Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog

The developers of KIDO’Z recently released the first version of its Android application on the Android Market. If you are not familiar with KIDO’Z, the software provides a kid safe environment that allows children to surf their favorite sites, watch videos, play games, send emails, create and communicate — all without knowing how to read and write.

While the mobile application is built using the recently added Android support available in Adobe AIR 2.5, KIDO’Z was an early adopter of Adobe AIR and released its desktop application back in November of 2008. This is a terrific example of how developers can take advantage of their existing investments (skills, code, tools, design assets, and user experience) to build engaging experiences across devices. Congratulations to the team at KIDO’Z on the launch!

Features of the the Android application include:

• Preloaded with many kid-friendly videos
• Videos sorted into channels including:
  • Movies channel
  • Funny Stuff channel
  • Cartoon channel
  • Fun channel
  • "How To" channel
  • Science channel
• New content added on a regular basis.
• Kids can easily create their own Play List with their favorite videos

Additional Information:

• Blog Post: KIDO’Z Goes Mobile
• What’s New in Adobe AIR 2.5
• Download Flash Builder "Burrito" (includes AIR 2.5 support)

We are excited about the launch of the Chrome notebook Pilot program. Since we announced the support of Adobe Flash Player in Google Chrome, the engineers have undertaken some extensive work on more tightly integrating our technologies. This work has taken a few forms including an integrated update system, plus improvements to security, end-user privacy, and performance advancements on operating systems like Windows and Mac OS. As we look forward, there’s a long list of integration opportunities ahead to improve and optimize the web browsing experience.

In terms of Chrome notebooks specifically, as with many aspects of the device, Flash Player 10.1 support remains a work in progress. Video performance in particular is the primary area for improvement and we are actively working with the engineers at Google to address this. Enabling video acceleration will deliver a more seamless experience on these devices. Because Flash Player is integrated directly into Chrome Notebooks, users will automatically benefit from the latest features and improvements as new versions of the software are pushed out.

The work we’re doing on acceleration for video in Flash Player is a top priority because the vast majority of video on the web is delivered using Flash.  As a matter of fact, adoption of Flash video streaming is on the rise with a more than 100% year-over-year growth over the past two years. Just in one month alone, we are now seeing 120 petabytes of video streamed, that’s 128 billion megabytes!  Chrome notebooks provide yet another opportunity for Adobe’s three million Flash developers to deliver their rich, interactive content to end-users.  The multi-screen opportunity is truly upon us and getting stronger by the day.

Paul Betlem
Sr. Director, Engineering

Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets recently made available an extremely helpful tutorial called Flex for Android in 90 minutes (.pdf). In around 90 minutes, you will learn how to build an Android application using Adobe AIR, Flex Mobile and the Flash Builder "Burrito" preview release.

The tutorial covers a number of important topics including how to create a basic mobile application, using mobile item renderers, navigating and passing information between views, creating an action bar, integrating with the device capabilities (dialer, SMS, email), using a RemoteObject, and using a local SQLite database. To get started, you will need to first download the Flash Builder Burrito release from Adobe Labs.

Below is a summary of the material covered directly from the document:

In this tutorial, you use Flash Builder "Burrito" and Flex "Hero" to build a simple, yet fully functional employee directory application for Android devices. "Burrito" is the code name for the next version of Flash Builder, and "Hero" is the code name for the next version of the Flex SDK. You don’t need an Android device to complete this tutorial: you can use the simple emulator available in Flash Builder Burrito to run and debug the application. The Employee Directory application allows you to: search for employees, view employee details, navigate up and down the org chart, and call, text, and email employees.

Of course, Christophe is known for pushing the limits. With the recent beta 2 release of the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR, Christophe decided to see just how difficult it would be to port his Android application to the BlackBerry Playbook. How difficult was it?

"It turned out to be amazingly simple: I was able to run the application without changing a line of code, with a great and consistent deployment experience: You select the target platform, hit the run button, and the app is packaged, deployed, and started on the device you selected."

Below is a video demonstration by Christophe showing the application running on a Google Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Tab and the BlackBerry Playbook Emulator.

Our team is fully focused on making it as easy as possible for developers to target applications that can run across different devices from desktop computers to smart phones to tablet devices and televisions. If you are building an application and would like to let us know about it, please leave us a comment!

Related Links:

• Christophe’s blog post: Tutorial: Flex for Android in 90 Minutes
• Flex for Android in 90 minutes (.pdf)
• BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR – Beta 2 Release!
• Download the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK Beta 2 and simulator

Today we posted a very minor update for the Adobe AIR 2.5.1 runtime that addresses a known issue related to interacting with a system’s camera on Mac systems. This is a desktop only release for the Mac; Windows and Linux users will not be impacted by this issue and will therefore not be prompted to update.

The build number for the Mac update is AIR 2.5.1.17750. We recommend that users update to the latest version of Adobe AIR.

David Knight, a member of the AIR development team, and Renaun Erickson, a platform evangelist at Adobe, co-presented an excellent talk at MAX 2010 titled Developing Well-Behaved Mobile Applications for Adobe AIR. The session covered a number of key topics that are valuable for developers building mobile applications using Adobe AIR including how to:

• measure the performance of your application
• detect performance bottlenecks
• improve the performance of your apps using techniques like object caching, GPU render mode and cacheAsBitmapMatrix

In the session, David and Renaun used several demos to support key points in their talk related to performance. In addition, the talk provides examples of how to use the Flash Builder profiler to detect problems in your applications.