Adobe Flash Platform Blog

It’s been a big week for the Web with the launch of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 betas. Our announcement was just one day prior to Microsoft announcing the latest beta version of their runtime. Serendipity aside, the Microsoft offering is actually a bit flattering for us on the Flash Platform team. Quite a few of the new features of the Silverlight beta appear to be following in a path created by the Flash Platform confirming that Microsoft sees the need for solutions that the Flash community has been using for years. They are also strongly affirming the role Flash has played in enabling the rise of rich Internet applications and helping people create more capable and usable line-of-business, data-centric applications. But more than anything, I was struck during the PDC with how far the Flash Platform has moved the standard for application development forward over the last two years.

As our CTO Kevin Lynch has been talking about for a few years now, the future of software innovation requires consistent platforms that work across devices. Work on the new Flash Platform runtimes, Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2, is a direct part of the Open Screen Project efforts, which is an industry-wide initiative with one vision: enable people to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere.

In addition to Flash’s innovation leadership, our work with the Open Screen Project demonstrates another way Adobe is unique among technology platform providers. Flash has a long history of supporting technology integration and industry collaboration, and Adobe has been investing in mobile and the digital home as an enabling technology, not as a competitor. Adobe is in a unique position because our business model complements those of the almost 50 Open Screen Project partners across their many lines of business, and thus Flash can achieve the cross-platform and cross-device reach unlike any other platform. When Flash Player 10.1 ships in 2010, we will double the number of operating systems that the full Flash Player can reach, to include a broad range of mobile devices — not just Windows, or Mac and Linux, but also Solaris, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm webOS and BlackBerry. The same mobile-optimized Flash Platform applications can even be compiled as iPhone apps, providing the most productive way to reach users across all leading platforms.

Flash Platform innovations lead the industry and surpassing its core strengths will be no easy feat:

• Flash Player is on over 98% of Internet-connected PCs (source: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html)


• Flash Player 10 was on more than 93% of PCs in under 10 months


• Flash Player powers approximately 75% of web video (source: comScore)


• Over 70% of Web games are built using Flash (source: internal Adobe survey)


• Adobe is working with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers worldwide to bring Flash support to their devics


• 7 of top 10 ISVs use the Flex framework (source: internal Adobe survey)


• Cross-OS/cross-browser consistency


• Best-in-class design-develop workflow and cross-OS tooling


• Adobe has always been and will continue to be committed to backward compatibility


• Flash Platform integrates with heterogeneous IT environments

We have a variety of new resources for developers and business decision-makers to learn more about the Flash Platform. Check them out:

• Adobe Flash Platform developer resources - Adobe Developer Connection


• Adobe AIR developer resources - Adobe Developer Connection


• Adobe Flash Player developer resources - Adobe Developer Connection


• List of Adobe AIR 2 features for developers and designers


• List of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 features and enhancements


• MAX 2009 demo of multi-touch features in AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1


• MAX 2009 demo of new features in AIR 2


• Flash Player 10.1 public prerelease demos and interviews

The Adobe Cookbooks application is your one-stop shop for finding and sharing community generated code samples. One of the great new features of the recently re-designed Cookbooks application is the recipe request feature. This allows users who cannot locate their desired code sample to put out a request for it to other community members. Additionally, fellow community members can vote for specific requests so that users can determine at a glance which requests are the most popular.

A list of recipe requests can be seen on the home page for each of the technologies that the Adobe Cookbooks support. Currently, the Flex Cookbook has the most unanswered recipe requests. You can also easily stay current on the queue of requests by subscribing to the uber RSS feed, or you can get notified of requests for specific technologies like Flex.

And while answering a recipe request won't bring you fame and fortune, it will give you:

• The opportunity to have the request you addressed featured in the Adobe Developer Connection
• That warm fuzzy feeling you get from assisting your fellow developers
• The potential to have your recipe included in an upcoming version of the O'Reilly Flex Cookbook
• Visibility on adobe.com via the Adobe Cookbook recognition features for contributors

Also, for a limited time, every person who addresses a recipe request will be sent a free copy of the Getting Started with Flex 3 Pocket Guide. Just email Ed Sullivan with a link to the recipe request you plan on addressing and then after you publish it, just sit back and wait for your book to arrive!

So if you know how to create a simple shopping cart with Flex 3, what are you waiting for?!

One of the popular features in the prerelease versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 is the multi-touch capability. If you haven't seen it, you should check out this video of Kevin Lynch showing a couple of innovative examples using the multi-touch and "gestures" capabilities on the HP TouchSmart during the keynote at the MAX developer conference last month. We hope you will be able to explore and innovate using the new features in Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. See what you can do with them.

At the Adobe MAX developer conference last month we unveiled the next release of Adobe Flash Player that delivers on the promise of the Open Screen Project - a consistent, cross-OS runtime across desktop and mobile devices. Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the first public developer prerelease of Flash Player 10.1 on Adobe Labs. While this initial prerelease is for desktop operating systems, we will be updating the prelease between now and general availability in the first half of 2010 to add more features (e.g., global error handler), performance improvements, new tooling options and support for mobile platforms.

Developers can test their existing SWF content and start working with some of the exciting new capabilities that result from bringing the full Flash Player to mobile devices. For example, as users increasingly interact with devices using their fingers, developers can now create entirely new types of applications that use multi-touch points and gestures on touch screen devices, including those running Windows 7. And because AIR 2, also available today as a prerelease, is a superset of Flash Player 10.1, those same capabilities can be used outside the browser.

