something in the way

Adobe MAX is here, and we’ve got a lot of news to share. Today we’re releasing Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 — you can download the release starting at 9:00 PM Pacific today. As we announced previously, there are lots of new features in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, and one of the newest features that’s getting a lot of buzz is hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering through Stage 3D, which will be available on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions. It redefines what’s possible across the web. With up to 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2, developers can animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver cinematic, console-quality games both in browsers and in apps. And a production release with support for Stage 3D for mobile platforms including Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS is expected in an upcoming release. For more information about Stage 3D and to see some sample apps, check out the Stage 3D games on the Adobe Developer Center.

Additionally, we’re excited that “Proscenium,” a 3D framework technology preview, is available on Adobe Labs. Proscenium will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype experiences focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections. Check it out and let us know what you think.

We previously announced the availability of the Starling 2D framework for stunning hardware accelerated, fluid 2D graphics, and you can check out a new game developed using the Starling framework, Whack! from BxyB. There’s also new information for available for developing using 3D frameworks like Alternativa3D, Away3D, Flare3D, Mixamo, and Minko.

And lastly, we want to extend a welcome to our newest developers and colleagues from Nitobi, makers of PhoneGap, which will soon become part of the Adobe family. With all of our announcements today, we believe developers will benefit from a workflow that allows them to choose the right tool for the right job, and we’ll continue to keep driving innovation in Flash so you can push the edge of the envelope for immersive experiences online.

We’ve already seen some early previews of games and apps that will be available in market soon, and there are now over 10,000 AIR apps in mobile markets.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll create. And there’s more news to come tomorrow, so stay tuned. You can watch the second day MAX keynote streamed live at 10am PDT, and be sure to check out the Flash Platform Blog for the latest updates.

Tom Nguyen
Sr. Product Manager, Flash Player & AIR / @tomng

Adobe just released AIR 2.7. I’d just like to walk through the new features of this runtime to highlight the most significant ones for Enterprise projects. Adobe AIR is used by many organizations for internal employees. It can bring some productivity features such as the drag and drop of files from the desktop to the application. Some customers are also using AIR to enable offline/online data synchronization (this particular case should become a hit on tablet devices). I also recently met two companies which are using AIR to display live notifications on users desktops (toast notifications), or toolbars that sit on the right of the screen. As you can see, this runtime is not only used for media campaign or social apps. You can discover nice AIR apps on the Adobe Showcase page: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplatformruntimes/gallery/

Here are my favorite features of AIR 2.7 as an Enterprise developer:

It runs fast on iOS

iOS devices, and especially the iPAD, are used by Enterprise customers and managers for more than a year. A lot of companies invested large amounts of money to distribute their own applications on the Apple Store. 85% of them used external agencies to develop iOS apps. Thanks to AIR 2.7, and thanks to the upcoming update of Flex (just give us few days), Enterprise developers will be able to reuse their skills and tools to develop and deploy Flex applications on iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices. In addition, they will be able to execute the same project on Android devices and on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This is a unique value proposition on the market, and more operating systems will be targeted in the future. My previous posts were already using AIR 2.7, and you can appreciate how fast Flex applications run on iOS.

AIR Runtime to SD card

Some users were complaining about the size of the AIR runtime. On some Android devices such as the Google Nexus One, it would take a significant part of the internal memory. Now you can just move the runtime to the SD card without impacting the performance of your applications.

Acoustic Echo Cancellation

I’m a big fan of real-time live collaboration as I’m convinced that the next generation of Enterprise apps will include more and more video chat features, Voice over IP options… You can check my previous posts about LiveCycle Collaboration Service. It will show you how to enable a live video chat adding 10 lines of code to your existing Flex projects. AIR 2.7 will automatically enable echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection and compensation of microphone levels. Without using your headset, you’ll experience first-class video chats. Combining AIR 2.7 on Android and LiveCycle Collaboration Service, you should be able to rewrite Skype in a day and sell it to MicroSoft (just kidding).

Interpreter Mode

I have been playing with the iOS packager for several month. It’s a great technology but it takes several minutes to package an ipa file. This impacts my productivity as sometimes I just need to debug my application on the device (and not in the AIR emulator). AIR 2.7 ADT introduces a new technology to quickly package your app as an ipa. It will take few seconds to get the file and deploy it on your iOS device. Your application will run a little bit slower with the interpretor mode then with the classic mode. Use it to debug your apps, and then export a release build to distribute a performant ipa file.

Be patient

The month of June is not over. We promised an update of Flex and Flash Builder. Both we’ll leverage AIR 2.7 features… Stay tuned.

