Category Archives: Flash Catalyst

See the Flash Platform in Action

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Companies often turn to the Adobe Flash Platform to solve business problems. From data visualization to customer self service, here are some great rich Internet applications (RIAs) developed by Universal Mind that executed business ideas to make them a reality. Built with Adobe Flash Platform technologies like AIR and Flash Builder and integrating Creative Suite tools, check these RIAs from Kodak, SpatialKey and SchoolVIEW to see what’s possible and learn about the ease of cross-platform app development!

Watch how Universal Mind used Adobe Flash Platform technologies to build the Photo Book app for Kodak, helping them offer a profitable online service allowing customers to easily create their own Photo Books to share “Kodak Moments.”

 

See how SpatialKey uses Adobe Flash Platform technologies to create a flexible tool for enterprises that rely on large location-based data to better present timely information for better decision making.

 

Learn how SchoolVIEW by Universal Mind used Adobe Flash Platform technologies to enable the Colorado Department of Education to present student and school achievement data to help administrators, parents and government funders make better decisions regarding education, creating a uniform approach to student educational achievement.

PrePress Center Powers the Flip-Page Experience with the Flash Platform

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When the developers at PrePress Center Oy, a European-based company focusing on digital publishing solutions, set out to make print-to-screen, magazine-style publishing easier and more powerful, they turned to the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe Creative Suite software to create eDocker.

eDocker, a 2010 MAX Award finalist in the digital publishing category, is an Adobe AIR application that lets publishers produce easy-to-customize, digital flip-page documents directly from Adobe InDesign CS5. Aside from AIR, eDocker was created using Flash Platform tools, including Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst, Flash Player and Flex. The resulting application replicates the format of the original InDesign publication and delivers magazine-style publications to the broadest possible audience for playback via Flash Player.

As a result of using Adobe Flash Platform technologies to build eDocker, PrePress Center was able to reduce programming costs and accelerate its development cycle. And the Flash Platform technologies have poised eDocker for tablet and mobile versions in the future using the existing code base in the Flash Platform environment.  Since it’s made with Adobe AIR, PrePress can monetize eDocker and sell the application through Adobe InMarket on multiple application stores, and can run on both Mac and PC systems.  Find out more about how PrePress Center used Flash Platform technologies to create eDocker here.

Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 Accelerate Mobile App Development, Adding Performance and Productivity

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Today is a great day for developers who are building applications for mobile devices. We are extremely excited to announce the upcoming release of Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 along with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 (CS5.5), offering unprecedented new capabilities for building mobile applications and content. These new products offer a new mobile development paradigm – allowing you to use one tool, one development framework, and one codebase to build mobile applications on Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS platforms.

What this means is that you can use Flash Builder 4.5 to build great looking, high performing mobile applications, and then package them as ready-to-deploy mobile apps that you can submit to an app store/market. No more need to learn different languages and tools for different mobile platforms. In May, you will be able to package apps for Android, and shortly thereafter, you will be able to compile apps for BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS using free updates that we plan to ship for Flex and Flash Builder in June.

Check out this video with Platform Evangelist Serge Jespers to see this new development flow in action:

Also new with this release is the addition of Flash Builder 4.5 Premium to Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium and Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection. Now you can get all of the tools that you need to build the most expressive applications for mobile, web, and desktop platforms all in a single suite.

To learn what’s new in Flash Builder 4.5, read this article and watch this video for more details on mobile development using Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex SDK 4.5:

Additionally, updates in Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5.5 feature a new round-trip workflow with Flash Builder 4.5 allowing designers and developers to work in parallel. Now designers can open, make changes and save Flex projects that were created or previously edited in Flash Builder, leading to faster delivery of applications. Designers can rapidly prototype user interfaces for resizable Flex-based websites and applications with new components, craft more precise and expressive transitions and effects, and efficiently design developer-built custom components.

Take a peek at this video, Introduction to Flash Catalyst CS5.5:

Lastly, Adobe and Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today introduced Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP software, a brand new integrated product helping PHP developers create rich Internet applications (RIAs) for mobile, Web and desktop leveraging the Flash Platform. For the first time, developers now have the benefit of an integrated development environment (IDE), combining the capabilities of Flash Builder and Zend Studio for rapidly creating Flex and PHP applications. Now, with a single code base developers can deliver applications for Android, Blackberry Tablet OS and iOS while sharing code from Web applications, noticeably reducing the time and cost of application creation and maintenance. 