Consumers are welcome to try the beta to preview hardware acceleration of H.264 video on supported Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks. The release notes provide details on supported graphics cards and drivers that support video hardware acceleration.

To get started with Flash Player 10.1, check out the information on Adobe Labs, download the prerelease, read the release notes, file bugs, provide feedback on the user forums, get tips on optimizing the performance of graphic and video content and prepare for mobile!

- The Flash Player team

Increasingly the Web is social. It is becoming important to make applications social. To make it easier to integrate your application with Facebook, MySpace and other social networks, we made the Social service available through Adobe Labs.

The Social service (currently in beta) enables you to write applications that integrate leading social networks such as Facebook and MySpace into your apps. The service, implemented through an easy to use API, provides an abstraction layer that connects with different networks. This removes the complexity and repetitive work of having to implement multiple APIs in order to integrate social features from multiple social networks into your application. The service also insulates developers against underlying social network changes, as the underlying APIs at the supported social networks change, the service adapts to those changes so you don’t have to rush updated versions of your app to market.

Check out the Social service on Adobe Labs.

Today, at RIM's annual Blackberry Developer Conference in San Francisco, Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen were there to jointly announce the upcoming support in Creative Suite 5 for the BlackBerry platform.  As part of the announcement, Adobe and RIM will also be working together to optimize Adobe AIR for the BlackBerry platform, making RIM the first OEM to announce support for Adobe AIR. This alliance between two companies builds on the momentum we started in early October when RIM joined the Open Screen Project and committed to bringing Flash Player to BlackBerry.

You can read more about the tools support for the Blackberry platform on Ryan Stewart's blog and see a preview of the tools' workflows in action on Adobe Developer Center. In addition, Adobe platform evangelist, Mark Doherty posted some great insights to the latest stats on the BlackBerry market and what it means to Adobe designers and developers who are interested in taking advantage of this new opportunity. 

Yesterday a number of blogs started to discuss the content on the Flash Player download center for iPhone users. There have been some questions about the site, so I want to provide a little background on the page.

We currently get nearly three million visitors to this page each month from people who are looking for the Flash Player for their iPhone or iPod touch, many of whom were leaving the download center believing that either (1) Adobe didn't want Flash on the iPhone or (2) the iPhone was somehow technically incapable of playing Flash content. Since neither of those is true, we are now explaining to those visitors that Apple holds the key in getting Flash Player onto the device.

The language was compact and to the point both because of the constraints of the page (this is displayed only to the iPhone) and the audience (consumers who are looking for the Flash Player aren't interested in reading a long piece of text). I also want to mention that Apple and Adobe have a strong partnership in many areas, but, Apple has not provided the level of support required to deliver the Flash Player to the iPhone. Nearly every other industry player is working with us in getting Flash technology onto their devices and platforms. These partners are making critical, high value investments in delivering Flash Player on mobile devices, on netbooks, and in the digital home.

To be clear, Adobe wants to make Flash Player 10.1 available for the iPhone and with Apple's support we're ready to do the work -- just as we and our partners are doing for Blackberry, Palm webOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and many other platforms to give users uncompromised access to the web.

Flex developers interested in new opportunities may want to look at the developer preview of Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. Flash Builder for Force.com is a new development tool for building cloud-based, rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be deployed in the browser through Adobe Flash Player or on the desktop leveraging Adobe AIR. In the tutorial series, Building a desktop application with Flash Builder for Force.com, Jeanette Stallons steps developers through the process of building an application from start to finish, covering salesforce.com, Stratus, Flex, and AIR fundamentals.

Also be sure to check out the newly released Day 4 of our popular video training, Flex 4 beta in a Week, to learn about extending events, accessing remote data, and creating a typed data model.

Apart from the data-centric capabilities, Flex 4 support, and other great features, Flash Builder 4 beta 2 introduces some new and updated features to improve developer productivity and make writing MXML and ActionScript code faster and easier. Read the article by Jason San Jose, Developer productivity improvements in Flash Builder 4 beta, to learn about the Call Hierarchy view, enhanced states syntax support, changes to code hints, and editor improvements.

Developers interested in sharing open standards and best practices for video player applications built on the Adobe Flash Platform may wish to check out the Open Source Media Framework and then follow R Blank's tutorial presentations, Building video players in Flash with the OSMF, to get a feeling for how the OSMF helps standardize the way that media players—particularly video players—are built on the Flash Platform.

The Omniture acquisition officially closed today. This marks a new chapter for Adobe as we begin work on key product integrations to deliver a complete solution from content creation through optimization. For designers and developers, this means you will be able to build user-centric applications that incorporate measurement and optimization into the early stages of the creation process and refine them to increase usage, satisfaction and monetization. You can get an executive perspective from Shantanu's blog posting on the Adobe Corporate blog.

For the Flash Platform, here is a highlight of the strategic integrations that our teams will begin to work on:

• Integrating Omniture’s analytics and optimization solutions with the Flash Platform to make engaging content and applications running in Flash Player and Adobe AIR measurable and easily optimized - and extending the Flex framework to include easy-to-use analytics components.
  
