Tag Archives: AIR

Why I’m Doing PhoneGap

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I’ve started to see some general questions and fielded a few emails from people asking about why the big push around PhoneGap on the Adobe side. In general, everyone knows the basic answer: we acquired Nitobi (the company behind PhoneGap), so now as Adobe evangelists, it makes a lot of sense for us to know it and be able to talk about it. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that. Christophe has a demo app (with source code) up, Greg has a couple of really good posts on it (especially this one that talks about how PhoneGap affects Flex evangelism). So at a general level, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but for me it’s quite a bit deeper than that and I wanted to provide a bit of context.

My desire to learn PhoneGap (and by extension get a lot better at HTML/JS) comes from two places. One, if you aren’t learning new technology, you’re not adapting as a developer. Two, as I’ve been looking around and trying to get my head around PhoneGap/HTML, I’ve found some rougher edges. Since I work at a tools company, I want to know where those edges are so that as Adobe builds out tools for this technology stack, I can provide good feedback to the product teams.

New Technology

I’ll say this a thousand times: I think AIR and Flex are the best way to build cross-platform mobile applications. I think they’re arguably the best way to build mobile apps in general for specific types of apps. And with AIR 3.0, AIR has never been more powerful. Stage3D is coming, we have native extensions and captive runtime so as a developer you can really blur the line between your AIR app and native functionality. But as great as I think native extensions are for our developer community, I’m not personally that excited by spending a lot of time writing them. I love the web. What got me so excited about RIAs back in the day was that you could build desktop-like apps with web technologies. I fully believe that Flash is part of the web, and I always will. Java and Objective C are decidedly not web technologies. And I’m not really that interested in spending a bunch of time learning Java/Objective C code. I don’t think that many AIR developers will have to roll their own native extensions, but it is one of the cool new parts of the platform, so a lot of the Adobe evangelists will be spending time getting up to speed on how to build them. That just doesn’t get me excited. Same goes for Stage3D. The stuff you can do with 3D in Flash Player is mind-blowing. I’m just not a 3D developer or a game developer. Luckily the Flash Platform is evolving beyond that as well. The stuff coming up with concurrency and potential enhancements to ActionScript both fall into what I’d call the “web world” and I’m excited to dive into those and get to know them as they get closer.

But, while I’m waiting, it turns out we now have a pretty cool HTML/JS mobile story with PhoneGap. I’ve been dabbling for a little while in jQuery mobile and HTML/JS and I’d consider myself an average JS developer. But you’ve always got to be learning, and if you love the web, you can’t not be good at JavaScript. I’m kind of ashamed that I’m not better, but this is a great opening for me to dive in, dedicate a ton of time and energy to getting better, and coming out a more holistic web developer. One of the things I love about the HTML/JS community is just how varied it is. There are JS developers of all stripes creating their own frameworks, own solutions to architecture problems, their own server solutions, and hell, even their own languages that eventually end up as JavaScript. The raw creativity of the web ecosystem is on full display when it comes to HTML/JS. And there is a certain zen to the chaos that I find intoxicating. I desperately want to be a part of that and the fact that I’m behind the curve is kind of depressing.

Helping Adobe

Which brings me to the second reason I’m planning to dedicate a ton of time to the PhoneGap stack. There are quite a few areas where the workflow is downright broken. My recent foray into on-device debugging is one example. Some of that is just that I don’t know enough, but there are also some real gaps in tooling, services, etc. We’ve got some smart people at Adobe who know the JS/HTML world pretty well. But we can always have more and if we want to provide value to developers in the space, that’s going to require knowing where the gaps are, knowing where to spend our time, and what kind of solutions will be helpful. I want to be able to provide that feedback and the best way to do that is to really know it. The hope is that I’ll be able to contribute in a small way to what Adobe will contribute to the open web ecosystem for developers.

Viva Flash!

So for me this particular foray goes beyond just learning PhoneGap to get up to speed. I think it’s a really cool time to be an Adobe evangelist and I came away from MAX a lot more invigorated than I’ve felt in a long time. Part of that is the Flash side (this session on the roadmap was excellent). But a big part of that was definitely that I think Adobe is going to make a positive impact in the HTML/JS space. The Nitobi guys are all insanely talented and I think that with them we’ve got a vision for mobile apps rooted in web technologies. I’m ready to contribute to that vision.

Update: And Ray pointed out he’s got a ton of stuff up as well.

Flash Player 11, AIR 3, and Flex/Flash Builder 4.6

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Today is a pretty big day for Adobe developers. We’re officially announcing Flash Player 11, AIR 3, and Flex 4.6 and Flash Builder 4.6. The bits will be available in early October, but we’re announcing things today to help provide developers with information on what’s coming. I’ve been at Adobe for 4 years now and it’s been a very interesting 4 years as the landscape has evolved. It’s definitely been an up and down ride for Adobe developers, but the world has never been a better place for interactive developers, and these set of releases provide a ton of functionality aimed at helping Adobe developers create content in the most cutting edge places.

