Tag Archives: Device Central CS5

Device Central CS5 – Accelerometer Emulation

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Many devices now come with Accelerometer, in fact back in late 2007 it was “discovered” that the Nokia N95 had one that wasn’t exposed through an API.  Nokia were in fact using the chip to create better images from the camera by removing the dreaded shakes, and even today it’s one of the best devices for taking pictures and video.

Lately we’ve seen these chips used to rotate the UI or to provide interesting models for user interaction through gestures like shaking.  So we thought it timely to introduce the flash.sensors.Accelerometer API into Flash Player 10.1 and AIR.  With the new API you can create games and applications that make use of the API consistently across device platforms.

In Device Central CS5 we have also added a new feature to help with the testing of applications and content using this API.  The team tell me that this new feature is actually using Flash Player embedded in the panel!

The video below covers this new feature, including the APIs, testing and deployment with Device Central, as well as  a demo on the Google Nexus One.

Device Central CS5 – Multitouch and Debugger

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Of course one of the most long standing and important pieces of integration for Mobile and Devices has been with Flash Professional CS5.  The new version of Flash Professional is what I would call “back on track” after a major gutting, while still adding new features to support mobile and devices.

One of the nicest new additions is the code snippets panel to help you transition from Actionscript 2, as well as a new FLA format based on XML that will help with source control.  Changing the file format is never taken lightly, but I’ve received so much great feedback already for this feature.

In the following video I’m going to walk through the new Multitouch APIs briefly and look at debugging applications between Device Central and Flash Professional.  For some of you that don’t know, with Flash Lite we’ve been without debugger support for five years.  This is like a miracle!

With AIR on Android available later in the year it’s a perfect time to prototype some AIR applications.  You might also begin testing your Flash Player 10.1 content for different browsers using the various instrumentation tools provided; some of which I’ll cover in the next videos.

As with all mobile development it’s much more exciting once you get started!

Thanks to Maso Lin for getting involved in the Pre-release and providing such a nice looking demo.

Adobe @ Mobile World Congress 2010: Free Tickets ;-)

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“Any Device” , that’s our tag line for this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Given the huge investments with our Open Screen Project partners in 2009/2010, you can imagine that this will be our most important event in the mobile calendar.

The Mobile World Congress is a chance for OEMs, Chipset Vendors, Carriers, Content Providers and Developers to meet up and decide the future of our ecosystem.  For the past two years that I’ve attended we have gone from 400million devices with Flash, to over 1.2Billion and this year will see a massive step change in our strategy with the launch of Flash Player 10.1.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan will be onsite to talk with our partners, and to discuss key challenges in the mobile and devices ecosystem and how we’re working to solve these issues with our Open Screen Project partnerships.

We’ll be showing Flash Player 10.1 experiences optimized for various devices platforms like Android, Palm and Windows Mobile.  Our booth will be packed with demos of multi-screen contextual experiences, games running across platforms and we’ll be showing off Device Central CS5 too.

With this being such a big event for us, we thought it would be nice for Flash developers to share this event with us.  So if you want to come along on us, and see the whole event for free then send us an email :-)

mwcstaff@adobe.com

For more information and updates then check out our micro-site for the event.

Adobe and RIM to simplify the delivery of rich content and applications

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Today our Open Screen Project partner RIM kicked off their annual Blackberry Developer Conference in San Francisco.  This year we’re seeing a central theme from the conference and that’s Blackberry as a web platform, and announced more details around the support that you can expect for the Blackberry platform within the upcoming tools in Creative Suite 5.

This year Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen was there to talk about our upcoming support in Creative Suite 5 for the Blackberry platform. This builds on the vision for our joint collaboration in the Open Screen Project and the work we’re doing to get Flash Player 10.1 running in the Blackberry browser.

Today RIM & Adobe also announced that we’ll be optimizing Adobe AIR and the Flex Mobile Framework for the Blackberry platform , making RIM the first OEM to announce support for Adobe AIR and Flex Mobile.

From developers the most obvious integration point will be in Adobe Device Central CS5, which enables the easy development and testing of content for Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Fireworks CS5.  These new tools aim to enable the production of content for use in Blackberry’s Java Plug-in for Eclipse, BlackBerryWidgets, and the BlackBerry Theme Studio tools.  In fact the new Theme Studio supports Flash and Photoshop files through its handy import mechanism, so you can easily create themes alongside SVG support in Illustrator.

Additionally, for consumers we’re also going to enable use of our Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.com products for sharing and editing videos and photos taken on Blackberry phones.

(The BlackBerry Bold runs a 624Mhz Marvell CPU)

So let’s have a look at Blackberry in more detail to give us an idea of where the opportunities are.  Recently we’ve seen the launch of Blackberry App World back in April, the addition of a new Widgets SDK, the Blackberry Theme Studio tools and of course the continued work on their Java platform for applications.  These strides toward a more open web platform have enabled users to access rich Internet content like never before, and as you’ll see below; they love content.

From an addressable market view, Blackberry devices are sold in vast numbers in the US market.  So let’s look at some key stats from Comscore on their behavior there,  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised:

  • 14.2m devices
  • 50/50 male and female audience
  • 25-34 age range
  • 43% earn over $100k
  • 64.7% of RIM users are browsing the Web
  • More than half a million are using dating services
  • 15% are interested in Tech news
  • 20% are accessing Maps (they travel more than most users)
  • 14% are downloading games (triple the norm!), with card, casino and arcade prevalence
  • 20% have changed their theme or wallpapers, 3x higher than normal
  • 1/4 are using online media storage / facebook etc

So on average a Blackberry user earns, spends, travels and browses the Internet about 3x more than users of other platforms.  This makes them a high value target in your development of applications and services, and important customers for niche and business oriented content.  With the Blackberry App World growing steadily (200,000 developers) in partnership with Verizon I can see a clear opportunity there with their joint customers, and one really nice feature is the $2.99 minimum price for a paid application!

You can watch the Keynote recording here, and yes it’s done with Silverlight for some reason :-)

Why not drop on over to www.adobe.com/go/blackberry to learn more and see some videos previewing the upcoming tooling integration announced today. Creating Graphics Optimized for BlackBerry in Adobe Creative Suite

Watch Data Integration with ColdFusion 9 and ORM

Further to the announcement of the alliance between Research In Motion and Adobe, this video illustrates the creation of graphical assets optimized for BlackBerry smartphones using Adobe Creative Suite. (6:17)

Launch video

Building BlackBerry Widgets Using Adobe Dreamweaver

Watch ColdFusion 9 Exposed as Flex Services

Further to the announcement of the alliance between Research In Motion and Adobe, this video illustrates the creation of a BlackBerry Widget using Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-leading web content authoring tool. (2:38)

Launch video