something in the way

This is a collection of Adobe Illustrator Scripts that exports layers or artboards to PNGs of different densities (iOS Retina Display, Android Devices, etc).

How to install

If you place the script in the Adobe Illustrator CS5/Presets/Scripts folder, the script will appear in the File > Scripts submenu. If you place the script in another location on the hard disk, you can run the script in Illustrator by choosing File > Scripts > Browse.

How to use Mobile > General

The general scripts asks for 3 values in sequence:

1. The folder where you want to save the files.
2. The scale factor 1 = 100% = 160dpi = mdpi, 2 = 200% = 320dpi = retina display (these values are only valid if you designed for 160dpi aka mdpi).
3. A suffix if you want to use one, e.g., @2x for retina display in iOS. You can also leave it empty if you don't want a suffix or if you are exporting to android or iOS non-retina.

How to use Mobile > iOS

1. Choose the folder where you want to save the files.
2. Optionally you can add a sufix to the files.
3. That's it, all files will be saved with the appropriate names.

How to use Mobile > Android

1. Choose the folder where you want to save the files.
2. That's it, all files will be saved on the appropriate folders.

Note on exporting layers: Locked layers visibility will be ignored and also they will not be exported. For example, this can be used to keep global layers visibility or guide layers from being exported.

Download zip file here: 
Illustrator Scripts for Mobile

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]

Today, we note the availability on Android of Control, a WebKit-based touch interface also on iOS.

For visualists and interactive designers, it’s worth paying attention to one feature in particular: dynamic interface creation. Perhaps biased by the musicians who have tended to embrace them, touch interfaces have tended to rely on the static layouts favored by physical knobs and faders. That’s arguably the worst of both worlds: you lose the tactile feedback of physical controls, but you don’t add any of the flexibility of a display.

Control is an open-source application rendered in HTML5, powered by JavaScript and JSON, so it’s capable of anything you can imagine. But Charlie Roberts has already demonstrated how a dynamic interface could work. Using OSC, you can make control layouts on the fly. That could lead to more sophisticated software integration for visual and musical performance, new chances for collaboration and live rigs, and the ability to make an interface on someone’s device in an interactive situation.

We saw the last of these scenarios in the case of the iOS app mrmr, developed by Eric Redlinger. As proof of concept, I and others put together a gallery show using mrmr, at which interactive pieces were able to build interfaces on-the-fly on user’s iPhones and iPads. With Control, those horizons expand, no longer constrained to individual proprietary UI widgets on one platform (like iOS), but cross-platform, Web-based, and dynamic.

The video above I think does a good job of scratching the surface of what’s possible. More on that here:
Control 1.3: Dynamic Interfaces, jQuery integration & more

But dynamic layouts could go in many, many directions. Since this is especially relevant to visual performance, perhaps in modes of interaction not really possible in music, I’d love to hear what readers imagine. And do try Charlie’s app, whether on iOS, Android, or both:
Control

– and if you’re really ambitious, have a look at the source!

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.

Appcelerator Titanium Studio™ is now released and available for immediate download! Upgrade today and improve your mobile development productivity with Appcelerator’s new enterprise-grade IDE built on Aptana Studio.

Titanium Mobile 1.7 is also available today. It’s now 5-times faster to build apps for Android and iOS has tons of upgrades, including universal binary support.

We had over 500 developers sign up for our new Titanium Indie and Professional subscriptions last month. Now we’re making it even easier by offering a 30-day free trial on both products. Test drive premium software in Indie and premium software and support in Professional.

Introducing Titanium Studio

Use Titanium Studio to rapidly build, test and deploy mobile, desktop and web applications. Take advantage of new functionality like code completion, Git integration and a full-featured editor. Manage Titanium projects, test your app in the simulator or on device, automate app packaging and much more … all from within the new Titanium Studio.

Titanium Studio is an upgrade and replacement for Titanium Developer. Titanium Studio is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that will enhance the user’s experience while developing on the Titanium Platform.  All of the latest Mobile and Desktop SDKs will be maintained and kept up to date by Titanium Studio.  In addition to the nice features of an IDE ( i.e. syntax highlighting, content assist, code validation etc.) Titanium Studio also provides tight integration with the scripts used to create and run Titanium Projects.

We strongly encourage all users to begin migrating their development workflow to Titanium Studio. Titanium Developer source code will continue to be available through an Apache 2 open source license.

Check out the video, "Getting Started and the Development Workflow with Titanium Studio"

Titanium Mobile 1.7

Nothing beats a Titanium mobile release and 1.7 is a big one. Here’s what’s new:

• Fastdev for Android speeds prototyping and testing by enabling local changes to become instantly available to your application while the simulator is running. This eliminates the time-consuming steps of packaging, building and deploying apps for each change.
• New cross platform APIs for TCP/IP networking: Sockets and Streams, and supporting APIs for managing Buffers and Codecs.
• Universal Binaries: develop a single app for deployment on iPhone and iPad
• Major improvements related to memory management and memory leaks for iOS (both iPhone and iPad) which substantially improves stability and performance.

