Some great news on the mobile packager, we finally passed the 100,000 users mark yesterday as shown here on the magic “Dashboard”.  This is really good news and shows that we’ve managed to reach to more developers than ever with the tool.

Interestingly enough I’m also seeing recently spikes for the Flash Lite downloads too, which would indicate that applications are finally reaching users

Note:  The orange line shows the attempted downloads, a few of which may be failures totalling 170,623 (which includes the 100,000 successful downloads).  My take on it is that these are Mac users cancelling after they discover that the Mobile Packager is Windows XP only

I’m happy to announce the further expansion of the Distributable Player to a further 15 countries bringing the total to 45 across the world. With the Distributable Player it’s possible to distribute your applications with the latest Flash player optimized for mobile devices, Flash Lite 3.1. This is the same player available on the HTC Hero and Nokia 5800 devices.

The countries are: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA.

Using the Adobe Mobile Packager 1.1 you can package your SWF files and assets in native installer packages, then distribute them freely from your website or that of your customer. We’ve made it extremely easy to get started and begin to work with mobile devices in advance of Flash Player 10 availability. If you’re interested in developing for Flash Player 10 when it arrives I recommend that you get your feet wet with Flash Lite to build up your knowledge of mobile and devices interaction and optimizations.

You can see some great examples of Flash applications running on mobile devices from the Flash Lite Developer Challenge below!

As some of you have noticed Nokia have begun the process of updating the Flash Lite 3.0 player to our latest version Flash Lite 3.1. There are a number of benefits with this update but in all this brings the Nokia 5800 all the way up to Flash 9 support (AS2 only), some features are outlined below:

• Flash Lite 3.1 builds on our support for web browsability
• 92% of the top 500 sites (plus a few strategic ones)
• HTML Text coloring, <img> tag support in text fields
• Streaming audio support
• Much more memory
• It adds new support for hardware acceleration for graphics (hardware dependant)
• Bitmap data is also now exposed
• Security Model and obviously version, is now aligned with the Distributable Player
• Various bug fixes to enhance extensions for packaged applications

This update is a huge step forward because it signifies the beginning of Open Screen Project commitments to keep the Flash Player up-to-date.  It’s also the first time that this has been tried out from an OEM and so there were a few glitches, notably:

• SetSoftKey FSCommand support broke
• The Flash version string included a new character “AFL” instead of “FL”
• Security Model wasn’t entirely fixed

In all for all the features added I think that this isn’t so bad, and I can say that Nokia will update FL3.1 and release this new version soon.  So if you were in the Day1 gold rush then I suggest hitting update in a week or so.

*NEW – More soon on this*

• Flash Lite 3.1 also provides support for Flash Remoting
• HTTPS and AMF support

As for the Flash Remoting features I’m wildly excited about this, and I’m working to produce a simple demo.

Update: Unfortunately Remoting doesn’t work on S60 however I’m informed that this should work on WM6 devices, so feel free to give it a try!

I have some great news on our Distributable Player availability and our plans to scale the solution.  For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working with some of you to test the download of Flash Lite 3.1 over-the-air in your home countries.  That process has gone pretty well and collectively we’re confident that our solution can now scale quickly, we plan to add countries in batches of eight on a monthly basis.

We have added support for the player download in the following countries (I tried to enable the Flash version of this but WordPress is having none of it):

We’ve also been working hard on device certification and accelerating that program by adding the most popular S60 and Windows Mobile devices.  The list is now 31 strong and will grow continually at speed.

S60 Devices

1. Nokia N78
2. Nokia E65
3. Nokia N95 8GB
4. Nokia N95
5. Nokia N73
6. Nokia N81
7. Nokia 6120 Classic
8. Nokia E51
9. Nokia N81 8GB
10. Nokia E71
11. Nokia N96
12. Nokia N82

Windows Mobile Devices

1. HTC-Pro S621(Same as T-Mobile Dash)
2. HTC S740
3. HTC Touch Cruise P3650
4. HTC Touch Diamond
5. HTC Touch P3452
6. HTC TyTN II P4551
7. Motorola Q
8. Motorola Q9c
9. Motorola Q9h (CDMA)
10. Motorola Q9m
11. Motorola Q Norman (same as Moto Q 9h(GSM))
12. Palm Treo 700w
13. Palm Treo 750
14. Palm Treo Pro
15. Samsung SGH-i607 BlackJack I
16. Samsung SGH-i617 BlackJack II
17. Samsung SGH-i780
18. T-Mobile Shadow
19. T-Mobile Wing

The Mobile Packager 1.1 release is now out on private pre-release with a few select developers to get some feedback before launch.  Last week the reigning packaging queen Liz Myers signed her first SIS and CAB files using the new tool.

