on the content partner side.  New technology partners include Freescale, MIPS, Vizio, Symbian, Imagination Technologies and Sonic.  In terms of scale we have created one of the largest initiatives in the mobile ecosystem to build a foundation for the distribution of the Flash Platform across devices.  Of course for the community much of this will appear like marketing, but rest assured that there are many hundreds of engineers working globally to bring Flash to a huge array of platforms.

As we begin to wrap up the Flash Player integration efforts our focus has widened to include enablement for web content.  In total we’re working with over 140 content provider partners, owners of the largest and most popular sites that use Flash today.  At MWC 2010 we showed applications and websites optimized for mobile viewing from the following:

Animation – Angry Alien Productions

Branded – AOL Mobile, BBC iPlayer, ESPN, Sony Pictures, TBS, TNT, Warner Brothers

Gaming – Addicting Games, Armor Games, Kongregate, Miniclip.com, Nick.com, South Park Studios

News – BBC News, The New York Times Reader App, The Wall Street Journal Online

Video – AlloCiné, Amazon.com, AOL Moviefone, Canoe, Dailymotion, Disney, Epix, GMX, IGN, Kid Rock (Atlantic Records), Lavanguardia, National Geographic, Mobile YouTube, Studio1290 Mobile, STV Player Mobile, Ustream, Vimeo, Yahoo! Movies

As you can see the list is HUGE and this represents a small part of the overall efforts to bring the full web to devices using Flash Player.  For the Open Screen Project to be truly successful we need our content providers and developers to play their part, as you can see, this effort is very much underway.

Of particular note we also joined the LiMo Foundation to deliver the Flash Platform on their Linux based devices.  It’s an exciting announcement because it demonstrates that the Open Screen Project and other industry initiatives are aligned with a goal to the delivery of consistent and open platforms for developers and consumers.

Flash Player 10.1

On our stand at the Mobile World Congress we showed a beta version of Flash Player running on the Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and the Google Nexus One.  The applications above were running incredibly well and attendees were very impressed with the performance and fluidity of the experience, Flash was built for the web and on devices it just makes sense.  The most important addition to the mobile experience was the ability to playback Flash content in full screen mode, enabled by these powerful webkit browsers.

Of course the fun part for attendees was in visiting their own sites to understand the sheer power of the new player.  In all, the thousands of attendees that visited our stand were extremely excited about being able to browse more of the web on their devices.  For many the call to action was “How can I get started?”, well Thibaut has been crafting a great set of resources with our engineering teams here.  The first step however is to create a plan of action, begin to plan a suitable user experience for mobile devices; and in particular those based on touch.

With Flash Player 10.1 we have worked to enable the same web content to run using less memory, yet with higher performance.  The results are really incredible and should see a significant improvement, not only for the mobile devices but also for desktop computers and application running on Adobe AIR 2.0.  Remember, we can only do so much and as a Flash Developer you have a role to play in ensuring that your content works well on these new devices.

For fun, my colleague Michael Chaize has created his own tour of the web on the Nexus One, he even pushes out all the stops by visiting a site based on Papervision!

In terms of availability we have required some significant patches to Android and to the Web OS to support the installation of the Flash Player over-the-air.  We expect these new updates to become available soon to end users, at which time the Flash Player will become available either via their respective Application Stores, within the software updates or both.  In either case the installation of the Flash Player will be seamless and ongoing we expect to see significant traction as we move forward.

Adobe AIR on devices

One of the big pieces of news at Mobile World Congress was the announcement of Adobe AIR on Android, and the tie-in with our Adobe Packager for the iPhone.  At MAX 2009 we demonstrated the creation of iPhone applications using the upcoming Flash Professional CS5, and the twist is that these applications are based on AIR 2.0.  To demonstrate the possibilities we showed some of the same applications created in Flash Professional CS5 that are available on the AppStore today, running on Android devices using Adobe AIR.  The workflow couldn’t be simpler, it’s simply a repackaging effort with a little UX tweaking for basic layout and hardware capabilities.

Here is a nice video from Kevin Hoyt showing off Adobe AIR for Android:

Write One Run Everywhere? – In many ways the answer is yes, given a few measured choices.  We have made it fantastically simple to reach across devices and platforms with Flash and AIR, and so the same code can now run on a huge array of phones, desktop computers and consumer electronics.  Using the same assets and principle it will be extremely simple to tweak applications for varying screen sizes, input methods and user experiences.

So now our “marketecture” diagram for Applications looks like this (2010 is on the right):

Note that I’ve called out iPhone OS separately, this is because you will be required to use Actionscript 3 to target the iPhone. Once you package an application it will not be possible to process additional SWF files containing actionscript, such as those stored on the web, due to Apple’s restrictions around interpreted code.

Android, by comparison, is totally open and AIR runs beautifully on the platform; and dare I say a little faster on the Moto Droid, a device with iPhone 3Gs hardware. We plan to bring AIR to Android devices later in the year, and in the meantime you can get started by creating you content for Flash Player 10.1 for the desktop.

When Flash Professional CS5 comes to market you will be able to create iPhone applications that can easily be packaged for Android!

Well I hope your AS3 training is well underway by now..

I thought I’d share a spot of code with you, a new API in the flash.sensors package called Geolocation.  The package itself is enabled for iPhone applications (created with Flash Pro Cs5), FL4 and AIR in the future enabling you to create context-aware applications with ease.

The coolest thing is that you can test your applications that feature Geolocation in Device Central Cs5, very cool.

import flash.sensors.Geolocation;
import flash.events.GeolocationEvent;

var locale:Geolocation = new Geolocation();
locale.setRequestedUpdateInterval(5000);
locale.addEventListener(GeolocationEvent.UPDATE, onlocationHandler);

function onlocationHandler(e:GeolocationEvent):void{

lastLat = e.latitude;
lastLon = e.longitude;
gpsIcon_mc.visible = !gpsIcon_mc.visible;

}

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.