  
• Integrating Omniture video analytics and optimization capabilities with the Flash Platform. Also, continuing to invest in advancing this complete video capability based on emerging customer requirements to support better targeting, engagement and monetization.
  
  
• Integrating Omniture solutions to analyze and optimize experiences and content consumed across multiple screens, including smartphones, Internet-connected televisions and other devices.

For more information, visit the Omniture acquisition page.

Today we announced the partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe. The new offering, Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed IDE that provides a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR. This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform.

As a developer, you'll be able to get a combined Force.com and Flash Builder tool so you never have to switch environments to create Flex applications on top of the Force.com platform. The new tool exposes a new project type, the Force.com stratus type, and lets you automatically connect your applications to the Force.com platform using a WSDL file. Then you can use the data features of Flash Builder to connect your data in the cloud with Flex components. It also has support out of the box for creating AIR applications that support online/offline synchronization and LiveCycle Data Services integration.

You can check out the video below for some getting started information. There is also a fantastic Force.com quickstart on Adobe's Developer Connection and a lot of other information on the Force.com section of Devnet. Finally there will be a live webinar on November 3rd with James Ward and Markus Spohn where you can see a demo and then ask questions about how it all fits together.

The new tool and the partnership really simplify the process of connecting your Flex apps to the Force.com platform so that you can focus more time on building a really great user interface that exposes those services. We're looking forward to seeing what kinds of applications you create with the Flash Platform and Force.com.

We are pleased to announce that the current version of Adobe AIR (1.5.2) supports Windows 7. For additional information on supported operating systems, please see our Adobe AIR system requirements page.

With the official release of Microsoft Windows 7 today, we are pleased to report that the current release of Flash Player 10 (10.0.32) already supports the new operating system. See the Flash Player system requirements for further information.

At MAX 2009, we announced the commercial availability of the Collaboration service. The service is available as Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS) and is part of the Adobe Flash Platform Services.

With this service, developers can easily add real-time, multi-user collaboration and social capabilities into their applications. Social interaction over the web has moved beyond just e-mail and messaging with friends and family. Users now expect in-context collaborative functionality in a wide variety of applications across business, education, and entertainment. Social games are a common example, but users increasingly require similar real-time interactions in other areas, such as online customer service, e-learning applications, and alongside news and sports broadcasts.

See examples
A number of developers are already using the service to power their applications. See the examples in this showcase.

Get started for free
Visit the LCCS developer portal and create an account. Just use your existing Adobe ID or create a new one. Then, download the SDK Navigator, which will guide you through the LCCS SDK.

The service is available worldwide and can be purchased today with a payment card. For detailed information on our pay-per-use pricing model, please check out our Pricing FAQ.

Learn how to use the service
We have created a number of videos to help you get started including one that tells you how to build your first application with the Collaboration service. You can access the videos and get more information at the Adobe Developer Connection.

Have you seen the October issue of the Edge newsletter? It's now live on Adobe.com. Produced by the Adobe Developer Relations team, the Edge has 1.7 million subscribers worldwide. It features video, articles and tutorials for developers and designers who create content and applications for the web.

In this month’s video, Edge Managing Editor Julie Campagna is on the scene at Adobe MAX 2009. See a snapshot of this year's lively event, including announcements, technology previews, and commentary from attendees.

Also included in the issue:

• An introduction to developing games on the Adobe Flash Platform by Samuel Asher Rivello
• From black box to contextual applications by Eric Oldrin
• The edge of Flash by Rob Ford
• A guide to Adobe developer groups and resources online by Bryan Rinaldi
• Unveiling WorkflowLab: A new tool for developing project workflows by Doug Winnie
• Object Relational Mapping for the Adobe AIR developer by David Tucker

Sign up to receive the Edge via email. If you missed MAX, you can watch the sessions on AdobeTV.

Today at Adobe MAX we previewed the next version of Adobe Flash Player, 10.1, that runs on mobile devices, netbooks and PCs. This is the full version of the Flash Player, with the same set of the features as the desktop based Flash Player. That same Flash Player was also shown running on a variety of netbooks as well. With the release of Flash Player 10.1, you'll be able to create contextual applications that provide a customized experience - applications that are aware of the device that they're being run on, and modify their UI accordingly. While it's not available in a public beta just yet, it will be available before the end of this year for Windows, Mac and Linux, along with Windows Mobile and Palm Web OS.

At MAX we also showed off a new feature of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 that allows designers and developers using ActionScript 3 to create applications for the Apple iPhone. Flash developers will soon be able to submit applications to the Apple App Store -- and there are already a bunch of applications available in the store now including: Red Hood, Chroma Circuit, Trading Stuff, Fickleblox, That Roach Game, and Just Letters. While, unfortunately, this isn't Flash Player for the iPhone, it's going to open up a lot of opportunities for developers to be able to build applications for the iPhone using Flash. There's more information about applications for the iPhone available on

We also announced the 2nd betas of Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Flash Catalyst and ColdFusion Builder beta 2. Available for download today, Flash Builder 4 adds refinements to many new features from beta 1, and will help you become more successful using the new Flex 4 framework, providing more clarity between the use of Flex 3 and Flex 4 throughout the IDE. The new data-centric development features have also evolved and expanded based on beta 1 user feedback, providing improved UI and workflow for common tasks.

(Note that the Flash Builder 4 beta 2 release expires after 60 days. See below on how to extend it.)

