Research: What’s your favorite tablet app and why?
The holidays are always a good time to do a little bit of research and since tablets are obviously going to be the next hot thing I thought about doing some research on tablet apps. I need your help though.
What I’d like to find out is what your favorite tablet apps are and why. I’d also like to hear from you if you currently do not own a tablet. To make this as easy as possible I created a Google Docs form. It would be a great help if you could take a few minutes to share your thoughts. Thanks in advance!
Got AIR for Android? Try these games!
I saw some comments from people installing AIR on their Android device who couldn’t find any apps for it. I think that’s just the beauty of it all. An AIR application behaves exactly the same way as any other application in the Android Market, so while there are already a few AIR apps in the market, they’re not explicitly identified as AIR applications. But I understand that you all want to test the performance and experience, and you want to know which apps run on AIR. So here’s a few AIR-based games that are currently available in the Android Market for you to try out.
I’ve also created an AIR for Android Applications list on AppBrain (UPDATE: AppBrain now has a list of all AIR applications on the Android Market: http://www.appbrain.com/apps/adobe-air) and will keep that up to date with new apps I find or hear about. If your app is already in the Android Market I’d love to hear about it!
Android – Move your apps to SD
One of the major gripes of Android users is the disk space problem. The problem is that you can really only install applications on the device’s internal memory. Froyo allows you to install apps on the SD card… but only if the developer actually enables that feature in his app. There are a lot of apps in the Android Market that do not have this feature enabled (and yes… Flash Player is one of those apps) but there is an easy solution.
Well… Easy… Provided that you are familiar with the Android SDK and have no problem using a terminal window.
The trick is actually pretty simple and all credits go to Jason Patel who posted this on the Modaco Nexus One forum.
- You need to make sure that you enabled “USB debugging” on your phone.
- You need the Android SDK but I’m sure you have that installed by now, right? ;-)
- Connect your phone to a USB port, open up a terminal window, and type “adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2” (without the quotes). ADB is part of the Android SDK.
This will enable the move to SD card option for all applications. - Go to the Applications menu in the Settings menu and move your apps to your SD card.
- To restore this setting back to default type “adb shell pm setInstallLocation 0“.
So far I have not encountered any problems with any of the apps that I moved to SD… That said… Please note that there’s no guarantee that this won’t break or slow down your apps. If you encounter any issues I’d love to hear about them though. Just leave a comment below…
Native iPhone applications built with Flash – FailBlog Player Demo
Write once, deploy anywhere. Sounds nice, no? Sadly it’s not really a reality today. The currently available technologies are very fragmented and today there is no technology out there that makes that dream a reality.
I have a strong feeling that is going to change dramatically in 2010. Some will disagree or say that I am too biased but I really do think it’s going to happen… Want proof? Ok… You got it!
I’m sure you’ve all heard that the next release of Flash (CS5) will allow you to build native applications for the iPhone. Instead of having to learn a new language to built such a native app, you just build it with the tools and technology you all know and love. The demo video below shows an application that I’ve been building the last couple of days. A FailBlog video player that gets all the latest FailBlog videos and allows you to watch them on your iPhone or mobile device. It is completely written in ActionScript 3.0 and plays Flash Video (FLVs with On2 VP6 in this case. So no need to transcode your videos!) on the iPhone. And that’s not even the coolest thing about it! The coolest thing about this is that I can export this as an iPhone application, SWF file and AIR application with just one button click. At the end of the video you’ll see a sneak peek of the same application running on a Palm Pre in its browser with Flash Player 10.1! And that is the power of the Flash Platform! Write once, deploy anywhere? It’s finally becoming a reality!
If all goes well, you should be able to play with the iPhone version of this app before the end of the year. I still have some optimizations to do and have to clean up some bits and pieces but I’m feeling confident that that shouldn’t take too long. Keep an eye on my blog for more details!
Flash on!
5 Adobe AIR apps I use every day
Yes I know… I work for Adobe and some of you will call me (and have called me) an Adobe fanboy. I’m fine with that. However, I honestly think that Adobe AIR has greatly changed the way people think about application development. I’m sure most of you know that Adobe AIR allows you to build applications that run across Windows, OS X and Linux based systems. The fact that you can build them with web technologies like JavaScript and Flash really opened up this market to all web developers. As a web developer, you don’t have to learn anything new to build desktop applications — applications that you build once and run on all the operating systems that AIR supports.
But this post was supposed to be about AIR apps I use on a daily basis. So here we go…
DestroyTwitter
There are a bunch of Twitter apps out there that are built on AIR and everyone has their own favorite. DestroyTwitter is my favorite. I like it for the uncluttered interface and its small footprint. One of the most common comments about AIR apps is that they use a lot of memory. DestroyTwitter shows that the opposite can be true. Just the other day, my Finder was actually using double the amount of memory that DestroyTwitter was using.
Adobe Directory (internal only but source available)
With over 5000 people working at Adobe, getting information about a colleague was really challenging before we started using this app. It has all the important information like phone numbers, email, location and manager name but it can even look up the person’s Exchange calendar to see if he/she is available at a certain time. The app actually uses ColdFusion to get the information from the Exchange server.
By the way… Did you know that ColdFusion is a full Exchange client? With just a couple lines of code, you can get a person’s calendar, contacts, emails, …
EspressoReader
EspressoReader is an RSS reader built on AIR but it syncs up with your Google Reader account. Next to my MacBook Pro, I also regularly use my EEEPC to catch up with blog posts and by syncing up with Google Reader, my EspressoReader apps on both machines are always up to date with where I left off.
Polaris
This app is the new brainchild from Nicolas Lierman. I’m sure you remember the Google Analytics AIR app that Nicolas built.
Just a few months ago, Nicolas started DesktopReporting.com, his own company in which he is building a bunch of apps on top of Google Analytics. Polaris is the first app he released and is a widget style app that allows you to keep up to date on your webstats.
Application X
This is an app that I can’t talk about :D It’s still under heavy development but is already one of the apps I use daily. I’m not sure when/if this will see daylight but I will blog about it if it does.
This is just a small list of apps that I really use every single day. There are a bunch of other apps that I regularly use but listing those would make this post like an AIR app directory and that’s not what I wanted ;-) You should definitely check out Refreshing Apps and the AIR Marketplace for more cool apps.
I’m also interested to know which apps you use every day… Feel free to leave a comment!
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