Android, though it lags iOS-based devices in gaming titles, does have a wide range of applications. Samsung pointed out that the Galaxy Tab will run Adobe Systems’ Flash Player 10.1, which opens the doors to more games available over the Web.
Featuring a powerful 1 GHz processor, high-speed WiFi-n technology and sleek high-resolution screen, the new Android-based tablets offer a fast and enjoyable PC-like web browsing experience. Users can access the entire internet thanks to Android’s support for Adobe Flash™ 10.1 player.
HTC Droid Incredible on Verizon Wireless – Click on Capabilities tab on product page after entering location information, Froyo 2.2 updates have been going out for existing phones.
Skype Mobile Capable
3G Mobile Hotspot Capable
VZ Navigator® Capable
Backup Assistant Capable
Visual Voice Mail capable
Backup Assistant capable
Mobile Broadband Connectcapable
HTML Browser: Supports Adobe Flash 10.1
WiFi® capable 802.11 b/g/n
My wife’s Droid Incredible received the Froyo update notice today. Interestingly it mentions Flash Player in the update text. Here is some highlights from the text: “This Android™ 2.2 (Froyo) software update includes new enhancements to support Adobe" Flash" Player 10.1 (pre-installed), support for 720p video recording, and many other improvements for your DROID Incredible by HTC.”
This is actually a very cool feature that is being added in Flex Hero. You can check the specification wiki page for SWF Size Report here. Previously all we had was the link-report which gave us a bunch of information about classes and inheritance and a rough idea of compressed size of classes. It was helpful to see which classes relative to each other where taking up space in a specific SWF file. But where the SWF Size Report comes in to play is it provides a nice breakdown of the SWF’s uncompressed size for actually bytes in the SWF.
In my last post “Using Flex Hero RSL Enhancements” I discussed some of the new Flex Hero features around RSL Enhancements. I wanted to finish off the discussion with some information about the new “include-inheritance-dependencies-only” addition to compc, which added to make monkey patching with RSL’s easier. Lets just say it made one manual step easier, the whole process is still a bit complex.
The main goal of Runtime Shared Libraries (RSL) and monkey patching is to be able to leverage the Adobe official RSL’s with custom RSL’s that only include the few classes that you are changing. This means you need to understand what classes are in what official libraries.
There is a bunch of information on RSL’s and monkey patching explaining the more manual way of figuring out the exact classes you wanted in your monkey patched RSL. It involves a bunch of getting what classes to include and exclude from different compiles of mxmlc and compc. Here is a good resource on the subject over at Darrell Loverin’s blog. I need to give a shout out to Darrell for helping me work through the new feature and how to make this all work in Flash Builder 4. Which is the approach I wanted to try and make work instead of the more common method of build scripts. Some parts of the Flash Builder 4 approach might change in the future as the IDE changes, and some parts are easier with using custom flex-config.xml and ANT builds. But if you don’t know or have an ANT setup or don’t know about flex-config.xml it doesn’t make a difference and I wanted to show how to do it without all that.
One of the new features of the Flex Hero SDK is RSL Enhancements. I wanted to understand what this new feature really means for Flex projects and applications. The following post will show the differences in Flash Builder 4 projects and then use a custom Flex 4 preloader to display timed text information about what really is going on in the RSL loading process.
One interesting data point that goes unnoticed is the fact that a lot of startup use the Flash Platform. Check out this latest startup called Bizk.it (prounced Biz-Kit). They made 33rd on a 100 startup list here. Its a great example of a cloud base service using Flex/AIR for the front in. Take note on their hiring page, they are hiring Flex Developers.
Another startup called UJam has some big backers, Hans Zimmer is a co-founder. Check out Hans Zimmer talking about UJam on youtube. They almost won the TechCrunch Disrupt contest.
Also one close to the Flash community that if you haven’t heard about you been in a hole somewhere is litl. They have devices, first a web book, that are channeled based connect to be part of the home experience. They Flash UI, data sync with Google AppEngine, and then custom hardware. If you are a developer check out there developer site here. Also they have been hiring quite a few people from the flash community so another place to look for work.
The landscape is changing, but take a look and you’ll see great projects and people committed to using the Flash Platform for very cool stuff. A great place to see and feel the excitement of the Flash Platform is MAX. Come join us in LA in Oct 24-27 for MAX 2010.
Motorola and Verizon announced the pre-sale and availability of the DROID 2. The DROID 2 will have Android 2.2 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 preinstalled. This is great news for the Adobe developer community. It also means that Android 2.2 is finally getting critical mass for preinstallation. Although Android 2.2 has been out for a while there still has to be a lot of certification and integration of software by each manufacturer and carrier, let alone the small but technical chipset differences of each device. Thus the lag of each device getting the latest OS. This doesn’t leave out Flash Player or AIR for Android (once it comes out of beta) in this process, the cool thing is it will come and Adobe and partners are working hard to make this happen as soon as possible.
Another cool thing, the DROID 2 will have a R2-D2 version available in September. The special version of the phone will feature exclusive Star Wars content and external hardware designed to look like the trusty Droid from the film saga. Check out the news here.
One of the features in Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 is developers now have access to the microphone sound bytes. I created an AIR 2.0 application for the release demonstrating how to use this feature. Originally I created the application with Flex 3 and have since ported it to Flex 4. In this process the application was first developed for the desktop at a screen resolution of 460×210. What I wanted is to have a way to have this application look the same on different devices. As part of my exploratory talk for Riapalooza I came up with a way to scale an application with out having to modified the application code. It also keeps track of scaled content that doesn’t fit into the new form factor.
The best way to explain what I am talking about is to show you. You can catch the video below that demonstrates the scaling concept as well as demos the Microphone feature working on the Nexus One.
I have updated the QTIndexSwapper2 AIR application. This update includes some UI fixes to display status of the video processing properly and make it hopefully a little better to understand. It also includes some code to check for updates of the application. You can find the update at the QTIndexSwapper page.
I presented a session at RIAPalooza 3 on “Building RIAs from the Prespective of the Finger Tip”. I will probably get around to posting more information about this subject on my blog, but until then I am making my demo code available for those that wanted to play with it.
Download the FingerTipTesting.fxp (just unzip if you want it in a non-Flash Builder project format). Its linked against Flex 4.1 which you can pull down off the Flex sdk website.