 

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

Attention BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet developers! As a follow up to our BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Webcast series, we’ve put together a video overview demonstrating how easy it is for developers to use the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK Beta2 for Adobe® AIR® and the BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator Beta to develop BlackBerry PlayBook applications.

In the above video, I walk through deploying your app to the BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator and the similarities between the Simulator and testing your app on an actual BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. I also demonstrate how the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK integrates directly into Adobe® Flash Builder 4 and the GUI builder in Flash Builder “Burrito”.

With the tools available to developers, practically anyone can create a BlackBerry PlayBook application, so start building! You might also be interested in learning that developers who create a qualifying application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet prior to its initial North American release are eligible for a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

BlackBerry Tablet OS Development Resources (SDK, Simulator, Webcasts)

Don’t forget get to also check out my friend Matthew’s new BlackBerry PlayBook Web Fidelity video on the Inside BlackBerry blog, which demonstrates rich multimedia, Adobe Flash games and social networking websites like Facebook running in the BlackBerry Browser.

Thanks also to our friends at Universal Mind for providing the code and app used in the video! For more information, please visit http://www.universalmind.com/

url='http://blog.everythingflex.com/2010/12/28/how-i-compiled-the-tour-de-flex-mobile-to-ios-iphone-with-video/'; Yesterday, I showed my AIRonAndroidBrowser application running on an iPod touch. So, this morning I figured I would try the Flex Tour de Mobile app. Here is exactly how it was done. There is also a video at the end. I grabbed the source by downloading and installing the fxp source from here. I [...]

Exciting news from Adobe; they've announced a new HTML5 Pack on Adobe Labs with support for HTML5, CSS3, and SVG:

Adobe is pleased to announce the availability of the Adobe® Illustrator® CS5 HTML5 Pack. This add-on for Illustrator CS5 15.0.1 provides initial support for HTML5 and CSS3, extends SVG capability in Illustrator CS5, and helps you easily design web and device content. In combination with the HTML5 features available in the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 11.0.3 updater, these new tools allow web designers to take advantage of the latest advancements in HTML5.

While HTML5 and CSS3 will not be finalized for some time, and SVG support in browsers will continue to evolve, the extension provides support for a set of currently implemented features.

Some of the benefits of the HTML5 Pack:

• Efficiently design for web and devices by exporting Illustrator Artboards for unique screen sizes using SVG and CSS3 media queries.
• Create web widgets with Illustrator by generating dynamic vector art for data driven web work-flows.
• Take advantage of the latest enhancements to SVG and Canvas to generate interactive web content.
• Map artwork appearance attributes from designer to developer tools—export from the Illustrator Appearance Panel to CSS3 for streamlined styling of web pages.

Greg Rewis discusses it more in the video below:

Mordy Golding has a good description of some of the new features in this lab pack:

Parameterized SVG

You can designate certain attributes (i.e., fill, stroke, opacity) as variables right from the Appearance panel in Illustrator. When saved as SVG, developers can easily change the variable definition to "reskin" or modify the art. You can even create global variables.

Multi-screen SVG

You can create multiple artboards in Illustrator at various sizes, for example to design art for different screen sizes. You might do this to create different designs for mobile, tablet, and desktop versions of a design for example. You can then save your file as SVG and include all the different artboards. Illustrator creates an HTML file and a CSS file, along with separate SVG files for each artboard. The CSS uses media queries to detect the screen size and automatically serves up the correct SVG image.

Mark objects as canvas in SVG

You can select an object on the Illustrator artboard and then choose Object > HTML5 Canvas > Make. These elements are rasterized and included as canvas elements when saved as SVG, giving developers the ability to control the elements via JavaScript.

Export named character styles as CSS

You can define character styles in your Illustrator document, and then export those character styles as a valid CSS file. You can do this directly from the Character Styles panel.

Export artwork appearances as CSS

You can select an object in Illustrator and export valid CSS directly from the Appearance panel. Of course, if you mockup an entire page in Illustrator, you can simply select all of it and export it to a single CSS file. IDs are picked up from the Layers panel (so you want to name artwork carefully), and Illustrator can export Fill, Stroke, Opacity, and Absolute Position and Dimensions.

Include selected Graphic Styles as CSS in SVG

You can select styles from the Graphic Styles panel and choose to have them exported when you save your file as SVG. What's really cool is that you can include styles even if they aren't applied to your artwork. This would allow you to deliver multiple styles to a developer within a single SVG, and even programmatically swap styles.

Great work Adobe!