Check out these articles for the latest product features and capabilities:

- Introducing Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK

- Understanding the new workflows in Flash Builder 4.5 and Flash Catalyst CS5.5

- Introducing Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP

We hope you’ll explore all that CS5.5 has to offer to create new digital experiences for major smartphones and tablets. Let us know what you think of the latest enhancements to Flash Builder 4.5, Flex 4.5 and Flash Catalyst CS5.5!

Lucid Design Group Uses the Flash Platform to Help Save the World One Dashboard at a Time

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With global warming on the rise, Lucid Design Group, a privately held cleantech software company, wanted to create something that would educate and inspire people to change their daily habits to help reduce consumption in their homes and offices (like turning off lights and unplugging appliances). Lucid developed Building Dashboard, a data visualization and communication application that monitors the use of electricity, water, natural gas and heating, and encourages social networking around the topic of resource conservation. It’s available via the Web, kiosks and mobile devices using the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium. With Building Dashboard (a MAX 2010 award finalist) in place, Fortune 500 companies, universities and residential customers saw consistent energy reductions up to 20 percent.

Coined “the first social network for buildings,” Building Dashboard employed the Flash Platform to help develop and deliver widgets, apps, maps and flow lists to encourage users of all technical backgrounds to save resources and understand their resource consumption levels. Currently, nearly 100 U.S. colleges and universities are using Building Dashboard to support key sustainability initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions across campus.

To streamline the developmental process behind Building Dashboard, Lucid used a variety of Adobe products including Flash Catalyst, Flash Player, Flex, Flash Professional, Photoshop and Flash Builder. The advantage of working with various Adobe products is seamless integration. For example, Adobe Flash Builder helped improve the Flex development process while Adobe Flash Catalyst and Adobe Flash Builder expedited design/developer workflow, ultimately reducing design and development time by one third. By adding Adobe Flash Player to the mix, Lucid developers could run their product across different platforms, devices and operating systems, while cutting testing time in half.

To learn more about how Lucid worked with Adobe technologies and to see how New York-based Hamilton College uses Building Dashboard, read their story here.

Wacom Showcases the Power of the Pen and Multi-Touch with the Flash Platform

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Leading tablet maker Wacom has always pushed the envelope when it comes to creative expression. However, when the company wanted to extend its brand from the physical world to the virtual one (targeting the mass consumer market) they decided to go with the Adobe Flash Platform given its ease of use and broad reach.

After bringing on the help of digital agencies Gugga and Fantasy Interactive, Wacom created Bamboo Dock, a downloadable Adobe AIR desktop application that holds, manages and launches applications for Wacom’s line of Bamboo tablets. Aside from AIR, Bamboo Dock was developed using Flash Platform tools, including Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. (Bamboo Dock even won an Adobe 2010 MAX Award in the ‘Social Computing’ category).

With the stroke of a pen, users can open and minimize the Bamboo Dock as well as open and add applications—providing a fast way to access fun, easy and useful tools for everything from note taking and doodling to gaming and sharing work with friends. Wacom turned to the Flash Platform to inspire users, drive hardware sales and bring creative users together through a growing lineup of applications.

In its first year, Bamboo Dock helped Wacom sell 30 percent more Bamboo tablets than the previous year, and they received 3 million application downloads plus 600,000 dock downloads. Strong technology integration across the Flash Platform allowed Wacom to quickly make updates and deliver results in a third of the time they anticipated. Already in the works, Wacom plans to transfer its applications across multiple devices and platforms. Find out more about how Wacom used Flash Platform technologies to deliver Bamboo Dock here.

A BIG Thank You to our Facebook Fans

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UPDATED: Two new vids from Adobe Flash Professional engineers – scroll to watch.

Wow – we’ve hit a Flash Facebook page milestone – 100,000 fans! Nice! Thank you for all the love you’ve shown us. The Flash community is one of the most supportive, creative, and cool communities out there, thanks to you. Lee Brimelow, Flash Platform evangelist, decided to share a few words of gratis in the vid below. He also talks about how Flash changed him when he was just a lad (uh..how old are you, Lee…how old is Flash again…?)