The easiest way to change the look and feel of those applications is to have your designer design the application using Adobe Flash Catalyst beta 2. It lets designers create rich user interfaces easily using designs from Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks and then lets developers open those projects up directly in Flash Builder 4 to add other code (things like database connections etc...). The new Flash Catalyst beta 2 adds support for video and enhanced interaction options.

Today and tomorrow's keynote will be streamed live at max.adobe.com. It will include demos of applications from many leading brands, showcasing how they're improving the user experience of their websites with the Adobe Flash Platform. We've also made 3 sessions per day from MAX available online. All the sessions from Adobe MAX will be available on the MAX website in the next few weeks.

** To extend Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 **

To continue using Flash Builder 4 beta 2 after 60 days you need to own a copy of Flex Builder 3 and use that serial number to get a serial number to remove the timeout in Flash Builder 4. If you don't yet own Flex Builder 3, you can buy it with maintenance, which will provide you with a free upgrade to Flash Builder 4 when its released. Yyou can purchase that by calling a Flex sales rep. Email Eardley Walker or phone 206-275-2831 for more details. Flex Builder 3 maintenance cannot be purchased through the online store.

Are you a Dollhouse fan? Now you can download a new desktop app Fox released last night called "Virtual Echo." Developed by the marketing agency, Blitz using the Adobe AIR, the app activates nine different Echo personae—like “assassin” or “dream date”—that traipse across your desktop including augmented reality functionality. You can print out the marker and “interact” with the main character in 3D via webcam. The augmented reality in this app is unique in that it's using higher quality video than what has been used with Adobe Flash in the past. Congratulations to the design and development team at Blitz for creating this innovative app using the capabilities in the AIR technology!

Hi!

At MAX this year we will have a bunch of session specially devoted to the Open Screen Project. We've been working on OSP for quite some time now with new partners, the OSP Fund and of course on the product side on delivering a consistent runtime that works across multiple platforms and devices. While you will hear a lot about the product related updates in the Keynote and other sessions, we've designed the OSP sessions to provide you with a chance to see how other developers, agencies and brands are already working on delivering applications across multiple devices. We really hope you find these sessions helpful!

Now to your Menu of OSP related sessions:

Title: Open Screen Project: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Learn what the Open Screen Project is and how it furthers Adobe's
vision of a consistent runtime environment across desktops, mobile
phones, televisions and other consumer electronic devices. See demos
of content and applications spanning multiple devices and find out how
you can tap into the US$10 million Open Screen Project Fund.

Twitter Hash: #adobemax313
Date/Time: October 7 at 02:00PM
Room: 503

Title: Paramount's "Circle of 8": Business Case for a Multidevice
Strategy

Paramount Digital Entertainment is working on a new movie format that
plays out on multiple devices. The first movie to come out on with
this new movie production model is the 'Circle of 8', due for public
release late October. Keith Quinn and Sean Naughton have both worked
on the actual production of this movie and its digital delivery
through the Flash Platform. They will be talking about how they
essentially re thought the movie making process and seamlessly brought
in delivery to multiple devices. This incidentally is a project partially funded by the Open Screen Project Fund.

Twitter Hash: #adobemax78
Date/Time: October 6 at 09:00AM
Room:505

Title: Cross-device Campaigns for Deeper Brand Engagement

Richard Lent, CEO of AgencyNet and an acclaimed speaker will take us
through the multi-screen paradigm showcasing how each device delivers
against a unique user context and requires a unique value proposition.
He will explain, through real examples, how the high-level strategy
was turned into cool applications and campaigns for world-renowned
brands such as Oxygen, Pepsi, Fox, Atlantic Records and Bacardi. From
strategy, to pitch, to deployment, he will break down how AgencyNet
accomplished and often exceeded their clients' objectives.

Twitter Hash: #adobemax207
Date/Time: October 6 at 03:00PM
Room: 505

Title: Netflix on TVs Using Flash

Learn what it took to implement the Netflix browsing and movie-
streaming experience for TVs in Flash. Matt McCarty from Netflix
along with Michael Hoch from Sodascope explore user experience
constraints for the TV, engineering and user experience challenges for
network data-driven user interfaces, architecture, and special
performance issues for embedded devices.

Twitter Hash: #adobemax395
Date/Time: October 5 at 05:00PM
Room: 505

Title: Open Screen Project Fund: Fueling the Future of Flash Experiences

Come to this session to hear more about the OSP Fund and the progress
we've made with the initiative in the past nine months. There will be
four demos of apps funded and now ready to hit market. Also we are
super stoked to annouce that David Blaine will be present himself to
showcase a Flash Lite based app developed for taking his brand of
tricks to Nokia devices. David will be available after the session in
the OSP Fund Circle in the Main Pavilion to talk more about the
application and maybe show the audience a trick or two!
Date/Time: October 5 at 05:00PM
Room: 503

Thank you and hope to see you at MAX!!

Manu @Adobe

The Flash Platform is used to create a large amount of applications and content on the Web. One of the challenges that developers face after they have created applications is getting users to notice them and use them. The Distribution service helps solve this problem by providing ways to promote applications and content to users.

In the last few years we have seen a clear shift in how people use the Web - they are spending a lot of their time on social media sites and on mobile devices. The Distribution service was especially designed to promote applications to social media and mobile users.

How do you use the Distribution service?

