Posts in Category "Flash Builder"

Building Rich Apps For Smart Phones and Tablet Devices Using Adobe AIR

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Rob Christensen | Comments (29)

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!

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Adobe AIR Launchpad accelerates app development

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Rob Christensen | Comments (2)

Several weeks back, Adobe evangelist Greg Wilson and Flex guru Holly Schinsky demonstrated an early prototype of an application called Adobe AIR Launchpad that they were planning to release publicly. Launchpad, built using Adobe AIR, was designed to significantly reduce the time to development new AIR apps by generating useful code snippets common to many AIR applications.

For example, Launchpad allows you to set whether:

  • the default application window is centered
  • the default application window can be resized, minimized or maximized
  • the application supports automatic updating
  • the application detects network status changes
  • the application uses a default preferences file
  • the application uses native menus

In addition, you can add optional code snippets to your project to help get you started including sample code for:

  • Drag and drop
  • Local database
  • Displaying PDFs
  • Sockets
  • Clipboard access
  • Native process
  • Detecting mass storage devices

Just a few weeks later, Greg announced on his blog that the application was available for download. Once you complete the application wizard and generate your code, a project file will be created that includes all the necessary files to build your customized AIR app. This project can then be imported into Flash Builder.

Note that LaunchPad currently does not support HTML/JavaScript. If you would like to see this application enhanced to support HTML/JavaScript, AIR for Android or anything else, please leave a note on Greg’s blog post.

In addition, James Ward, enterprise evangelist at Adobe, recorded an excellent overview of Launchpad:

Related posts:

This is a very exciting concept and I look forward to seeing your feedback and seeing how Launchpad evolves over time. Hopefully it will help make many of you more efficient when you are starting the development of a new AIR application. Congratulations to Greg and Holly for building this out in record time!

Adobe – Intel Application Lab

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Michael Hu | Comments (0)

adobe_intel_logos.jpg

Distributing and Monetizing Adobe AIR Apps

On July 21, learn what Adobe and Intel are doing to help you distribute and monetize your AIR applications by understanding the business opportunities and discovering how you can take advantage of the service immediately. Learn more and register today.

Better SDK Overlay Instructions

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Christian Cantrell | Comments (2)

We noticed that some developers were having trouble overlaying the AIR 2 beta SDK on top of the Flex SDK in Flex Builder and Flash Builder. Looking into the reports a bit further, we discovered that our instructions were not quite accurate. I just updated the AIR 2 release notes with more detailed instructions, so hopefully that will clear things up.

If they’re still not clear, let us know via the comments and I’ll clarify further. Also, we are looking at ways of making this process much easier in the future. Thanks for bearing with us in the meantime.