We invite you to join us in celebrating our 100k Friends of Flash on Facebook milestone by telling us your own Flash story. Show us a demo of your proudest Flash moment (project, site, game…) and tell us about how Flash has changed you and we’ll feature it on our facebook page. Simply create a video, upload it to YouTube and share the link with us. We’ll highlight it in our “Flash Fan Stories” YouTube Playlist. Or, simply post the video and/or your thoughts to your Facebook page and tag it with @Adobe Flash and we’ll find you.


Can’t wait to hear your Flash story!

Went to Max? Got a Droid 2? We Want Your Apps!

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Thanks to all of you who joined us at MAX 2010. We hope your new Droid 2 is already helping you create some amazing mobile experiences that use Flash Player and Adobe AIR because we want to expose what you’re making! Adobe and Motorola are looking for cool new Flash Player compatible web sites and AIR for Android apps that will ‘wow’ Droid users – whether they are regular folks or business types. If you have something great, it could be featured in:

  • Motorola print or TV ads
  • Adobe TV demos and success stories
  • The m.flash.com showcase
  • The Adobe Times Square billboard
  • Demos at industry events
  • SHOP4APPS by Motorola – currently available in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and China (1 million + downloads in China)

So submit your apps and sites here!

Need help getting started? Go to the Adobe Mobile and Devices Developer Center.

Important Upcoming Dates

To submit for CES (January 6-9, 2011)
Deadline: December 17

To submit for Mobile World Congress (Feb 14-17, 2011)
Deadline: January 5

Day One at Adobe MAX 2010!

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Greetings from MAX 2010, where the news is all about how the Flash Platform is powering the multi screen revolution. It’s been a really exciting Day One keynote, full of surprises, and this morning we’ve seen the following from Kevin Lynch & his special guests:

  • Web authoring is being enhanced, including CSS support to optimize delivery of HTML content for multiple screens, a new prototype (“Edge”) which enhances motion design (and is built on JQuery), and Site Catalyst support in CS Live for Web/browser adoption stats
  • It’s a good thing…when Martha Stewart herself is on stage! She showed off a beautiful new version of Martha Stewart Living magazine on an iPad, recognizably branded, followed by Kevin showing Wired magazine on the 16×9 Malata tablet running Android. Kevin was then joined by Joe Simon, the CEO of Condé Nast to talk about how they are optimizing delivery of CN magazines using Adobe tools on multiple devices (including the New Yorker showing off dynamic pagination in HTML), demonstrating this on the iPad, Malata, and Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets. Kevin continued with some exciting sneak peeks including dynamic wrapping of text around shapes in HTML, and the New Digital Publishing Suite for publishers who want to create, produce, distribute & monetize, & analyze their content (now in beta), as well as an announcement that Adobe is contributing to WebKit
  • Moving on to the digital home, Kevin showed off a Samsung TV streaming Amazon’s Video on Demand service with HD video on a GoogleTV, as well as HBO Go HD video, with support for StageVideo. AIR is not only for Android but also for TVs – and the CTO of Epix, Marc Goldberg, made a special appearance to show off a new Epix app for TVs. In FMS, you’ll soon have on-the-fly video encoding support as well as P2P support for video (the keynote today was being streamed using P2P)
  • And how about some editing on tablets? Demos included not only content aware and fill, but also color mixing on a tablet interacting with Photoshop running on a laptop
  • As for the enterprise, there are new LiveCycle ES 2.5 announcements, and David Nüescheler, CTO of Day Software, joined Kevin on stage to demonstrate multi screen content for enterprise. Kevin then showed off an eUnity healthcare demo – built in Flex 4.5, now in beta – showcasing how a Canadian hospital is now viewing/interacting with MRIs in the Flash Player…on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet! (You can see a video of the BB PlayBook here later today.) Mike Lazarides, RIM President & Co-CEO joined Kevin onstage to talk about how the UI for the PlayBook is based on AIR, and then demo’ed some AIR apps on the PlayBook, including SAP’s CIO Cockpit, SalesForce Chatter, and HD video from BBC Motion Gallery, and showing off multi-tasking on the tablet. The SDK is now available for the PlayBook, and those developers who write an app that’s accepted by RIM will be eligible for a free BlackBerry PlayBook.
  • In gaming, Kevin showed off Sony Picture’s “Green Hornet” movie Flash-based game for desktop and mobile, as well as hardware accelerated graphics in a Retro Shooter game on an HTC phone. He entertained the crowd with the Idle Worship game, a new social game now in beta – particularly entertaining if you’ve ever wanted to throw a lightning bolt. Following that, he showed off game controller support for Flash while demo’ing Meteor Storm, and then came the big gaming surprise – a prototype of a 3D driving game that took full advantage of hardware acceleration, which he navigated using a USB steering wheel from Logitech. Here’s a preview of this 3D functionality which will be available in an upcoming release of Flash Player and AIR
  • And at the very end came an announcement that got a huge response, when Christy Wyatt, Corporate Vice President from Motorola announced that all MAX attendees were getting a free Motorola Droid 2 phone, because “anyone who’s not giving you Flash on a mobile device is not giving you the Internet.”