1. Establish an account
Install the Distribution Manager (available here through the install badge) and login using your Adobe ID. If you don’t have an Adobe ID, create one here.

Find your partner ID in the lower right corner of the Distribution Manager

2. Add sharing to your application
Install the extension for your preferred authoring tool (Flash Professional, Flex Builder 3 or Dreamweaver). It is easy to make your applications sharable by adding the Share menu (tutorials).

Here is an example of a sharable application with the Share menu.

You can share your applications to over 70 destinations including Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, mobile devices and the desktop. A complete list of the supported destinations is available here. Note that you will have to create native versions of your applications on mobile platforms where Flash is not supported.

3. Manage the application
Approximately 15 minutes after you've loaded the Share menu during your application testing, the application will appear in the Distribution Manager. Once your application appears in the Distribution Manager, there are 3 main activities you can perform (tutorials):
a. View the analytics
b. Earn money with your application by opting in to host cross-promotions
c. Assure installs for your application creating a new campaign

Here is a screenshot of the Distribution Manager with some analytics:

Who should use the Distribution service?
The Distribution service is broad enough to be used by anyone who is creating applications targeted towards social and mobile users. Advertisers, publishers and game developers will find the Distribution service particularly attractive.

Advertisers
Advertisers can use the Distribution service as part of an effective, predictable and scalable social media and mobile campaign. Advertisers are finding that branded applications are the most effective ad-unit on social media sites.These applications blend interesting content with an advertising message.

The Distribution service lets advertisers make their branded applications sharable on social, mobile, and desktop destinations. When users on social sites embed them on their pages, they are implicitly endorsing the brand to their friends. Their friends can then take this application and place it on their own pages or send it to their mobile devices. In addition to getting distribution through "earned media," advertisers can use paid promotions to get guaranteed installs for their applications within the specified timeframe. Advertisers also get persistent real-estate on the user's page and can push new messages. The Distribution service collects analytics data that advertisers can use to measure the success of their campaign.

Publishers
With the growth of social media, online publishers have to find ways to go beyond their own web destinations to reach their audience on social networking sites and mobile devices. Publishers are increasingly letting consumers take pieces of their content to their social pages or mobile devices. An effective way of syndicating content is to build widgets and applications.

The Distribution service lets publishers syndicate their applications to more than 70 destinations, including Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, desktops, and mobile devices. Once a consumer has installed an application on his or her social page or mobile device, the publisher can push new content to the consumer.

These applications often help publishers indirectly monetize the content by driving users back to the main website. To help publishers directly monetize their sharable content, the Distribution service has built in ad hosting. By turning on ad hosting, publishers can make money with their applications.

Game developers
Game developers often distribute their games by listing them on game portals. This approach is effective but can miss the opportunity to get games to users via social networks and on mobile devices.

Game developers can use the Distribution service to make their games sharable distribute them on social media sites, mobile devices, and desktops. The Distribution service also provides ad hosting, which enables game developers to make more money. This ad hosting does not conflict with other advertising in the game, so game developers do not have to remove existing advertising. Finally, game developers can track distribution and engagement and use the data to improve the engagement and viral lift of the game.

The Adobe Developer Connection is excited to announce that the brand new Adobe Cookbooks application is now live! This uber Adobe Cookbook application replaces the individual, product-specific cookbook applications that we previously had in place for Flex, AIR and Mobile. The new application will still support those technologies, in addition to a dozen or so additional technologies, all within a single application. For those new to the cookbook applications, they are a searchable repository for community-generated code samples.

You can read more about the new application in this Logged In article on the Adobe Developer Connection.

The new application has an updated design in addition to several new features:

• Many more products/technologies supported
• Improved navigation and search
• Recipe requests - for developers who can't find the code sample they are looking for
• Related recipes - that appear in a side bar of all recipe pages
• Cookbook Explorer - a visual display of top cookbook recipes and contributors
• New contributor recognition features - profile pics, links to blogs, links to community profiles

Community participation is the backbone of the cookbook application, so whether you are coming to contribute, request or locate a recipe, or comment on and rate existing content, your participation in this community application is greatly appreciated. Contributors should be sure to have their Adobe.com community profiles filled out before publishing any recipes as that is where the application will pull in a lot of the author recognition features. To fill out your community profile, login here and click "View your profile."

We will be updating the Adobe Cookbook after the initial launch with new features and new functionality. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so after you check out the new Cookbook, please feel free post your comments and suggestions in our Cookbook Feedback Forum.

Additionally, be sure to watch this blog going forward as this is where we will be announcing Cookbook contests and promotions from time to time.

Enjoy the new cookbook application!!

I am excited to announce that the Flash Platform has added services to its collection - Adobe Flash Platform Services. Adobe Flash Platform services are online, hosted services that allow developers to add innovative capabilities to applications with a predictable, cost efficient deployment model.

The first three services that are being delivered are Distribution, Collaboration and Social (coming soon).

Here are brief descriptions of each of the services:
Distribution: Distribute, promote, track, and monetize applications on social networks, mobile devices, and desktops.
Collaboration: Enhance applications with real-time collaboration features, including chat, audio, and video.
Social: Enable applications to integrate with leading social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

In the next few weeks, I will describe the services in greater detail and show how customers are using them.

