FLEX{er} » Android

Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 Launched

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:23:21 +0000

Now that MAX 2011 Conference is started, Adobe just launched the Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. Take a look at the features introduced by each of them.

Flash Player 11 features

Native 64-bit support (Flash Player desktop)
Stage 3D accelerated graphics rendering
Adobe Flash Access content protection support for mobile
Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) support
G.711 audio compression for telephony
Garbage collection advice
Cubic Bézier curves
Secure random number generator
Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Flash Access enhancements
TLS secure sockets support (new for Flash Player)
Socket progress events
Native text input UI (mobile)
JPEG-XR support
Enhanced high-resolution bitmap support
High-efficiency SWF compression support
DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying
Sound.loadCompressedDataFromByteArray and Sound.loadPCMFromByteArray
Asynchronous bitmap decoding

Test if you have Flash Player 11 installed here: http://blogs.adobe.com/sunil/2011/10/04/test/.

Get Adobe Flash Player 11 from here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

If you look for the debugger version of Flash Player 11 go to this link: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

AIR 3 features

Stage3D (desktop only)
Native extensions (all platforms)
Android Market licensing integration (Android only, obviously)
Captive runtime bundles (Android and desktop)
Background audio playback (new feature in iOS; already works on Android)
CameraRoll support for iPad
Hardware-accelerated video (mobile)
Native text fields (mobile)
Front-facing camera support (iOS and Android)
Mobile-encrypted local storage (brings feature parity between desktop and mobile)
Device speaker control (mobile)
Native JSON support (mobile and desktop)
Socket improvements (mobile and desktop)
H.264 video encoding (desktop only)
JPEG XR support (mobile and desktop)
Higher resolution bitmaps (mobile and desktop)
Multichannel audio digital output (AIR for TV only)
Advanced controller support (AIR for TV only)
More easily removing all children from a container (all platforms)
More easily determine if a MovieClip is playing (all platforms)
Secure random number generation (mobile and desktop)
Support for cubic bezier curves (all platforms)

Get Adobe AIR 3 from here: http://get.adobe.com/air/

The features were only listed. Read more bellow to find put more about each feature…
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/10/adobe-flash-player-11-air-11-available-later-today.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/whats-new-flash-player11.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air3_whatsnew.html

Adobe Annouced Creative Suite 5.5

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 07:19:10 +0000

Yesterday, 11th of April, Adobe announced Creative Suite 5.5.

Besides all new features and improvements introduced in the new CS5.5, part of them presented in the previous video and some listed bellow, another new thing introduced with Creative Suite 5.5 is the “Pay as you go” subscription. Besides buying the whole product now the products can be rented for shorter periods of times. This helps a lot development teams that work on short term projects. Read more about it here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/cssubscription.html?promoid=INPKB

Now lets get back to what is new in the products…

Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK

Multiscreen development with Flex 4.5 SDK
New Spark components in Flex 4.5 SDK
- Spark DataGrid
- Spark Form
- Spark Image and BitmapImage enhancements
Spark Formatters
Video and text enhancements in Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK
Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK compiler improvements

There are too many new features and improvements to list them here. If you need to know more please read: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/introducing-flex45sdk.html

Adobe Flash Builder 4.5

Developing mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Blackberry Tablet OS
Accelerated coding for Flex and ActionScript projects
Improved designer/developer workflow
Updated platform support
Improved Performance
Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP

There are many great changes but the most important I think is the workflow for developing mobile applications. See a video about it bellow:

Please read more about Flash Builder 4.5 here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/introducing-flex45sdk.html

Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5.5

Resizable applications and components
Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder workflow (see Understanding new Flash Catalyst CS5.5 and Flash Builder 4.5 workflows)
Prototyping and wireframing enhancements

I just mentioned a few of them and didn’t go deep into each feature or improvement, but you can read more here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashcatalyst/articles/introducing-flashcatalyst-cs55.html

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5

CSS3 and HTML5 authoring
jQuery Mobile integration
Native mobile apps (for iOS and Android) with PhoneGap

Read more about new features and improvements in Dreamweaver CS5.5 here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/whats-new-dwcs55.html

Other products that are included in Creative Suite got lots of new features and improvements and to see more keep an eye on adobe.com.