Kevin Lynch had a Q&A With Brady Forest today at Web 2.0 Expo and addressed a lot of topics including HTML5. As an Adobe employee, I’m kind of excited about what we’ll be able to do with HTML5. Who knows more about drawing APIs and interactive web content than Adobe? Now that HTML5 has started to coalesce a little bit, I think you’ll see us bring a lot of that knowledge to bear as we do build tools that target HTML5. You’ll see some of the early thoughts around that on our Design and Web blog so if you’re interested in that, I encourage you to subscribe.

; ;

Click to play

But just as HTML5 evolves, Flash is going to evolve as well and there are a lot of cool plans for the next generation of the Flash Platform. I think it’s a pretty exciting time to be a web developer no matter which technology you choose.

Forget Hulu: with no Flash allowed on the iPhone and iPad, whoever will protect us from the Legion of Doom? [The Duty via Walyou] More »

On Saturday, I joined the other 700,000 people who spent part of their day waiting in line at the Apple Store. What made my experience unique is that I was the only person in line at 3 pm—and remained the only person in line for the next 20 minutes.

I arrived at the Apple Store with my brother and saw the ropes outside with no one nearby, so I walked inside. An employee asked if she could help me and I said I was there to pick up an iPad. She said, “Congratulations!” and asked me to step outside and wait in the empty line. Since the iPad is for work, I just needed to pick one up—no need to play with one, decide between the different models, or pick out accessories. At any other store, I would’ve able to go straight to the cash register, purchase what I need and be on my way.

My personal salesman arrived, asked for my name and said, “Congratulations, Jonnie!” He turned to my brother and warned him that I’ll ignore him for the rest of the day. I told him I’m a software developer and I just need the 16gb model for testing. He said, “Need! I like that word. You need it!” He then said he’ll check in the back to see if they have any left—after waiting in the empty line that whole time.

He came back with box in hand and said, “Congratulations, we have one available for you.” Next was the long list of extras to sell me. I know it’s their job to get me to buy a dozen accessories, but I ended up repeating, at least a dozen times, that I only needed the iPad—half of them was to turn down Mobile Me after he insisted I wouldn’t be able to completely experience the iPad without it. Each time I said I didn’t need any accessories or additional services, he looked like a deer in headlights, as if no one has turned them down before. He then said, “Jonnie, you’re looking at me like I’m a putz.”

It was finally time to pay for it, so I handed him my company card, and he says, “Congratulations, you’ll be the first at your company with an iPad.” I laughed and said, “Actually, we already have ten.” He looked shocked, then continued processing the order with an uncomfortable look on his face. This entire time, I tried my best not to reveal I work for Adobe—to avoid any unnecessary awkwardness. For the receipt, they needed an email address, so I painstakingly said, “jhallman@…adobe.com.” He paused for a moment and asked if I work for Adobe. I said I did and he exclaimed, “You guys hate us!” I assured him we don’t and said we just want Apple to support our platforms.

After the order went through, he said, “Congratulations, you now own an iPad.” But before I can go he said they were required to activate the iPad in the store “to make sure it works.” Can you imagine if I was a fanboy, dying to video tape the unboxing? That would’ve hurt. He led me to the ‘activation girl’ and said, “Jonnie needs his iPad activated …He works for Adobe.” From the tone of his voice, I felt compelled to ask the girl if that was code for something.

The whole experience just made me feel so awkward. I remember when I could walk into an Apple Store, tell an employee what I need, pay for it and leave. They would treat me like a regular person and talk like one too. I realize it was the release of the iPad, but the entire time I felt like I won it or needed their approval in order to get it. Congratulations? I’m a consumer there to purchase a product. The ordeal left me a little sick, as if they expect me to be that Apple fanboy who flaunts every iGadget, helpless without them. I do own a Macbook Pro, an iPhone, and now an iPad, but I’m not that guy.

The video shows some obvious short comings in the flash handling (slight flickering very visible) but it’s still a huge step forward and I can’t wait to start browsing flash sites and playing games from my browser. Are you guys excited at the prospect of finally having flash in action?

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Adobe's seemingly tried everything in its fight to get Apple to tear down enough development barriers to get Flash ported to the iPhone, culminating in a native compilation option in CS5 that... well, really doesn't solve much of anything. So far, nothing's worked. What's next? Get the masses fired up with some old-fashioned propaganda and let 'em riot down at One Infinite Loop, of course! Visiting Adobe's Flash download page from an iPhone now shows a pretty tersely-worded message informing the user that they're getting short-changed simply by Apple's refusal to budge, so yeah, if you hear an occasional cry of "this is outrageous, I'm writing Apple immediately!" while sitting at an airport gate or a coffee shop, you can safely guess what just happened.

[Via Gear Diary]

Filed under: Cellphones

Adobe engages Apple in passive aggressive warfare with iPhone's Flash message originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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