Posts Tagged AIR

$200k – Adobe AIR App Challenge for Sony Tablets


This summer seems like one for Flash and Mobile, so it’s great to be able to tell you that Sony, one of our long term partners in mobile, are joining the Open Screen Project and will be a platinum sponsor of Adobe MAX in LA.

Today we’re announcing an exciting new Adobe AIR App Challenge for two upcoming Sony Tablet devices.  It’s available to those of you in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and USA.

There are lots of prizes ($200,000 USD) available for various categories of applications, as well as early access to the devices and Adobe AIR 3, and a paid-up trip to Adobe MAX for finalists.  All that and more for optimizing your applications for Sony’s new devices.

Let’s take a look at the devices..

Sony Tablet

Both tablets come with Sony quality design and hardware, most importantly, with incredible quality screens.  Each of the devices has a Tegra 2 chipset from NVIDIA and will be “PlayStation Certified”, so expect some of the best quality games seen on the 1st-gen PlayStation and Xperia PLAY smartphone.

The tablets will ship with Flash Player pre-installed, but interestingly the Sony Tablet devices will ship with a new Sony Web browser.  With that, we can expect better performance for Flash and browsing the web, compared to the stock browser.

The Sony Tablet S1 (codename) which has a stunning curved body designed to feel lighter in the hand, like when you fold a magazine.  It comes with a 9.4 inch display, so will be great for Entertainment and reading.  As many of you have heard me say, 10″ screens feel too big for my little Irish hands, so it’ll be interesting to see what it’s like.

Sony Tablet S2 (codename also) is quite different as it comes with two screens.  The underlying technical specs are identical between the devices, but this device is going to be great for building applications that long for unique interfaces that make use of the dual-screens.  I’ve got my sights set on a mixing deck idea, but it’s also going to be a nice way to play games; Battleship anyone?

The Challenge

Adobe and Sony are challenging developers and content publishers to build breakthrough mobile apps optimized for the Sony Tablet S1 and Sony Tablet S2.  We have a panel of some amazing judges, both Sony, Adobe and industry experts picking finalists and winners across four key categories.

Each category has a cash prize of $20,000 USD and promotion on the Sony Tablet devices, with a $100,000 USD Grand Prize awarded for the best overall application.

  • Entertainment
  • Lifestyle and Community
  • Gaming
  • Business and Productivity

Our team of judges will be reviewing applications throughout the process, and will look favourably at applications that span across different platforms.  Maybe your application works on Sony Vaio PCs, or Sony Televisions with GoogleTV?

If you get in early enough, before September 16th, you’ll have the chance to be one of the 10 MAX Award Finalists.  So get in early and you can get a free trip to Adobe MAX in LA!

In addition, $10,000 USD will be awarded for the following applications:

  • Most Innovative Application
  • MAX Public Favorite – awarded by community vote

The top 80 finalists in the contest will get pre-release access to the devices for a 4 week period, the Adobe AIR 3 runtime, and access to the very latest tooling to complete your application.  You’ll be on the leading edge of Flash development and innovation.

Adobe AIR 3 Beta

You will use Adobe AIR 3 Desktop Beta, released soon for the desktop to optimize your applications for both devices.  So you can start to consider how your existing or new applications would make use of the dual screen, be as novel as you like!  (cough, mixing desk, cough)

For the Sony Tablet S2 you will use the upcoming Native Extension feature in AIR 3, one of the most exciting features in the upcoming release of the platform.  Native Extensions give us an easy way to optimize applications for dual screens, that’s because we can now access any API on a host Operating System!

All applications should support both the Sony Tablet S1 and S2.

Key Diary Dates

  • Sept 16: Deadline for MAX Showcase App prizes
  • Oct 1-5: MAX Public Favorite Vote & MAX Showcase App winners attend Adobe MAX
  • Oct 10: Deadline for Entries
  • Nov 11: Final App Submission for Finalists to the Android Market
  • Nov 17: Winners Announced

Submit your app or app project now at airappchallenge.com

 

 

 

 

 

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AIR on Xoom Video & MOTODEV App Summit Tour

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

REGISTER

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Facebook Connect with AIR on Android

Last week we published a new Facebook SDK for creating Flash and AIR applications that incorporate Facebook connectivity using their new Open Graph API.  The design of their API is really great and uses Open Authentication version 2.0, so it’s easier than ever to connect your applications – and help them go viral.

Admittedly I was a little surprised to see that AIR on Android wasn’t supported, although the full source is published and so it was easy to start adapting it for use on Android.  In the video above you can see how simple it is to connect your applications.

Below you can download the full source and step through the application.  Maybe you can add a feature that supports status updates?

Radar

In addition, I have been adding support for Facebook and Twitter connectivity to my Radar application – currently available on the Android Market.  This application has become much more complex as a result, but I think it’s now looking really great.

You can download the application on the Android Market, or for the Desktop here.  If you are feeling brave then you can find the source for this application below.

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Radar running on the Samsung Galaxy Pad (European)

Last week I visited Toronto in Canada for the second FITC Mobile event, part of the Mobile Innovation week held in the city.  As always the event was a great success and it was nice to meet up with old friends, and hear about the exciting new ideas in the mobile industry.

Samsung were a sponsor this year again, and thankfully the team had brought along a couple of Samsung Galaxy Tab devices for the attendees to play with. The device is very nice, light in the hand and with a beautiful bright screen – the whole experience is very fluid. Something that I missed at the launch was the inclusion of a phone, so it was great to see added functionality and play with the browser.

With a little arm twisting I managed to install the very latest AIR2.5 beta for Android and test out my application, Radar.

On the way to Canada I have been playing with dynamic layouts, and trying to figure out how the application will scale for different screen sizes. At the time I was only thinking about the desktop, Nexus One and Droid 2 – but hey, why not a tablet :-)

The video below shows the experience running well, although the demo gods were circling…

Terry Ryan, Paul Trani and Brian Rinaldi were also at the event, it was great to catch up with the US Evangelists. In fact Paul also recorded a great video demo of Flash in the browser on the Samsung Tablet here:

I am also provide the update source files for this demo below, maybe you can think of new features and play around with the UI?

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P2P Radar for Android

A few weeks ago I published a video demonstrating the amazing P2P features in AIR2.x, running on the desktop and on Android devices. Well I have been hard at work improving this application and making it robust enough to show here in India at the Flash Platform Summit.

The result is a pretty complex application that enables users to establish P2P video calls. I have used Google Maps in 3D mode and added Gesture support, Twitter for Authentication and a completely new API.

As promised, here is the source for you to download.  Remember that Tom Krcha is our P2P and FMS expert, so make sure that you keep up-to-date on his blog for more elaborate uses of P2P.

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