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

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

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.

Creating an application couldn’t be simpler, just go to this link and fill in the details to retrieve your Application ID.  You’ll only need that to connect your new application.

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?

FaceCard Download

FacebookMobile Download

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.

Radar Source Download

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?

DOWNLOAD SOURCE

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.

DOWNLOAD

I have just completed my App in a Week session on targeting Mobile and Devices, as promised, here are the source files for EVA on Android.  So that you don’t get lost in the huge swathe of code let’s run through some of the features to get you started.

If you missed todays session you can catch it here and view the running application here.

Setup:

Get Flash Pro CS5

Get Flash Builder 4

Get AIR on Android extension

Target Multiple Screens:

The goal of this application was to target Android devices running AIR, or indeed the Flash Player running in mobile browsers.  So it was important to include some pointers on how to dynamically layout the application.

I chose to implement two pretty simple examples of how to do this using the widgetComponent and the footerMenu.  In the Application class I listen to the “Event.RESIZE” event through the doLayout function.  As you stretch the SWF (use the standalone player) you can see the widgetComponent always displays in the middle, the footerMenu will always be at the bottom.

Of course the menu, widgets and background should all change dynamically.  This won’t require a huge set of changes and as you can see it’s quite simple to control the layout.  In a later build I will investigate a more dynamic approach to laying out the UI.

PHP+MySQL Backend

To demonstrate the data-centric features of Flash Builder, Mihai and Piotr created a database with PHP services that describe common Evangelist activities as well as data about us.  In the mobile demo I have coded as few of these database interactions in the UsersService class:

• “UsersService.getByUsername” – Is used to login and returns an object with user details including their name, photo url etc
• “UsersService.setLocation” – Is used to store the lastest location after login, this is then synchronized with other Evangelists.

I have created a User object to represent the user of the service, this class also manages the loading of the user image using ContentLoader.  The primary function of ContentLoader is to abstract the loading of SWF/image files, handling the various possible error cases.

User Location

An interesting new feature of Adobe AIR on Android is the ability to use the GPS hardware to get an accurate location fix.  Although EVA was designed to run inside, or outside of the browser and as such I have built a few fallbacks.

When the application is running in the browser (Capabilities.playerType==”PlugIn”) I have used an HTML5 feature to get the location.  This is achieved by using the ExternalInterface class, a bridge that Flash uses to communicate with Javascript.

In addition to these two approaches I have also deployed the MaxMind GeoIP service on my blog.  This is a huge database of IP addresses that can be used to determine an approximate location, usually your nearest city.  This is used when the application is running in standalone mode for debugging purposes, or as a failure fallback.

Using each of these methods I can reverse geocode the latitude and longitude to discover the users current location.  The UI displays the current city and country.  The open geonames database is an incredible free webservices that cover all manner of data, I couldn’t have wished for more.

Local Weather

One of the more interesting features of the application is the local weather service.  There are only two services that can produce weather data for a give latitude and longitude, and those are Geonames and Google Weather.

I chose Google because it comes with the added bonus of providing a weather icon to display.  Unfortunately this icon isn’t up to the quality of Serge’s design and so I ultimately swap it out, but at least I can easily change the URL.

The most fun part was easily finding a piece of code that calculates the Sunset (SunriseSunset.as).  I was able to find and port a piece of JavaScript code that does the trick, although annoyingly I cannot find the author to thank them.  Using this I can swap in the night icons for weather, nice

Flash Settings:

• The stage is running in low quality mode – perfect for use with device fonts
• Layers have been minimized and flattened as much as possible
• The Frame rate of the application is 15FPS – as low as possible

Asset Optimizations:

• The EVA background is an 8KB PNG-8 128
• All other images are mobile optimized PNG-8 128 Dithered and under 4KB
• Bitmap caching is not used, the application is relatively static
• Special care has been taken to ensure that all assets are snapped to pixels (not 23.43 etc)
• No assets are loaded off stage and nothing is invisible, ever – if they are unused, then they are unloaded
• All assets use “Sprite” as their base class, as set in the properties panel in Flash Professional

Text Optimizations:

• TLF is not used anywhere due to performance and size issues
• Only device fonts are used, they perform and render much better

Flex:

• Flex is not used due to the overhead of the framework on devices.

In later blog posts I will discuss the Widgets in more depth, including the Social and Radar widgets.  It’s also worth noting that Tom did a great job to deliver his P2P widget ready for integration, amazingly within 12kb!

DOWNLOAD

“Any Device” , that’s our tag line for this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Given the huge investments with our Open Screen Project partners in 2009/2010, you can imagine that this will be our most important event in the mobile calendar.

The Mobile World Congress is a chance for OEMs, Chipset Vendors, Carriers, Content Providers and Developers to meet up and decide the future of our ecosystem.  For the past two years that I’ve attended we have gone from 400million devices with Flash, to over 1.2Billion, and this year will see a massive step change in our strategy with the launch of Flash Player 10.1.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan will be on site to talk with our industry partners, and to discuss key challenges in the mobile and devices ecosystem, and in particular, how we’re working to solve these issues with our Open Screen Project partnerships.

We’ll be showing Flash Player 10.1 experiences optimized for various devices platforms like Android, Palm and Windows Mobile.  Our booth will be packed with demos of multi-screen contextual experiences, including Flash applications running on the iPhone, games running across platforms, the Digital Home and we’ll be showing off Device Central CS5 too.

With this being such a big event for us, we thought it would be nice for Flash developers to share this experience with us.  So if you want to come along on us, and see the whole event for free then send us an email with your name, company, email address.

mwcstaff@adobe.com

For more information and updates then check out our micro-site for the event.

Lee Brimelow has posted a great video tutorial on iPhone development using the upcoming Flash Professional CS5 over at gotoAndLearn.com.  In the video you can see just how easy it is to produce an application that uses the accelerometer.  On top of that he shows some incredible demos of GPU surface caching at the end after the compilation step.

If you’re in the midst of learning AS3 for the future then I suggest going through his video series.  Lee is a great presenter and you can get some inspiration for your first AS3 project to boot.