Category Archives: Flash Lite

Flash Distributable Player Now Available in 45 Countries

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Last week Mark Doherty blogged about the fact that the Distributable Player is now available in a total of 45 countries. One of the nice things about the Distributable Player solution is that you don’t have to bundle a version of Flash with your application. You simply package it up using Adobe Mobile Packager 1.1 and it has all of the information about where to grab the runtimes inside of it so that when someone in one of the 45 countries below goes to install your application it will download Flash Lite if they don’t already have it installed. It’s similar to AIR’s model of making sure you’re only packaging and downloading what you need.

As Mark says, this is a great way to start building mobile applications today while you’re waiting for Flash Player 10. You can see the full list of supported devices and countries over on Labs. There’s also a great tutorial for getting started with the mobile packager that I’ve embedded below.

Distributable Player Supported Countries

Distributable Player Supported Countries

HTC Hero is the First Android Phone with Flash Support

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The Flash Platform is coming to Android. Today HTC is shipping their Android-based HTC Hero smartphone and it’s the first Android device with Flash on it. There was a lot of news this week about Adobe delivering the full Flash Player 10 experience in the browser and this is an important step towards this. We’ve set up a section on the Adobe Developer center with HTC Hero information and Adrian Ludwig has a good video that shows off what you’ll be able to do with the device there. Adobe’s mobile evangelist Mark Doherty also has a lot more info. One of the cool things for Flash developers is that this is the first device with multi-touch support for Flash content.

I think the main thing this shows is that Adobe is committed to mobile devices and ensuring that every phone, not just smartphones, has some kind of Flash support. Ultimately it’s about bringing the best Flash experience that the phone can handle. Once we get the runtimes out for Flash Player 10 and AIR then we’ll be able to bring a much more full fidelity experience to higher end devices. But we’ll also continue to support the less powerful devices as well with as many features of the Flash Platform as possible.

In addition to the support for the Flash Platform on the Hero, HTC also announced they’re joining the Open Screen Project (OSP). As I’ve been talking to customers about the OSP I’ve discovered a lot of interesting tidbits about the project. One of them is how we’re working with members to port Flash Player to their devices/chipsets/operating systems. In this case, with Android and the HTC Hero, we gave HTC an ActiveX and Linux reference implementation of the Flash plug-in. HTC then used those to implementations to port the Flash Player to the Android web browser on the device. Adobe, HTC, and Android engineers then worked together to optimize it.

That’s happening with a lot of our partners and all of the work we do helps feed into making Flash Player 10 available for more devices. As an example ever since ARM joined the Open Screen Project engineers from both Adobe and ARM have been working together to make optimizations to the Flash Player for ARM chipsets so any netbook, smart phone, or embedded device with an ARM chip will get an optimized Flash Platform experience. I think it’s going to be a good year for Flash Platform developers who want to get into the mobile space.

Congrats to the Flash Lite Developer Challenge Winners

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I was lucky enough to be asked to judge the Flash Lite Developer Challenge in which we gave away a lot of prize money ($15,000 USD for each category winner and $30,000 USD for the grand prize). I continue to be impressed with what you can do with Flash Lite. I’m busy working on my own Flash Lite application and these guys put me to shame. My favorite out of the bunch is Little Spender because I think it’s an easy to use and well designed little application.

flash_lite_developer_challenge-1

Be sure to check out all the winners, Mark Doherty has some great YouTube videos of all the winners in action. And we also have some very cool Flash Lite news coming up in the near future, so stay tuned.

Flash Player on the Palm Pre and the $10 million Open Screen Project Fund

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Adobe announced a bunch of news today before the start of Mobile World Congress. I think Robert Scoble has the best roundup. The biggest? In my opinion it’s great to see Palm join the Open Screen Project. The Pre seems like it’s going to be a big, big deal, and getting Flash on it would be great for smartphone users. The other big piece of news? The $10 million fund that Adobe and Nokia have created for developers to build applications that work on Nokia devices and use Flash/AIR.

Most of this will be available in 2010, but I can tell you that this is the year of mobile at Adobe. We’re going to be doing a number of public betas, our tooling will start having robust mobile support, and the entire ecosystem is going to move forward. But we’ve also announced the availability of a downloadable Flash Lite runtime for Nokia and Windows Mobile devices, so if you’re targeting Flash Lite 3, you can bundle your applications with the runtime so you can deploy it all at once.

Stay tuned for more mobile Flash Platform stuff this year.

Adobe Open Screen Project – Open Specifications and Open Technology to Help Expand Flash Player Reach

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Today Adobe is announcing the Open Screen Project, something that continues our steady march to being more open and at the same time should help foster the community around the Flash Player by freeing up how and where people use it. (Info for developers is here) Here’s the news from the press release:

  • Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
  • Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
  • Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
  • Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

The biggest part of the announcement in my mind is that we’re finally removing the restriction on the use of not only the SWF specification but also the FLV and F4V specification. We think we’ve gotten to a point where users don’t want different versions of a Flash Player and that there isn’t much incentive to create one, so opening up and removing the restrictions on the SWF, FLV, and F4V spec is a way to show that. Now our community can really dig into these and see what makes Flash so great. But one of the major reasons I’ve heard for wanting to implement separate versions of the player is because there are parts of the technology world, especially devices, where Flash doesn’t exist yet. That’s also going to change.