Flex developers often use a combination of tools as part of their workflow, and Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta takes that into account. Follow Tim Buntel’s article to learn how well Flash Builder 4 can play with four other Adobe products in both data-centric and design-centric phases of a project: Adobe ColdFusion Builder beta, Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 beta, Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, and Adobe Flash Catalyst beta. Then move on to Elad Elrom's article on how to use Pixel Bender with Flash Builder 4 beta as a number crunching engine.

Augmented reality (AR) made a big splash this year when GE's Smart Grid reached mass-market appeal. Experienced Flash developers can dig into Samuel Asher Rivello's AR project, which overlays a 3D model of the Eiffel Tower onto a 2D marker using FLARToolkit code libraries and a webcam. For those just getting up to speed with Flash CS4 Professional, check out Dan Carr's five short presentations to learn about working with timelines, symbols, instances, buttons, Motion Editor, and ActionScript 3 in Flash. Finally, check out Paul Robertson's new QuickStart on understanding the benefits of using the Vector class in ActionScript 3.

Web video producers might want to explore Lisa Larson-Kelley's updated web video player template, which makes it easy to publish multiple videos on the same web page without authoring a new SWF for each one. Also use Jens Loeffler's live dynamic streaming and digital video recording sample app to set up a dynamic streaming environment without any coding.

There are a number of places people in interested in Flash Platform technologies can go to find events that Adobe is sponsoring and/or speaking at. But finding one place for designers and developers to go to find these events hasn't been easy. Until now.

We've pulled together a Google calendar of Flash Platform events for everyone to use. We hope you like it.

Feel free to subscribe to the calendar, or embed it on your blog, user group site, or anywhere you think others may be interested. To do so, you can go to the calendar's settings, and copy and paste the calendar's html embed code.

You can also subscribe in a number of ways including:
- via XML
-via iCal

We'll be adding and updating events all the time. Note that we may not be able to list every single event that covers Flash Platform technologies, but we'll certainly try to. Our basic guidelines are that Adobe needs to be sponsoring the event or someone who is an Adobe staffer needs to be speaking. And the emphasis is on Flash Platform technologies.

Enjoy. If you have any feedback, suggestions, etc, please comment away...

The New and Improved Adobe TV has been launched this week. Main improvements are in navigation, search, sharing & customization options, tagging and more. It is the first website in the world to deploy a video player built with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (a.k.a Strobe), and one of the first sites built using Adobe ColdFusion 9.

Highlighted features include:

• User-customizable homepage
• Vastly improved navigation & search
• Save your favorite episodes to “My Library”
• Share videos on social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, and StumbleUpon
• Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite shows
• Pop-out video player to view videos at any size
• Commenting & Rating
• Tags

Now you can easily find video content on your favorite product by rating, by popularity, and by how recently it was posted. Watch an recent episode on the Adobe Flash Platform. See more at tv.adobe.com.

<

More

The initial release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) includes an earlier version of Adobe Flash Player than what is available from Adobe.com. We recommend all users update to the latest, most secure version of Flash Player (10.0.32.18) -- which supports Snow Leopard and is available for download from http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

We have planned a series of free Flash Platform online seminars in September for Adobe AIR and Flex developers. Below is a list of topics and schedule. Hope you can join us. Discover the benefits of the Flash Platform for developing contextual applications for multiple devices, building rich enterprise applications quickly, and distributing and tracking your social applications. Learn about upcoming beta releases from Adobe. Register today!

Contextual Applications: Building Rich Internet Applications that Leverage Multiple Devices
Thursday, September 10, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Adobe Flex for the Enterprise (LiveCycle)
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Flash Builder for Java Developers
Thursday, September 17, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Achieving Success with Social Applications
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Are you a baseball fan? Major League Baseball today released MLB.com OnBase, a new AIR application that helps fans to stay informed about games, news and tweets on their favorite baseball teams and players right from their computer desktop. It's another great example of using Adobe AIR to keep your audience engaged online and offline. With MLB.com OnBase, it's easy to know when exciting events are taking place, or when there is high-level of activity around a player, team, or topic.

You can download this free application from Adobe AIR Marketplace.

I recently read a published paper "The Best Practices in Online Video Across Industries" from Forrester by Bobby Tulsiani and thought that it would be useful to share some basic dos and don'ts from the article. I'd like to invite you to share your best practices with us as well.

The Dos:

• Enhance the ease of playback by providing a simple and frictionless playback experience
• Highlight the information being presented by providing a thumbnail preview and the total running time which could earn user trust and increase clickthrough rates
• Provide users more control to enhance user's interactive experience

The Don'ts:

• Don't isolate the videos without context
• Avoid obtrusive experiences such as automatically start playing without any warning
• Avoid barricaded experiences such as requiring users to download new software, register, or sign in before viewing a video, especially for videos with ads

Have any burning questions about Adobe Flash Platform or Flex? Get them ready. Chat live with Lee Brimelow today, August 25, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The chat will be happening on the wall at http://www.facebook.com/adobeflex.

You can find out more about Lee Brimelow on his blog at http://theflashblog.com.

As an Adobe Flash Platform developer, you're probably frequently integrating video and sound into your projects. In this issue we have new sample projects on using Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash to work with media.

Jens Loeffler shows you how to create a video sharing application in just a few steps using Adobe Flex Builder and Adobe Flash Media Server. Dan Carr explains how to manage audio in a media project using Adobe Soundbooth with Adobe Flash Professional. Doug Winnie provides an iterative approach to the designer-developer workflow with Adobe products and technologies.

