Digital magazines coming to Android built on AIR
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Wired, Martha Stewart, and New Yorker magazines on iPad, right? Those were created with a new suite of tools that we’ve been working on. The Digital Publishing Suite allows you to use your existing staff, skills, and Creative Suite publishing tools to design and deliver publisher-branded reading experiences to mobile devices.
Currently these magazines were only available on iOS devices but this week at MWC we announced that the Android viewer is now available. The application is actually built on AIR!
Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED magazine, showed off the magazine at MWC on the Motorola Xoom running Honeycomb. Check out the video below for more info (courtesy Seattle Times):
MWC off to a great start
Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona today and Adobe announced some amazing numbers. Developers and content publishers can now deploy Adobe AIR applications to more than 84 million smartphones and tablets running Android and iOS. Thousands of applications have been created and made available on Android Market and Apple’s App Store to date. By the end of 2011, Adobe expects more than 200 million smartphones and tablets to support Adobe AIR applications.
More than 20 million smartphones were shipped or upgraded with Flash Player 10.1 on over 35 certified devices in the first six months following the launch. For 2011, we’re expecting Flash Player to be supported on more than 132 million units worldwide. More than 50 tablets are expected to support Flash Player this year alone.
I’m really proud of what Adobe has achieved in such a short amount of time. This is my third year at MWC and we were actually talking about the things we’ve been showing at the show the last couple of years. It’s pretty amazing to see where we are today and to see the momentum in the market.
For more info check out http://adobe.ly/FlashMWC2011
Flash on!
Lapse It – time-lapse video app made with AIR for Android
I just came across this very nicely made time-lapse video application in the Android Market. Lapse It is built with Flex 4.5 and runs on the AIR runtime. You can set the capture interval to anything from 1 second to as long as you like. You can also limit the length of your capture by limiting the amount of frames, by setting a time or you can stop it manually. Lapse It will capture frames with a resolution up to 720p (It’s actually not 720p but 720×480) (the free version is limited to 240×160) and the final result can be either a JPEG sequence or an FLV video. The app also has a built-in video player so you can immediately see the result and will even allow you to directly upload it to YouTube.
I was going to record the sunrise this morning… But then I remembered that I actually live in Belgium and that we are in the middle of the winter… ;-) The chances for sun are very slim and this morning it was too cloudy to record anything useful. I love time-lapse video so you can bet on the fact that I will be using this app whenever I can!
Go check it out!
UPDATE: I just did a quick little test with Lapse It and I absolutely love the result!
Start building AIR for TV apps today! More exciting news for Flash devs from CES!
More exciting news for Flash developers coming out of CES this morning. Samsung and Adobe bring AIR to Smart TVs.
Samsung’s Smart TV platform (demonstrated at MAX 2010) will be the first to integrate support for AIR 2.5 for TV, making it easy for developers to build, distribute and monetize standalone applications through Samsung’s Smart TV applications store, Samsung Apps.
All of Samsung’s 2011 Smart TVs and Smart Blu-ray players will include support for Adobe AIR for TV and Samsung also announced plans to bring Flash Player 10.1 to its Smart TV browser.
Adobe is a key partner for Samsung and we are thrilled to be the first TV manufacturer to support Adobe AIR across the Samsung Smart TV platform,” said Boo-Keun Yoon, President of Samsung’s Visual Display Business. “Together, Samsung and Adobe are transforming the ways in which consumers interact with devices and content, providing rich, interactive applications built with industry-leading, cross platform tools.
Companies such as CNET, Epix and YouTube are already developing apps for Samsung’s TV app store. In the video below Don Woodward demonstrates what those apps look like on an AIR enabled TV.
You can already start building apps for the new Samsung TVs! Watch Don Woodward’s MAX 2010 session,“How to Develop AIR for TV Applications” and then check out the resource page on Adobe’s Devnet. Flash on!
InMarket: Monetizing your apps made easy
InMarket makes it incredibly easy to start making money with your AIR applications. InMarket provides a central mechanism to distribute, monetize and manage applications across various channels. In just a couple of easy steps and only a couple of lines of code you’ll be able to add a complete payment and licensing solution to your application.
Once your application is ready you can submit it to the InMarket Portal. InMarket will then submit your application to multiple application stores. Adobe is working with several store partners to provide the widest distribution possible for your applications across devices. Intel AppUp and the AIR Marketplace are the first stores that are supported and we’ll keep adding new stores once they become available. These stores will not only be available on laptops and netbooks but also on tablets, mobile phones, TVs, and set-top boxes. You can also just distribute the application on your own website using an AIR install badge.
One of the biggest benefits of InMarket is that you only need to remember one URL and login/password. If you have an update to your application you can just submit it to the InMarket Portal instead of having to update the file on all the different stores you published it on. The portal also has all the information available about your app and your revenue.
InMarket also allows you to create trial versions of your application. These trial versions can be time based or feature based. You can have a time based trial that gives the user full access to the app for a number of days or disable some of the features of the app until the user buys a license.
For instance, a feature based trial for a game could be one free level. If you want to play more you have to buy the app.
If you wanted you could even build an application that shows a “nagscreen” every x minutes to prompt the user to buy your app.
Adding InMarket to your application is also really easy. The InMarket portal will tell you exactly what you need to do and will even generate the necessary code.
If you sign up for InMarket today we’ll also give you a free code-signing certificate that you can use to sign your applications. You receive 70% of the sales revenue; Adobe and its partners take care of credit card processing, hosting, and marketing.
For more information and registration go to adobe.com/go/inmarket.
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