The second exciting part of the announcement is that we’re removing the licensing fees for the next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices. That means you’ll be able to distribute and deploy the Flash Player anywhere you want without having to pay Adobe. We’re also planning to publish the device porting layer APIs for the Flash Player. That combined with the removal of the license fees means you’ll be able to actively participate in porting the Flash Player to devices that are important to you. It’s still not open source, but I think this makes the Player a more agile piece of software and empowers developers to expand the number of places it runs. There are also a number of implications on the mobile side that Bill Perry discusses in detail.

I’m really excited about what this means for our community. Developers can now look at the SWF spec, the core video spec in FLV and F4V, and the AMF spec that we released as part of BlazeDS. The goal here is to provide the same Flash Player experience across a number of devices, operating systems, and machines. We haven’t quite had that yet when you look at Flash Player and Flash Lite. But the combination of the Open Screen project, our partners (Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, etc), and the recent movement of the mobile business unit into the same business unit as the desktop Flash Player at Adobe, we’re going to see that happen. It’s a really exciting time to be a developer.

Go SWF! There’s a pretty good FAQ for the Open Screen Project up for any more questions you have. Dave McAllister, one of the maestro’s of the project has a blog post up as well.

Chumby Raises $12.5 Million in a Series B

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Chumby, one of the first and best use cases for Flash Lite 3 has raised another $12.5 million dollars in a Series B round. Chumby is one of the coolest uses of Flash that I’ve seen. Flash Lite developers can create their own widgets and deploy them on the Chumby website. It includes a touch screen and an accelerometer that you can take advantage of in Flash. Because it uses Flash Lite 3, it also supports video.

Coté wrote up his thoughts on Chumby and we also discussed it in our very first RIA Weekly podcast. I think the Chumby is a great example of RIAs on mobile devices and what’s possible. Throw in the social/connected aspect of the Chumby and you’ve got a great device for RIAs.

[tags]Chumby, Flash Lite, Flash[/tags]

Beet.tv with a ton of Flash Lite Info/Content

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Andy Plesser over at Beet.tv is becoming the multimedia guru when it comes to Flash Lite. He has a couple of interviews that are especially applicable with the announcements earlier this week about there being 500 million Flash Lite-enabled devices and Microsoft licensing the Flash Lite player for Windows Mobile.

The first interview is with Rhett Woods, the director of Mobile Expression here at Adobe. He talks with Andy about all the cool stuff Flash Lite can do and shows some demos of video running on it. The second interview is with Brian Frank working with Mobile Applications and Solutions at Adobe. Brian provides a pretty neat history of Flash Lite and talks about the fact that Japan has been doing rich Mobile applications for 5 years now. Both are worth checking out, especially with the Flash Lite news this week. Thanks for getting this on camera, Andy.

[tags]Beet.tv, Flash Lite, Adobe, Flash[/tags]

The Coolest Flash Device Ever?

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Dave Winer really digs his Chumby. A ton of people in our community have been talking about and playing with the Chumby for a while but it seems like the Chumby has been turning a lot of heads all over the place.

The Coolest Flash Device Ever?It’s the very first Flash Lite 3 device on the market and the developer community already seems to be blossoming. It’s also a really interesting blend of open source and Flash. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Flash Lite is what makes the Chumby so cool, but it does open the device up to a lot of developers and helps bring home parts of the experience (including video). I don’t have one yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to change that soon.

Have you built any cool widgets for the Chumby?

[tags]Chumby, Flash Lite[/tags]

Flash Media Server 3 at the IBC Conference

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Flash Media Server 3 LogoBig press day today around Flash Media Server 3 and Adobe Media Player (AMP). Let’s first step back. IBC is a big media conference with the tagline “the world of content – creation, management, delivery”. Adobe obviously has a lot of ways to do all three of those things with content. The primary takeaway for me in reading some of our internal material and the press releases is that we’re starting to tell a consistent story around our media offerings. Basically we’ve got a lot of great tools; Flash, Premier, Audition, After Effects, and Soundbooth that let you create cool content. We’ve also got a couple of great ways for people to consume that content; the Flash Player and Flash Lite 3. Finally we’re working to empower the delivery of that content with Flash Media Server. From what I can tell we’re starting to make the workflow seamless between all of these tools and technologies. Hopefully that’s good for anyone touching rich media content.

The biggest announcement (aside from the Cisco partnership which I’m still researching) seems to be the Flash Media Server 3 push. I didn’t see a lot of new news, but there’s a FAQ that might be new. I know a lot of people here commented on the requirement that you have FMS3 to stream H.264 content. I’m still trying to get more information about that. We also announced some partners for AMP but I don’t know how many of these are new. I think the Akamai support is new and is kind of cool.

JD has more thoughts.

[tags]Flash Media Server, Adobe Platform, Rich Media[/tags]