For those of you gearing up for the next release of Flex, check out Tim Buntel's article, Five great new features in Flash Builder 4 beta. Meanwhile, Flex developers who are interested in mapping should not miss Matt Sheehan's article. It teaches you how to build a basic interactive map with zoom and pan functionality, and then extend the application to include multiple providers and markers.

On Monday, August 17 at noon PT, I will be a guest on “Tomorrow Will Be Televised,” and encourage you to tune in. The show will be an interesting one, focused on the interactive TV movement, and Cisco’s director of product marketing for its Service Provider Video Technology Group (SPVTG), JT Taylor, will be interviewed alongside me. The progress we are making with the Open Screen Project will be a major focus of the discussion, as Cisco is a participant of the Open Screen Project.

Following our 30 minute interview, live questions will be opened up to the audience, so feel free to call in via the number provided on the show. You can listen to the interview live on Monday at noon at www.blogtalkradio.com, but you’ll need to register for the site first by clicking register. If you miss it, you can download or play the interview beginning at 2pm at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/simonapple04. Hope you can join us and submit questions.

Recently, we announced that the Adobe Wave beta was live on Adobe Labs at http://wave.adobe.com.

Adobe Wave lets users opt-in to the content they care about, such as updates from MySpace or new stories hitting the Digg homepage.  Publishers can use Adobe Wave to stay in touch with their user community by sending notifications that show up as alerts on the desktop.

Adobe Wave is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications for web publishers, large and small. It helps you stay connected to your community and lets users avoid the email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update messages.

If you're a user, check out the Labs page and install Adobe Wave.  We'd love to hear what you think.  If you're a publisher or developer, you can find out more about setting up your own feed on the Adobe Wave developer page.

A new tutorial video, featuring Duane Nickull, has just been released by Adobe Developer Connection on Adobe TV. This 7-minute step-by-step tutorial will show you how to quickly set up web services, specifically SOAP-WSDL in Flex Builder. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Even though there are some signs of economic recovery, the job market continues to get worse. With the offer of free Flex Builder 3, we'd like to make it easier for unemployed developers to add Flex skills to their skill set, which even now remains in high demand. For details and to apply for the program, please visit https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/

The beta version of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 delivers many new features and improvements. One particularly exciting feature is a new technology, code named Fiber, which enables Flex developers to use a model-driven development approach for faster and easier data-driven application development. With Fiber, data management is implicitly supported and does not require developers to create custom assemblers or employ complicated LiveCycle Data Services specific configurations. And as part of Flash Builder 4 beta, Flex developers can easily create a fiber Model to simplify development and enhance productivity of data-driven Flex applications.

For an overview of the features included in the next release, view the Getting Started videos or read Anil Channappa’s What’s New in LiveCycle Data Services 3.

Flex developers: Secure your applications with the Flexible Chimp project and Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Ryan Knight and Jon Rose show you how in their article, Enterprise security for Flex.

If you want to learn more about ActionScript programming in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, you'll want to watch Doug Winnie’s recent ActionScript video tutorials. In these videos, Doug teaches designers how to code interaction and animation, as well as basic programming concepts. Also be sure to check out the Components Learning Guide for Flash CS4 It will help you reduce your development time and effort by using building blocks for creating rich interactive applications on the web.

For the more advanced crowd, ActionScript expert Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript Weekend turns a fireside chat with friends into a series of real-world lessons about ActionScript 3.

To get e-mail updates of our new content, subscribe to our newsletters: News Flash, The Edge, and the ADC update. You can also visit the Adobe Developer Connection to check for new content.

Every year, we celebrate creative and forward-thinking uses of Adobe software with the MAX Awards at the annual Adobe MAX user conference. This year, Adobe MAX Awards feature new categories, industry judges and dynamic online voting. Specifically we are interested to see more innovative project submissions for Social Computing and Mobile, which are the two of the fastest growing sectors in the industry.

New to this year, we have increased awards to eight categories: Advertising & Branding, Education, Enterprise Productivity, Entertainment, Mobile, Public Sector, Social Computing, and Social Responsibility. Category winners will also be chosen online via people’s choice voting. Online voting will open September 21st and close during MAX Los Angeles. The three finalists in each category will be invited to attend MAX North America in Los Angeles, where the category winners will be announced live. All finalists will receive complimentary admission to MAX.

All submissions must be received online at www.adobemaxsubmission.com/submission/ by 11:59 pm PDT on August 7th. For more information, visit max.adobe.com/awards/

Be sure to submit your project before August 7th. Good luck!

We are excited about the progress we are making along with Nokia with the Open Screen Project Fund (OSP Fund). The Fund as you may know is a 2 year long, $10M market development channel to fuel development of a wide variety of multi screen applications using Adobe Flash.

Since the Fund launched in February, Adobe and Nokia have funded over 20 projects that make an interesting mix of multi screen apps and some really cool mobile apps.