All of this coming on the heels of our news announcements today, including the release of Adobe® AIR® 2.5 SDK for televisions, tablets, smartphones and desktop operating systems (http://blogs.adobe.com/air) and these other announcements:

  • http://m.flash.com has been updated with AIR for Android apps and social features, so you can share your favorite sites or apps as well as submit your site to Adobe; now available, http://tv.flash.com with 12 experiences powered by Flash for Google TV

Lots of sessions to come, and more fun previews tomorrow with @BenForta and his special guests. Keep an eye on this blog for new updates throughout MAX!

Hot Off the Press from MAX 2010

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This week at MAX 2010, Adobe makes several exciting announcements that will enable designers, developers and content owners to fully embrace today’s multiscreen revolution across PCs, smartphones, tables, and TVs.

  • Runtime: Adobe unveils AIR 2.5 for televisions, tablets, smart phones and desktops. Adobe AIR now supports smartphones and tablets based on Android, iOS, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and desktop operating systems. In addition, Samsung will be the first television manufacturer to ship Adobe AIR in its line of Samsung SmartTV devices while RIM, Motorola, Acer, HTC, Samsung and others are expected to ship the runtime pre-installed on smartphones and other devices starting this year and early 2011. Visit Adobe AIR team blog for details.
  • Tools: As part of AIR 2.5 announcement, Adobe also announces previews of developer tools including Flash Professional CS 5 extension for AIR 2.5 beta,  Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and Flex mobile framework, which will make the process of multiscreen development more streamlined. The preview release of the open source Flex framework provides developers with a common framework for building Web, desktop and now mobile applications. Developers can build standalone mobile Flex applications with the same ease and quality as on Web and desktop platforms. For details visit Adobe Flex team blog.
  • Services: Adobe also launches Adobe InMarket, a new service that allows developers to easily distribute and sell their applications on app stores across different device types from Acer, Intel, and others. To get started with InMarket, visit Adobe Developer Connection

Lastly, don’t miss the MAX keynote in the morning on Monday, Oct. 25 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific. Sign up for live streaming of the keynote at the MAX 2010 website at http://max.adobe.com/online/.

MAX 2010: "Are You Smarter…?" Survey! We Need Help!

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As I posted last week, we’re doing a live game show at MAX – a quiz show that will pit 2 teams against each other; one team of Adobe Flash evangelists and one team of Adobe Flash community experts.

One section of our game will be a survey question in the form of a Family Feud question. Haven’t seen or heard of Family Feud? Watch this. Scroll to minute 3:48 and you’ll see one member of each team coming to the center with the host, getting a survey question and trying to be the first to buzz in with an answer. The person who buzzes in first gets to answer first, and if their answer ranks highest on the answer board, they can try to fill in all the answers or pass to the other team.

Our game show “Community Round” will be in the same vein. So… TAKE OUR SURVEY! It’s three easy questions where we want you to rank your answers. It’l take you 3 mins. Then be sure to join us at MAX 2010 at 4:30 PM PT on the pavilion stage where your responses will be part of the game. We’ll also record the show and get online – so stay tuned for links.


Again – Take the survey and help us stump the evangelists!