Adobe and RIM Collaborating on Tool Support for BlackBerry Devices

Posted on by

At the developer conference in San Francisco today, RIM and Adobe announced a collaboration around creating content for BlackBerry devices and Adobe’s Creative Suite tools. This builds off of the momentum we started with RIM when they announced they were joining the Open Screen Project and dedicated to bringing Flash Player to BlackBerry. There are some good links on Techmeme that cover the announcement pretty well.

rim_adobe_announcement

Creating Content with Adobe Tools

Adobe is known for first class design and development tools and today’s announcement means that you’ll be able to use those tools to target RIM’s devices. There are going to be multiple points of integration. One of the critical pieces of creating mobile content is to make sure it is optimized for the smaller screens and often less bandwidth. In Creative Suite 5 we’re going to support optimized graphic and video content from Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Illustrator. We’re also supporting a seamless workflow between those design tools and BlackBerry’s developer tools including the BlackBerry Web Plug-in for Eclipse and the BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse.

More interestingly for developers, we’re going to be working closely with RIM to enable full support for BlackBerry devices in Creative Suite Design Central, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. You’ll be able to use those three tools to test and create content for BlackBerry’s mobile browser as well as to create widgets directly on the BlackBerry device. Device Central is a fantastic way to test both HTML and Flash content for specific mobile devices. It lets you tweak battery settings, screen sizes, and other phone-specific functionality. Now we’ll have support for most of the BlackBerry phones so you never have to leave Creative Suite to see exactly how something will look on the phone.

Lastly, on the application front, Adobe is to be working on applications for BlackBerry that will let users take rich media and image content from the phone and quickly and easily bring it into tools like Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.com so it can be edited and modified.

BlackBerry Momentum

My colleague Mark Doherty has some great stats on what the BlackBerry market looks like and what this collaboration will mean for people who want to use their existing skills with Adobe’s tools to create mobile content for BlackBerry. Seeing the level of cooperation between Adobe and RIM is an exciting thing for designers and developers. Unlike some companies, I think RIM sees the value in partnerships, and with the breadth of Adobe tools it means they’re able to leverage our community for all kinds of different content- not just Flash.

Next year is going to be incredibly exciting for Adobe developers and designers. We’ve already talked a lot about Flash Player being available for smart phones next year, you’ll undoubtedly be hearing more about AIR, and hopefully we’ll continue to see deeper mobile integration across all of our tools just like you’re seeing with RIM here today. For more information you can check out the BlackBerry portal on Adobe’s site to get the scoop on the details and see some of the workflows in action.

Related posts:

  1. Adobe And Photobucket Jointly Announcing Flash-based Tool – Update 1
  2. Flash Penetration on Mobile Devices
  3. HTC Hero is the First Android Phone with Flash Support
  4. Flash Player Gets Even More Reach on Mobile Devices
  5. Rundown of the MAX News
  • Bradley

    Note to myself:
    Prepare yourself for a technology turnpoint as mobile internet becomes THE number target market.

    And flash is the center of it all!

  • http://knowledge.lapasa.net Mark Lapasa

    THE number target market!

    kidding.

    Mobile is getting a lot of buzz but I haven’t come across any companies making some good coin for making mobile software.

    I concede that mobile is the fastest growing market but I think the market will be forever smaller than than desktop. Look at a user’s typical day and chances are they don’t spend 8hrs on a mobile device. So why would they spend any significant amount of money on mobile software?

    My current attitude right now is it will just complement desktop at best. Cautiously skeptical.

  • http://quetwo.com Nick Kwiatkowski

    It would be nice if the workflow between these different devices would be similar. Although I’m creating apps / web sites for “mobile”, I still have totally different workflows for RIM, Nokia, Apple, etc. While Device Central was supposed to help that out a bit, it failed when Adobe announced how the workflow would work with the Apple iPhone.

    Personally as a devloper, what would be really slick is to be able to target these devices right from within Flash Builder (or Flash Pro), just like we do Flash Player or AIR. FB/Flash seems like it would be a comfortable end-game for many, many people.

  • Tom Sammons

    RIM adopting Flash Player is a *big* deal for financial and other enterprise business applications. FOr example, I’ll be looking into extending our intranet online approvals system to allow Blackberry users to receive real time notifications of approvals in their queue and allow them to approve without having to access the application online.