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.

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.

MAX is also a great place to come mingle with the community’s best and get a chance to talk with the engineers who make the products. There are also a couple of big surprises we’ve got for the keynote that I’m excited to see the reaction to.

Hope we’ll see you in Los Angeles.

Kevin Towes has a great writeup on the changes. The important part for developers:

The specification documents how the RTMP protocol works, this will enable you to send and receive data from Flash Player or AIR. You can learn how to use the RTMP handshake, understand how the RTMP Chunk stream is formed, how RTMP command messages are created and the message formats. This information will let you leverage the client side ActionScript classes, NetConnection , NetStream, SharedObject and others that today move data back and forth between Flash Player and Flash Media Server.

There are a couple of things that aren’t included in the spec. As most of you may know, we’ve been evolving both Flash Media Server and RMTP over the past couple of years and have created specific protocols based on it to enable our partners to do things like protect digital content. Those include, for example, RTMPe for encrypting RTMP streams and RTMFP (the real time media flow protocol) for doing P2P communication between Flash Players.

While it took us longer than I would have liked, this is still very significant for our developer community and the wider Flash ecosystem. With the AMF, FLV, F4V and RTMP specifications now open developers have a published set of rules that will let them better integrate SWF applications into their backend systems and architecture. These two specs are the keys to communicating with the Flash Player and I hope this shows that we continue to try to make the Flash Player as transparent as possible even if we aren’t open sourcing it. It’s also important to note that you’re allowed to expand on the RTMP spec and create unique implementations for your own needs.

It’s got the same UI as the rest of the Acrobat.com family so it’s easy to add rows and columns and I also liked the addition of the “summary row” that you can tack on to the end and put formulas into. I found a few bugs while messing around but it’s a pretty impressive piece of work for the Acrobat.com team and I think it’s a good example of a well-written Flex application. I think we’ll call it little Bobby tables.

In addition to Tables the team also announced that they’re rolling out premium pricing for Acrobat.com. The premium pricing has two plans and lets you host larger meetings, create more PDFs and share larger files.

Greg has the code that you’ll need to grab the data up on his blog so all you need to do is get creative!

His first post takes you through some of the basics and I’m looking forward to what else he has coming. Andrew Trice also has a good example of some custom layouts in Flex 4.