Gaming

We’ve been doing a lot of work to help enable console-esque games on top of the Flash Platform. Flash Player 11 includes Stage3D, which is going to open up a whole new world for game developers. Zombie Tycoon and Tanki are initial examples of what can be done and I can’t wait to see what comes of it. I’m reminded very much of the early days of Flash where a bunch of creative people were given a technology that was pretty open-ended and poked and prodded to create a bunch of very cool things. I think we’ll see that kind of revolution with Stage3D because of the ubiquity of Flash and the creativity of our developer community. Also in the gaming bucket is a framework we’re working on called Starling, which leverages Stage3D to create a super-fast way of doing parts of 2D games. It’s a great merger between the underlying technology/performance benefits of Stage3D and the kinds of things people want to do in 2D games. I think it’s also going to see some traction beyond games as agencies start to use it to enhance 2D content.

Mobile Applications

Flex and AIR have really found a great place in mobile applications. The performance enhancements in 2.7 made building native-experiences with AIR possible and we’ve seen some great examples of that in action including Machinarium and Caltrain Times. I’ve been impressed with performance on my 100 Days of Exercise application on iOS. I’m incredibly, incredibly excited by what this means for Flash. There’s a definite need to create mobile apps that can be deployed to multiple application stores. The Flash Platform provides a way to create great looking, high-design applications with near-native performance that can run on multiple devices. That’s a big deal.

And this release of AIR 3 goes where we haven’t gone before on the Flash Platform with native extensions. Now if there are features that aren’t included in AIR, like access to a credit card reader, you can build those extensions in native code and then link them to your AIR applications and leverage those libraries. It’s a great mix of native for specific use cases and AIR/Flash for fantastic user interfaces. It’s a big, big, big deal to be able to extend the platform and it’s a huge step.

I also think we have one of the best mobile-tool chains out there. Flash Builder 4.6 is going to help with creating those native extensions while also enabling the use of captive runtime in AIR so your applications don’t need to rely on the external AIR runtime on Android. Combine that with the enhancements that are coming in Flex 4.6 and it adds up to a world class mobile development platform that lets you reach more devices that matter. Flex 4.6 is especially exciting because of the new components that have been added. Flex and AIR are far and away the best toolset for interactive developers or any mobile developer who needs to create content for multiple devices. The apps you can build with Flex and AIR are going to stand out from the boring, standard apps that have started to litter app stores. Creativity will win the day and creativity is at the core of Flex/AIR.

Beyond

So this is a huge release, and I’m excited. But I’m also excited about the future of Adobe and how we are responding and will continue to respond to the evolving marketplace. As Danny Winokur, VP and GM of the Flash Platform, said recently:

“We’re not so concerned about what the right technology is for that as long as we’ll be able to deliver those experiences. We’re working with Microsoft and other members of the HTML community including Google, Apple, and others to enable rich experiences on HTML5.”

This is not a technology war. Adobe is about enabling developers to build the best possible experiences with the technology they want. We want to build tools and services that cater to that ethos. That takes the form of cutting-edge gaming features like Stage3D and world-class mobile app features with Flex, AIR and Flash Builder. But HTML5 is exciting for a lot of reasons, and Adobe will help developers there as well. If you’re an interactive developer, the future is very, very bright for you.

So you better get a good pair of sunglasses.

Adobe Refresh – Australia, Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore

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I’m really excited to be joining up with the crew for Adobe Refresh, which will cover some of the latest and greatest features for the Flash Platform as well as show off Adobe’s HTML story over a couple of weeks in March. We’re hitting a total of 6 cities in Australia, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore. I’ll be tagging along with Richard Galvan, Paul Burnett, and Michael Stoddart.

The sessions are going to cover Flash Pro, HTML5, Flex/Flash Builder, Digital Publishing, and a Q&A for answering any questions you might have about the Adobe stack. Plus we’ll be showing off some things that most people won’t have seen live yet, so if you come, you’ll get a first crack at seeing some very cool stuff coming up from Adobe.

Here’s the full list of cities:

I’m looking forward to being able to see all of the community members in those countries as well as getting to show off the latest and greatest with the Flash Platform. I’ll be talking about multiscreen development with Flex and Flash Builder and there is some VERY good stuff for developers on the horizon when it comes to building apps across devices. This will be a great event to see it all come together.

Presenting at the Portland Adobe User Group January 20th

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PDX RIAI’ll be doing a presentation on the very diverse world of mobile and the Flash Platform at the Portland Adobe User Group on January 20th. I’ll be covering the iOS Packager for Flash Professional, Flex Mobile, AIR for Android, and the RIM tablet. It’s going to be a mix of hello world samples so that you can see the workflows as well as some techniques I have found for optimizing applications to get the best performance out of your apps. It will probably focus mostly on RIM and Flex Mobile/Android because that’s what I’ve spent the most time on.