What’s New in Adobe AIR 2.6

Andrei Ionescu — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:07:36 +0000

A while ago Adobe has release AIR 2.6 for Android, iOS and desktop. These are the new things in AIR 2.6:

Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding. This features allows bitmaps to optionally be decoded in another thread as opposed to on-demand in the main thread.
Owned Windows. The use case for owned windows is primarily things like tool palettes.
Bitmap Capture in StageWebView. The new drawViewPortToBitmapData function on StageWebView lets you draw the view port of a StageWebView to a bitmap.
Microphone support on iOS. The Microphone APIs now work on iOS.
StageWebView on iOS. Just like on Android, the StageWebView now works on iOS.
Multitasking on iOS. With 2.6, AIR applications will get activate and deactivate events on iOS as users switch to and from the app. AIR applications will also be properly resumed rather than restarted (unless the OS has decided to kill it for some reason which both iOS and Android reserve the right to do for any application).
Retina Support on iOS. Pretty self-explanatory. 2.6 has support for the very high-resolution iPhone 4 and iPod touch screens (326 PPI), and the higher resolution application icons.
iOS Camera, CameraUI, and CameraRoll Support. The Camera and CameraUI APIs are now supported on iOS, just like on Android.
Improved hardware acceleration on iOS. Hardware acceleration on iOS now works like it does on Android, and generally provides much better performance than with PFI. And speaking of PFI…
PFI is now ADT. The PFI (Packager for iPhone) utility is gone, and its functionality has been integrated into ADT. ADT can now be used to package AIR files, native desktop installers, Android applications, and iOS apps. I should also mention that iOS applications (IPA files) can be built and copied to iOS devices on Windows using ADT and iTunes. Very slick.
Configurable panning with soft keyboard activation. When a text field receives focus in an AIR application on a mobile device, the soft keyboard is generally shown, and if the keyboard covers the text field, the UI is automatically panned so that the text field isn’t obscured.
Programmatic control of the display of the on-screen keyboard.
Support for the Amazon Android Market. AIR applications built with the AIR 2.6 SDK can be distributed on the new Amazon Appstore for Android.
Vector printing on Linux. If you can get your printer to work on Linux, you can now get vector printing in AIR.
Native cursor support. This is a big one. With AIR 2.6, developers have access to real native cursors. The new MouseCursorData class takes one or more bitmaps and a hotSpot Point, and creates an actual native cursor.
On-device debugging over USB (Android only). No more wrestling with WiFi debugging. Mobile Android apps can now be debugged over USB.
Native Menu event refinement.
Enhanced text support on Android. Another big one. AIR 2.6 has support for scrolling, text selection, and text context menus (for cut/copy/paste) on Android.
NetConnection.httpIdleTimeout. In AIR 2, we added the URLRequest.idleTimeout and URLRequestDefaults.idleTimeout properties. In AIR 2.6, we’re adding similar support to NetConnection with the new httpIdleTimeout property.
Bundled Android USB drivers on Windows.
Support for the vipaccess:// URI. The vipaccess:// URI for invoking VeriSign’s VIP Access application is now white-listed in AIR.
-version flag for ADT. Running ADT with the -version flag will now return the version of ADT.

Adobe Announced New Flex Framework Technologies

Andrei Ionescu — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:42:28 +0000

Adobe has announced new technologies on Flex Framework. These are:

Each of them have new features, improvements and integration work-flows added and you can test all these new technologies on Adobe Lab. If you like to see some samples go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flexsdk_hero/samples/.

As you already know Adobe MAX is on course and new stuff will be presented to everybody.

Read more about “Burrito” in the Andrew Shorten’s article on Adobe Developer Connection.

Flash Player 10.1 Enabled Devices

Andrei Ionescu — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:58:37 +0000

Flash Player 10.1 for Android has been released to different partners and a few mobile devices now do use Flash Player 10.1.

Google

Nexus One

HTC

Motorola

Also, you can see the list on adobe.com. Today there are six but the number is increasing and I’m sure other devices will emerge.