Exciting times!

You’ll hear how the Distributable Player with Flash Lite 3.1, has enabled them to reach their customers with a consistent experience across devices.

Check them out.

Working on Fanbase among others is David Brown, an extremely talented Flash developer.  He’s been working with us for some time on the Distributable Player, and in fact his Bacardi application may well have been responsible for the new security model

I’ve asked him to come and present a session on his experiences and thankfully he’s accepted.

AgencyNet: Mobile for Flash Developers
Thursday, April 30, 2009 11:00 A.M. PST

In this session David Brown from AgencyNet will uncover the key factors to consider when developing and deploying content to multiple devices with Adobe’s distributable player solution. Topics include Multilingual content, multiple input types, and consistent user experiences across screens.

Spread the word and register here

I’m here at the airport in San Francisco, shoulders breaking due to the sheer number of phones in my bag.  Today I’m carrying about 35 devices that I’ll be using over the next year.  They are from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, T-Mobile and Nokia and some of them are more special than others..

There are in fact seven devices in my bag with Flash 10 working in the browser.  There’s an Android device from HTC, four HTC Touch Diamonds and two Nokia N85s.  You will have already heard that we showed a very early demo of Flash 10 at MAX in San Francisco; its amazing to see the level of excitement from the broader community around this announcement.

Many of you have been asking questions around time lines and technology, so let’s set some expectations:

• This does not spell the end of Flash technology optimized for non-PC devices (called Flash Lite)
• We will not be bringing Flash 10 and AS3 (browser plugin only) to devices until the end of 2009
• When this happens the numbers of devices in market will be low and expensive
• There is a huge amount of work still to be done
• Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile are going to have full web parity with Flash 10.
• iPhone is a closed platform gated by Apple and its up to them.

While we’ve made great progress with Flash 10 for mobile browsing it’s still a long way off.  Even when it does arrive we’ll still need to deliver AIR and enable standalone applications, for that we need to address many more devices.  As a way to get started early, at MAX San Francisco we announced the Flash Lite Distributable Player private beta program.  On mobile devices you can now distribute your applications, games and video content to Open OS mobile devices and install Flash when necessary; just like the desktop.  The solution comes in a few pieces:

Create: To create packages effectively you’ll need to update your Adobe Device Central to 2.1.  You can then test your applications categorized by screen resolution and platform.

Package: We created the Adobe Mobile Packager Beta to enable you to trigger the download of the latest Flash player for your devices.  Using the tool you can follow a simple process and build CAB or SIS files for open distribution.

Distribute: You told us that it was hard to do deals on your own that it would be great if Adobe helped seal the deal.  Well we’ve done just that and signed deals with Thumbplay and Zed which includes a standard developer agreement.  There will be a large number of devices supported at launch (some 30 devices) and an audience of over 11m users in Italy, Spain and the US.  Importantly these are hand-picked high value consumers that browse the web and consume content.

Discover: It was also very important to allow applications to sit side by side with native apps.  Customers out there were demanding a catalogue experience, free and open.  We created the Adobe AppZone a rich interactive catalog that presents aggregator and partner content.  It manages the installation and general management of applications and Flash versions.

Of course no new product would be good without a developer kit to get you up and running.  Well this time I decided that 100s of pages of docs was getting a bit tired, so it gives  me great pleasure to point you at the all new video tutorial series by Liz Myers.  For the past five weeks we’ve been working really hard together to create this series for Adobe TV and I hope we can do more in the future.  You’ll find the series broken down into bite-size chunks and hopefully you should be setup in 30mins.

Please spread the word about the Flash Lite Distributable Player, and get signed up here for the private beta.