Monthly Archives: September 2010

RIM’s PlayBook and Adobe AIR

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Yesterday RIM announced their tablet computer, the PlayBook, with an impressive set of specs and what looks like a great form factor. But what I thought was the coolest part of the announcement is that Adobe AIR is going to play a central role in application development on the tablet. While there will be support for Java eventually and developers can use C++ to tie into things like OpenGL, Adobe AIR is the primary way to develop applications for the tablet.

In fact, a lot of the work on the tablet is already being done in AIR. The browser, the application launcher, and a lot of the default applications have been built using Adobe AIR. One of the cool things is that this is just one step in a long evolution of Flash. The company behind the tablet OS, QNX, was acquired by RIM back in April. QNX has long been a partner of Adobe and is one of the experts on porting Flash to different pieces of hardware. So they’ve got a ton of experience working in the guts of Flash and it sounds like a lot of that knowledge went into the AIR integration on the PlayBook.

So if you’re building AIR applications then this is one more place you’ll be able to bring those skills. You can get a jump on development by heading over to the labs page we have set up for the BlackBerry and of course, there will be a lot more good stuff at MAX, so you’ll want keep an eye on news coming out of LA for the latest.

Flash Player “Square” With IE9, Native 64-bit Support

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Flash Player SquareToday you can go download the beta of IE9 and from what I’ve seen it looks like it’s pretty damn impressive. We also released a version of Flash Player, codenamed “Square” which not only has support for IE9, but includes a bunch of code collaboration that we did with Microsoft to create a really streamlined experience. The Flash Player Team Blog has a bunch of info:

As part of our collaboration with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team over the past few months, Flash Player “Square” has been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE. Flash Player “Square” leverages the new GPU support available with Internet Explorer 9 Beta to deliver a faster and more responsive user experience with Flash-based content. In our internal testing, we’ve seen significant improvements in Flash Player graphics performance – exceeding 35% in Internet Explorer 9 Beta compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE. While the performance improvements will vary based on the type of content and how it’s created, bitmap-heavy content for Flash Player will experience the greatest benefit. Flash-enabled content that’s embedded as transparent (wmode=”transparent”) will also run more efficiently given the benefits of offloading the HTML and Flash content compositing to the GPU. Try it out by downloading the Internet Explorer 9 Beta and the Flash Player “Square” preview. We’d appreciate your feedback and observations on performance.

So right off the bat with IE9 you get hardware support for Flash. We’ve also (finally) got native 64-bit binaries for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It’s been a long time coming, but we hope you get a chance to test these versions out and give us feedback.

We’re only a couple of months from MAX, and this gives you a taste of some of the things we’ve been working on. Between the work on HTML5 with Dreamweaver and Illustrator and the work the Flash Platform teams have been doing, it’s going to be an incredible year for RIAs and for Adobe designers/developers.

Android, Flash, Free Beer, Pizza

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If you’re in San Francisco this week you’ll want to swing by the free Droid Does Flash event that we’re putting on with Motorola on Thursday, September 16th, at the Adobe offices in San Francisco.

Droid Does Flash

It’s going to be a chance to check out some of Motorola’s new devices, win some software, drink free beer, and hear about optimizing content for Flash and devices. I’ll be talking about where Flash is in the mobile world and how we got here including some of the things we did to make the runtime sing on Android. After that, it’s all about networking, hanging out with some of the folks from Adobe, and drinking free beer. We’ve also got a pretty cool beer mug for all of the attendees that lets you show your malty-enthusiasm for Flash and Android.

Registrations are starting to fill up, so I encourage you to hit the Eventbrite site and sign yourself up.

Come to 360Flex and Win a Free MAX Pass

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360 Flex QR Code

360Flex in DC is coming up very, very soon. It’s arguably one of the best Flex events out there. MAX is also coming up shortly thereafter, which is where you’ll be hearing about all kinds of cool Adobe goodness. What’s better than each one of those? Coming to both. So I’m running a contest. If you’re at 360Flex you’ll have a chance to win a free pass to MAX along with Creative Suite 5. Here’s the deal:

At 360Flex I’m going to be hiding a bunch of QR codes around the venue (and in some of the presenter’s slides). Each one of those QR codes will point to a random URL, which will let you put in your email address. The person who collects the most QR codes during the conference (or the first one who collects them all) will win a free pass to MAX and Master Collection CS5. The runner up still gets a free copy of Master Collection CS5.

All you need to play is some kind of barcode application for your phone. They have free apps for both iPhone and Android (and I’m guessing Blackberry) so everyone with a smartphone should be covered.

So if you haven’t registered for 360Flex yet, get on it. Where else do you get to hang out with the coolest community on earth?