Some of the apps we've funded are:
1. LiveTalkBack: This is a real-time audience voting system to collect feedback from mobile devices, web based widgets and the desktop - all using the Flash Platform. The application is soon going to be tested at large Media and Broadcast conferences in Europe and North America and we are excited about the progress the developer is making.
2. uvLayer: Think of this as a minority report-"ish" interface to manage all your favorite online media and share it with friends and contacts across different IM and social networks. Unknown Vector, the company behind uvLayer, had already built the AIR based desktop version of their web based service (www.uvlayer.com). The OSP Fund came in to fund the mobile version of the product to extend the experience to devices on the go.
3. GolfBox: This is a mobile app that allows golfers to book tee times, invite friends to play, read golf related news. It is being built by a team from Little Big Ideas, an interactive agency out of Denmark that has done many pioneering mobile projects in the past with Flash.
4. Mileblaster.com: A great utility application for frequent travelers that tracks frequent flyer miles and award goals, finds mile offers, and sends alerts when miles are about to expire. From the get go this application was built as a Flash widget for the web and has been funded to complete production of not just the web version but also a mobile and desktop version of the very same experience. This will allow users of the service to stay on top of their miles and awards from any Flash supporting device.

These are just some of the apps and information about them and others in now available here. We continue to seek more such interesting utility and media based experiences and are also specifically on the lookout for multi-device games built in Flash. There are already thousands of awesome Flash based online games. We are looking to developers to extend those experiences to more devices to let gamers take game play with them no matter where they go.

If you would like to apply for funding or simply learn more about the OSP Fund I would encourage you to Click here.

For our inaugural Flash Platform blog posting I want to begin with some important news. The Flash Player penetration statistics have just recently been updated and Flash Player 10 is now installed on 86.7% of Internet-connected desktop computers in mature markets, which is the fastest the Web has ever adopted new innovation.

Since the first release of the Flash Player, Flash has been a leading source of innovation for the Web. From salesforce.com to facebook, from Nike to picnik, from Google to The New York Times our users are constantly finding a new ways to use Flash to make the Web better. That is why Flash has become the most popular way to deliver applications, video and interactive content on the Web.

It's gotten to be such a big tent, that it's hard to find a single place that covers the highlights across the full range of Flash Platform tools, technologies, partners, and communities. This blog should help with that -- as we find out about important news related to Flash, we'll post it here.

Welcome to the Flash Platform blog.

Today Adobe announced two exciting new Flash Platform open source initiatives that will help media companies and publishers reinvent themselves and jumpstart innovation on the Web. Specifically, we have released as open source the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), previously part of the "Strobe" project, and the Text Layout Framework (TLF). Both are now freely available under the Mozilla Public License as part of our broader strategy called Open@Adobe, which Dave McAllister describes below.

OSMF gives developers standard video player functionality, like playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming, including an API that partners can use to drop in plug-ins to add advertising and reporting features. The flexible OSMF framework embodies best practices for media player development, allowing the developer more time to focus on the overall user experience. With OSMF, content publishers can build advanced and feature rich media players, along the lines of what Hulu has created or CBS TV player, with much less work than it takes today. It is now available for free at www.opensourcemediaframework.com

TLF is an extensible ActionScript library that runs on the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Leveraging the publishing expertise of the Adobe InDesign team, TLF offers a level of typographic control and sophistication that goes well beyond what can be done with HTML and CSS.

TLF is being used today in The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe's GlobeReader Adobe AIR applications, and represent an excellent use of TLF's reflowing text, multiple columns, and top notch typography features. The new text layout features in AIR are enabling the New York Times and Boston Globe to create an experience like the real paper and opening up new types of apps and subscription models.

makebook has built a community content creation, collaboration and collection platform that makes extensive use of TLF, BlazeDS for remoting to a Java backend, the Flex framework for the frontend, and other open source technologies. With this online authoring network, makebook users can create content and write stories using advanced text capabilities, add multimedia content, and publish content to a library or share content with friends--all within the browser. Subscriptions are available for collaboration and co-authoring.

Adobe is also practicing what we preach by using TLF for all text objects in the new Acrobat.com Presentations service that provides a great way for people to collaboratively create and share presentations.

I look forward to seeing the next generation of Web applications that the OSMF and TLF projects will enable.

As part of our weekly content launches in the Adobe Developer Connection, we’ve recently published some new articles for Flash Platform developers.

The new skinning architecture in Flex 4 beta makes it easy to completely change the look and feel of an application. Follow Ryan Frishberg to learn about the new improvements by writing a basic skin for a button and then delving into skinnable components. Building on what you’ve learned there, Evtim Georgiev addresses a number of pain points in skinning, CSS, components, states, animation, text, and graphics tags. He also shows you how to create a custom layout in his article, Spark layouts with Flex 4 beta. Meanwhile, read Tim Buntel's article to learn how a brand new approach in Flash Builder beta can simplify the development of data-centric applications.

If you are working with web video, you'll want to learn how to customize the ActionScript 3 FLVPlayback component, the built-in solution in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional for displaying video on the web. Also be sure to download two updated templates: spokesperson presentation with synchronized graphics and showcase website for personal video.

Flash animators: Dig into Chris Georgenes' popular series covering the entire process of creating a digital animated character in Flash CS4 Professional. And there's a bonus: a killer animation technique that creates convincing 3D effects while remaining in the 2D realm. Also be sure to check out Tom Green's article on Integrating Flash CS4 with After Effects CS4.

To get e-mail updates of our new content, subscribe to our newsletters: News Flash, The Edge, and the ADC update. You can also visit the Adobe Developer Connection to check for new content.