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

Machinarium, an award-winning indie point-and-click adventure/puzzle game in Adobe Flash and AIR.

A few months ago I met the guys from Amanita Design in Brno, Czech Republic. We talked about the success of Machinarium for desktop (available for Windows, Mac and Linux). That was just around the time the Adobe AIR 2.7 for iOS, Android and PlayBook was made available – and after some time the guys decided to port the game for tablets.

And today September 8th 2011, the game is available on the iOS App Store!
*Note: I will be releasing an article about the making/porting of Machinarium for tablets soon covering all the technical details.

Watch the trailer:

Interview with Jakub Dvorský (game designer and director):

Me: You have just released the new iPad version of Machinarium, but tell me something more about the history of Amanita Design and how you started building puzzle/adventure games?

Jakub: Amanita Design started in 2003 when I released a free web-game Samorost which was my thesis project at the Academy of Art. Even before that, I had created a couple of adventure games while studying at grammar school. Since then I have found several excellent collaborators so now the studio is nine men strong. We are still completely independent and self funded, and we still make adventure games. Of course we are also trying to push that genre somewhere to make our games more funny, entertaining and challenging at the same time.

[Screenshot from Samorost 2]

Me: Where does the original idea for Machinarium come from?

Jakub: First we knew, we wanted to create a full-length adventure game and that it should be a bit different and more complex than our previous Flash games. Then we came out with an idea of a robot as the main hero who lives in a robotic world. My first idea and vision of a strange vertical city populated by robots came to me about ten years ago when I was on an exchange scholarship in Netherlands. I was influenced by the modern functional architecture and the flatness of the country.

[Machinarium - sketches]

Me: How long did it take from the first sketches to the release?

Jakub: It took us almost three years. It’s a very long time and it wasn’t easy to stay focused on only one project all the time. Of course the whole game also changed significantly over that time. The basic concept was much simpler and our idea was to create longer but quite simple looking game. We thought it will take us about one year to finish it. In the end I’m really glad we spent all that time on it, because the game is now much better and more polished than what was intended in the initial plan and it definitely paid off.

[The artist's studio - Adolf Lachman]

Me: Why have you chosen Flash/AIR for the game?
Jakub: We have a long time relationship and lots of experience with Flash (since the Macromedia days). We don’t know any other tool for making such rich and interactive animations like Flash. And AIR was for us the only way how to get the game on iPad and other tablets in a relatively short time. Also we are looking forward to trying upcoming features of AIR 3.0 including Stage3D.

[Black Cap Brotherhood from Machinarium]

Me: What about the music and sound effects?

Jakub: The music and sound effects are very important in all of our projects so we do care about the whole audio side a lot. Our ‘in-house’ composer Tomas ‘Floex’ Dvorak (who created also Samorost2 OST) has worked almost one year on the score. The style could be generally described as electroacoustic music with elements of ambient, soundtrack and classical music. Tomas is very interested in the fusion of the acoustic and electronic fields, and it is also noticeable on this work. The same goes for sound effects which were all recorded and edited in our studio.

[Music by Tomas 'Floex' Dvorak, Sound design by Tomas 'Pif' Dvorak]

Me: Where can people get Machinarium?

Jakub: Machinarium is available for PC, Mac and Linux on our own website (machinarium.net) and it’s also on Steam and Mac App Store. The iPad2 version is available on iOS App Store and the Android version for tablets is coming soon as well. In addition to that we are also working hard on PS3 version which should be available later on PSN.

[Level design]

Me: Are you planning any other games at the moment?

Jakub: Yes, right now we are working on two projects – the first is a light-hearted and funny adventure game called Botanicula. It’s about five friends – little tree creatures who set out for a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites. The game itself is about exploration, solving little puzzles, meeting strange tree creatures and listening to the music. The other game is Samorost3 which is our main project. It will be our second full-length game and it will feature full HD graphics and a bit of a new approach to game design.

[Sketch of the five friends from Botanicula]

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.

Last week at FITC, Lee Brimelow demoed Molehill running in AIR on a mobile platform (Android) for the first time. It seems like you guys liked it!

You guys will be able to leverage the Molehill APIs on mobile platforms for 2D and 3D rendering, for you guys who did not attend FITC, here is a little video demoing Molehill on Android through AIR. The same code is reused for the desktop version and then pushed to mobile :

Molehill - Tablet demo from Thibault Imbert on Vimeo.

This demo illustrates a common thing in 3D like cube map textures for reflections and is one of the demo from our test suite, so we have many little demos like this. I will be posting more complex examples soon!

If you are curious about the slides, you can download them here.

Here are some of the features we are working on :

- Faster GC : GC hint API and more.
- New numeric types : float and float4 (very useful for Molehill in the future).
- Concurrency : Worker threads (shared nothing model) to leverage multicore CPU's. No more UI 's blocked when doing expensive operations.
- Stage3D : The API used for Molehill (that you know through the Incubator builds).
- StageVideo : Allowing full GPU acceleration (decoding + blitting) when used with H.264. Part of Flash Player 10.2 and coming to AIR soon.
- Threaded video pipeline : Will decode non H.264 streams on another thread (H.264 being decoded by the GPU), Net I/O will also be moved to another thread, all this bringing smoother playback.

I will be covering some of those in more details later on, stay tuned!

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/

I recently started playing around with GPU rendering in AIR for Android, and I decided to do a quick video demonstrating the differences between CPU and GPU rendering modes.

The code for this example is available here on GitHub.

As you can see from the example application, the key to offloading rendering to the GPU is to do three things:

1. Set rendering mode to GPU in your application descriptor like this:

<initialWindow>
    <content>[...]</content>
    <resizable>true</resizable>
    <autoOrients>false</autoOrients>
    <fullScreen>false</fullScreen>
    <visible>true</visible>
    <renderMode>gpu</renderMode>
</initialWindow>

2. Make sure cacheAsBitmap is set to true on your DisplayObject like this:

square.cacheAsBitmap = true;

3. Make sure to assign a Matrix to the cacheAsBitmapMatrix property on your DisplayObject like this:

square.cacheAsBitmapMatrix = new Matrix();

That’s all you have to do to offload your rending to the GPU and to free your CPU up for more important tasks.

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