Adobe Is Resuming Development on The Packager for iPhone

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:17:53 +0000

In the previous article Apple let us know that they are relaxing the App Store Review Guidelines. This is great moment and Adobe could not miss it. Adobe’s Packager for iPhone is already available in the Flash Professional CS5 and Adobe is resuming development on it.

Although this is a big step forward, Apple’s restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.

I’ll end with a quote from Adobe Featured Blogs…

Adobe will continue to work to bring full web browsing with Flash Player 10.1 as well as standalone applications on AIR to a broad range of devices, working with key industry partners including Google, HTC, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Palm/HP, RIM, Samsung and others.

You can download the packager from Adobe Labs.

Apple Starting Love Adobe by Relaxing App Store Review Guidelines?

Andrei Ionescu — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:31:36 +0000

Previously Apple restricted the application development for iPod, iPhone & iPad and excluded a number of technologies like Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, and Flash CS5, but no limited to these.

See the following articles that explains the limitations:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/apple-puts-another-nail-into-flashs-coffin/6554
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphone-applications/

As a result to this restrictions Adobe has stopped the development for the iPhone.

Apple implied about Adobe…

They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

But Adobe demonstrated the opposite that Flash Player 10 is suitable and ready for mobile market by working closely with Google to integrate Flash Player 10 with Android OS and this way enabling the release of the Motorola Droid 2 mobile phone with Flash Player 10 (see the printed ad here).

Today, 9th of September, Apple did relaxed the App Store Review Guidelines allowing third party development tools. The things that changes are:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework.

With these changes, in my opinion, Apple admits that they did a mistake and now they are trying to fix it. Apple’s problem is that Android Market is gaining in App Store’s detriment and lots of developers started developing applications for Android using third party tools. As a result to this Adobe’s shares did explode today.

Let’s wait for Adobe’s response to Apple’s move.

Further readings:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/86cf0890-bc32-11df-8c02-00144feab49a.html?referrer_id=yahoofinance&ft_ref=yahoo1&segid=03058
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/apple/app-store-review-guidelines-published-third-party-dev-tools-allowed/8131

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on Motorola Droid 2

Andrei Ionescu — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:19:55 +0000

Today, 11th of August, Motorola launches Droid 2 mobile phone on Verizon mobile network and it will be available in stores on 12th of August. The important is that this is the first mobile phone that comes with Flash Player 10.1 out of the box.

Droid 2 is running Android 2.2 Froyo for which Flash Player 10.1 was highly optimized.

Droid 2 is available in USA and it seems that it will be available also in Europe as Milestone 2.

Medical Device Simulation on Flash Player Platform Using Multi-Screen Development

Andrei Ionescu — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:12:20 +0000

Serge Jespers did post an article regarding the new application Innovation Mecom has built for Dräger Carina medical device. The application is a simulation that reproduces all functions of the real device. So it is possible to get a real good impression of it even without using a real device.

Watch the following demo about it.

You can experience the application for yourself following this link: http://www.draeger.com/local/products/carina_trainer/start.html

You can read how it was developed on the creator’s blog: http://www.ketzler.de/2010/07/simulations-of-medical-devices-on-touch-devices-desktop-iphone-ipad-android/

Two New Apps with Multi-Screen Experince

Andrei Ionescu — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:16:20 +0000

Last two week I seen two great applications that make use of multi-screen experience capabilities of Flash Platform.

Androideroids by Grant Skinner
Desktop MP3 Music Player by Mihai Corlan

The first is a prototype multiplayer asteroids game in which each player uses an Android phone as their game controller. The player connects to the game and on the main screen he can see 3rd person view of the whole game while in the same time he can see the 1st person view on their Android phones.

The second one is a mp3 player that can be controlled by any numbers of Android phones. Mihai did the application using AIR and Flex Framework. The communication between the remote controls (AIR apps running on Android phones) and desktop player is done using the peer to peer features of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1.

Demos of the running application can be found on each of the application pages. So take a look at them.

These two applications show the power of the Flash Platform for all types of devices: Computers, TVs, Phones, etc.

Enjoy!