Read the Titanium Mobile 1.7 Release Notes for the full list of enhancements and fixes. Download Titanium Mobile 1.7 from within Titanium Studio or at my.appcelerator.com.

New 30-Day Free Trial on

Titanium Indie & Titanium Professional

Our new Titanium subscriptions offer something for everyone, from indie developers to corporate development teams. As you download Titanium Studio, please choose the Titanium edition that is best for you:

• Titanium Indie—Free 30-day trial—get all the software you need to build great apps including: Titanium Studio with mobile debugging, Titanium Mobile, Titanium+Plus modules that extend your apps to the cloud, and early access to new software.
• Titanium Professional—Free 30-day trial—get all the Indie software plus access to Appcelerator helpdesk professionals. Yes, you can test drive support during the trial!
• Titanium Community—Free—get the core Titanium mobile SDK for iOS and Android and Titanium Studio (all current features except mobile debugging).

Upgrade to Titanium Studio now. Choose the free 30-day trial for Titanium Indie or Titanium Professional and you won’t be billed until after your trial period ends.

New Release Webcast

Join us for a new release webcast on June 21st, 9AM PST to learn more about Titanium Studio and the updates in Titanium Mobile 1.7. We’ll walk through several demos and have our engineering team on hand to answer your questions.

According to figures stated in the report, global tablet shipments reached 9.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2010 with Apple continuing to dominate the tablet market with a 75% global share. Although impressive, Apple’s share slipped 20% from 95% in the third quarter, thanks largely to the apparent success of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab which sold over one million units in two months after it launched.

Despite warnings from Google that its Android operating system at the time wasn’t specifically tailored for large-screen tablet devices, manufacturers rushed their Android tablets to market in the fourth quarter, offering low cost devices aimed at capturing early-adopters and those without the budget for an Apple device.

Strategy Analytics expects Android to increase share in the first half of 2011, we tend to agree with them. At the recent CES event, a number of high-powered Android tablet devices were announced, most running Google’s new Android Honeycomb operating system, software that Google hopes will tempt many users away from Apple’s iOS-toting iPad.

Apple is expected to announce its next-generation iPad within the next couple of months, rumours suggesting it will become available in early Summer. We imagine Apple will record phenomenal sales of its new tablet but as the tablet market continues to expand, Android tablets will continue to provide significant competition for consumer hearts and wallets.Image Credit

Love strutting your stuff to that sassy barista at your favorite Starbucks? Starting today, you’ll be able to swipe your iPhone, iPod touch, or BlackBerry at almost all Starbucks locations to pay for your coffee (or delicious reduced-fat Cinnamon cake). The program had been piloted in California and many New York stores and allows you to use the Starbucks Mobile Card iPhone app to add your Starbucks Cards, track rewards, and also reload your cards from your phone. How easy is it to use to pay that Trenta Caramel Frappuccino? Just tap “touch to pay” in the app, hold it up to the scanner at the register and you’re off and running. Or slowly reconsidering ordering a 31oz blended coffee and beverage. Going to give it a go? Let us know, alright?

Read [BlackBerry] Read [iOS]

It felt like the perfect time to refresh the blog and chronicle a new direction my work/play has taken. Over the past few months, I’ve been in the process of expanding my skill set to include the newer development platforms including iOS, Android, HTML5, and Windows Phone. Much like the current technology climate, my bag-of-tools is undergoing the largest retooling in years, and that experience has been extremely enjoyable, particularly when playing with the new HTML5 API’s. Javascript is about to undergo its third renaissance and will finally fill the gapping holes in browsers that Flash has diligently filled for the last decade.

Of course that’s not to say the death of Flash is imminent. Far from it. The latest additions to the Player are very exciting, particularly hardware 3D access which will reinforce Flash’s dominance in browser based gaming. Also given how much faster and nimble Adobe is than the W3C and browser vendors at rolling out technology, Flash will patch future browser holes and likely shape the next HTML standard.

These are exciting times to be an interactive developer. Our industry is being reshaped before our eyes and the advancements are coming rapidly. I expect to participate fully with experiments and projects that explore the new landscape. Here are some personal projects I’ve worked on in the last few months.

jsTerm – JS Telnet terminal emulation done using Canvas2d and WebSockets (node.js on the server side).

BitmapData.js – JS implementation of the AS3 BitmapData class done using Canvas2d.

Particles – Java and C++ interactive 3D particle emitter for Android done using Android NDK.