So if you’re in Portland, come out and join us. I’m hoping to be able to answer any questions people have about building mobile apps with AIR and Flash, so if you’ve got questions, come armed with those as well. It’s also my birthday so we’ll be finding a place to grab beers and geek out afterwards (it is a PDX RIA meeting after all).

Publishing AIR Apps to the Android Market

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Now that the AIR for Android runtime has been released it means you can publish applications that you’ve created with the AIR for Android prerelease to the Android Market. If you’ve published to the App Store, fear not, this is muuuuch easier.

The first thing you need to do is get your developer account set up. To do that, browse to http://market.android.com/publish/Home and you’ll be prompted to fill out some information about yourself as well as pay $25 via Google Checkout. It seems like the developer name has to be unique, which seems odd, but when I put in “Ryan Stewart” it said it was taken.

Once the process is completed you’ll be able to start uploading applications. The initial screen will show nothing but an empty blue box and a button for uploading apps. That takes you to the pretty self-explanatory upload page.

Now is a good time to see about creating the certificate and, if you haven’t already, compiling the application. The Android Market lets you use a self-signed certificate and using adt you can create your own self-signed certificate. (Remember that you’ll need to be using adt from the AIR for Android prerelease). The only requirement is that it has to be valid for 25 years. The format is this:

adt -certificate -cn name [-ou org_unit][-o org_name]
[-c country] [-validityPeriod number_of_years]
key_type pfx_file password

And the example I used is this:

./adt -certificate -cn MyFirstSelfCert -ou ryanstewart
-validityPeriod 25 2048-RSA ~/Certificates/newselfcert.p12
mypassword

This creates a 2048-RSA certificate in my Certificates directory with the name newselfcert.p12 and a password of mypassword. Now that you have that certificate created you can use it to package your APK file. Assuming you’ve already created a release version of your AIR for Android application you can use adt to compile an apk file with the following command (or use the much simpler and better Package Assistant Pro by Serge):

./adt -package -target apk -storetype pkcs12 -keystore
PATH_TO_YOUR_CERTIFICATE -storepass
YOUR_CERTIFICATE_PASSWORD YOUR_APPLICATION_NAME.apk
YOUR_APP_XML_FILE-app.xml YOUR_SWF_FILE.swf

That command (when you replace the capital letters) will build an APK file (that’s the -target) out of the app-xml file and the .swf file and use the certificate you just created to sign it.

And you’re pretty much all set. Upload the APK to the Android Market, give it some snazzy screenshots, a great description, and start making money!

Me on the Android Central Podcast

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I did a quick semi-informal podcast today with the guys from Android Central on Flash Player and Android. It was a lot of fun to do and special thanks to Phil and Jerry for having me on.

The feedback after the Android Summit we had has been great and I have to say, I think the Android community is as great as the Flash community when it comes to smart, passionate and fun people.

Slides and Demos from FITC San Francisco

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FITC was an absolutely awesome event. Props to Shawn, Rick and team for another great event. I’m looking forward to them coming back to San Francisco next year. Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. I got some great questions and as I said in the sessions, if you have anything cool you’re doing with mapping and Flash, drop me an email.

Below are the slides I used and I’ve also posted all of the code for the demos I did. I haven’t really cleaned them up at all, but if you have any questions, let me know.

Mapping and Geolocation on the Flash Platform
View more presentations from Ryan Stewart.

Using Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 in Flash Builder

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I didn’t realize until Renaun blogged it that the Flex 4.1 SDK includes Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. One of the biggest pains for me during the beta period was copying over files and folders to merge the 4.0 SDK with AIR and Flash Player so I could do development in Flash Builder. I didn’t know they were doing a 4.1 that included both of the new runtimes.

That means you can grab the Flex 4.1 SDK, and using Flash Builder 4 you can add it to your list of SDKs and start taking advantage of the new APIs including multi-touch, geolocation, and socket server. As Renaun mentioned, make sure you target Flash Player 10.1 or above in your project when you’re selecting the new SDK or you won’t be able to use the new APIs.

Flash on!

Slides and Demo from Mapping/Geolocation talk at Flash and the City

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I gave a presentation on Mapping and Geolocation with the Flash Platform today at Flash and the City. Below I’ve embedded the slides and you can download the PDF here. When I get some downtime today I’ll be uploading my demos as well.

Mapping and Geolocation with the Flash Platform
View more presentations from ryanstewart.

Hands-On Review of Android Multi-touch Tablet

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At Web 2.0 Expo this year in the Adobe booth we’re showing off some devices and tablets running Android with full Flash Player and AIR on them.

It runs Adobe’s Flash and Air apps flawlessly. That was the first time I saw Adobe’s Air apps running on a tablet and totally impressed by how it ran. And now I can understand why Apple wants to ban Flash and other Adobe products completely from their iPhones and iPads, because it’s rather incredible technology.

It’s been a bit of a long haul, but we’re really close to putting the runtimes in your hands so you can see it for yourself.