Declaring this week “Android week”
February 9th 2010: The last day I used my iPhone. Or: The day I discovered Android. Or: The day I switched to the Google Nexus One. Well… You get the idea.
I was an iPhone user from the moment it came out. Before I continue this post, I want to repeat what I’ve been saying all along: Apple has done a fantastic job with the iPhone. I was very happy with my iPhone and never thought I would last more than a few days without it. Especially since I was so accustomed to having all my apps and my music there. But you know what…? Most of the apps I often used are also available on Android. And in all honesty… some of those apps look better on Android than they do on the iPhone.
Take Tripit for instance. If you are a frequent traveller, Tripit is your best friend. It was the first application I installed and when I first launched it, I immediately noticed how sexy the UI was. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the iPhone UI isn’t sexy. Trouble is that every app that uses the iPhone design guidelines looks just like the next one. It’s refreshing to see application designers/developer being creative with their UIs again. (And yes, I do know that there are some very creative UIs on iPhone apps as well). In this particular case, the app even becomes easier to use. The icons, dates and times are a lot clearer compared to the iPhone version.
Even though I (and some of my colleagues) thought I wouldn’t last longer than a few days without my iPhone I am now entering my 14th week without it. But back to the title of this post… With Google I/O just a few days away and some really exciting announcements coming up, I officially declare this week “Android week”. I am going to blog about Android at least once a day and you can even win a Google Nexus One on my blog this week!
So… Happy Android week everybody!
Also read “Android week: On switching to Android“.
Package Assistant Pro
A few months ago I released an early version of my Package Assistant application. The application made it easier to compile native installers for AIR 2. While it was a lot easier to use compared to using the command line the application wasn’t very user friendly. A few weeks ago I started working on a brand new version and I think you will like it!
When you first launch the application, it will ask you to enter the paths to ADT and your code signing certificate. When you have access to the AIR For Android Beta you can also add the AIR 2.5 ADT to package native Android installer packages. AIR For Android is currently in private beta but you can sign up to be notified when it is publicly available. When you have set your preferences, you are ready to go. Just point Package Assistant Pro to your application descriptor XML file and it will read and set all your parameters from it. Package Assistant Pro will also check if you correctly entered your code signing certificate password.
If you don’t mind playing around with beta quality software then check out http://bit.ly/papinfo for the downloads (available for OS X and Windows) and more information. If you run into an issue, have feedback and/or have a feature request, feel free to get in touch or leave a comment on this post.
Package Assistant Pro would not be possible without AIR 2. To learn how to use native processes in AIR 2, check out this article on Adobe Devnet.
AIR2.0 RC available on Labs
The Adobe AIR 2 Release Candidate (RC) build is now available on Adobe Labs. Please be sure to download the latest AIR runtime and, if you are an application developer, SDK. If you run into any issues, please let us know by using our feedback form to send us a bug. Please be sure to include all relevant information necessary to reproduce the issue.
Important: Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 2 *will not run* using the AIR 2 RC runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 2 application to run on the AIR 2 RC runtime, the namespace of the beta 2 application descriptor file must first be updated to “2.0″ and compiled against the AIR 2 RC SDK.
E-Seminar: App in a Week – June 7th-10th
With CS5 now available the EMEA Evangelism team have been hard at work prepping for our upcoming tour and the Online Developer Week. The course of events will fall between June 7th – 10th covering everything from design in Photoshop CS5 to development, and even deployment of your applications using the Flash Platform suite of tools.
The tools covered will include Flash Builder, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, Flex 4 and the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 runtimes. In my own session we’ll also be covering Device Central and some asset optimization guidelines for targeting mobile phones.
We’ll also look at P2P with Flash Player 10.1 as well as Livecycle, PHP and Java integration on the backend.
Schedule:
June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn
Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty
We’ve been busy for the past week building “EVA” to demonstrate all of the above. I think you’ll be really impressed with it and of course we’ll be providing the code after for you to use in your own applications.
SIGN UP HERE
The power of the Flash Platform part 5 – Multi-touch
Multi-touch is only just gaining grounds in the tech world. While it’s pretty common on mobile devices these days, you don’t yet see a lot of multi-touch devices in people’s homes. Sure… A lot of trackpads on laptops also support multi-touch these days but they usually only support the common gestures for zoom and rotate.
One of the key advantages of the Flash Platform is that Adobe can innovate and add new features rapidly. As Flash Player is one of the fastest adopted technologies on the web developers can use those new features in their applications almost instantly. Multi-touch is a very good example. When Adobe saw the uprise of multi-touch technology, it immediately started working on adding multi-touch capabilities to both Flash Player 10.1 and the AIR 2 runtimes. With public betas being available to developers, they can immediately start to experiment with these new features and start adding them to their applications.
That said… Developers have been doing multi-touch applications with Flash for years thanks to community driven ActionScript libraries. Check out these videos to get an idea on what people are doing/have been doing with multi-touch and Flash.
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