Adobe is pleased to announce the availability of the Adobe® AIR® 2.6 SDK and AIR® 2.6 desktop runtimes for Windows, Mac and Linux. With AIR 2.6, AIR achieves feature parity for Android and iOS platforms. This new release provides significant improvements for iOS app development as well as updates for Android and desktop app development.”

Here are the updates:

iOS:

• Updated AIR for iOS support with improved performance. Developers can take advantage of new features in iOS 4 like multitasking, Retina display for higher screen resolutions, and front and back camera support. Developers can now build application that capture audio with the microphone and take advantage of the same graphics hardware method used in AIR for Android using OpenGL ES2 for fast graphics.
• Packager for iPhone (PFI) is now replaced with and the functionality integrated with AIR Developer Tool (ADT) a comand line tool for compiling application in the AIR SDK. ADT can now be used to package AIR files, native desktop installers, AIR applications for Android and iOS.

Android:

• Submit apps to be included in the Amazon Appstore for Android when the store launches.  Companies now have an additional distribution option with one of the largest online shopping destinations on the web.
• USB debugging was added as an additional debugging option to WiFi.

See the video here - 

Flash Builder Burrito is a separate SDK that you need to download from Adobe Labs, and is currently in Preview.

Here are two screens (or views in this frameworks’ terms). One gives the list of all headlines from CNN World news and the other is a detailed description of that news item. You would have figured it out from the images

What I like about this:

• You strongly feel that you are designing in a mobile context. And as I said, for the Android phones. You can listen to events such as press of MENU and BACK buttons.
• You can include transitions between views.
• The action bar (that is the top pane of the application) is customizable. You can add icons/buttons to them.
• Quick integration with data services. I have always believed projects written in Flex/Flash Builders are handy when dealing with data-driven applications. Connecting to webservices is as simple as they are in Flex (for the desktop).

Obviously, from the above images, you’ll observe the img HTML tags. Yes, I am figuring out a way to display RichText inside Spark TextArea. Also, being a aesthetically challenged programmer, I haven’t thought even a single second to skin my app or its components and hence apologize for the UX. I am still in the process of skinning this application and shall soon test/deploy it on a compatible Android device ( I done have one; If any of you have pls comment below, I shall send it to you, for your comments and feedback) after completion. But I must say, I finished this whole RSS reader application within half an hour (inclusive of reading basic Burrito docs). So, I call super-fast application development environment.

“Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the release of Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 to mobile platform partners. Redesigned from the ground up with new performance and mobile specific features, Flash Player 10.1 is the first release that brings the full Web across desktops and devices. Mobile users will now be able to experience millions of sites with rich applications and content inside the browser including games, animations, rich Internet applications (RIAs), data presentations and visualizations, ecommerce, music, video, audio and more.

Already one of the top free apps on Android™ Market today, Flash Player 10.1 will be available as a final production release for smart phones and tablets once users are able to upgrade to Android 2.2 “Froyo.” Devices supporting “Froyo” and Flash Player 10.1 are expected to include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, DROID by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S and others. Flash Player 10.1 was also released to mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months.”

kris

It should be a direct sequel to the G1, and has all the features like multi-touch HVGA screen, accelerometer support, GPS, Compass, WIFi, 5 MP camera, Android Webkit Browser, and now with having Adobe Flash makes for even more very rich mobile web user experience.  

Check out the device here!

Adobe has a good a really good press release which explains in detail. They also have made a good video where the Adobe Platform team explains some of the features of the Flash implementation on the HTC Hero device.   According to Mark’s blogpost, it’s possible to view up to 85% of online video through the Flash Player, supports latest Flash Lite 3.1 supports streaming audio capabilities, as well as support for around 80% of Flash content on the web today through the device’s web browser. On this device, double clicking Flash content (games, ads, etc) brings it fullscreen mode, which seems to work very much intuitively: Demo of Flash on the HTC Hero (an Android device).

What version of Flash is this? Well, right now it’s Flash Lite 3.1 according to Adobe.  However, there have been prior public announcements that Flash 10 is coming to Android (by as soon as end of this year), as well as other mention of other SmartPhone platforms like webOS, Windows Mobile, & Symbian for starters down the lane.  Mark says that the HTC Hero has Adobe Distributable Player.  My lateral thought would be that, they (HTC) may upgrade the device at some point later (whether that means Flash Lite 3.x or Flash Player 10 can be anyone’s guess).  Here are few words from Adobe: Serge Jespers, Mark Doherty.  Here are some of the interesting comments from the Peter Elst & Dale Rankine of flashlite community.   With now over one billion devices running Flash, and Android represents a nice (open) platform in which Flash to grow, develop and play.  This new HTC Hero device represents the true mobile (web) experiences possible and I think we’ll see much more devices in the future.

“We are bringing Flash Player 10 to smartphone class devices to enable the latest web browsing experience. Multiple partners have already received early version of this release and we expect to release a beta version for developers at our Max conference in October. Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and the new Palm Web OS will be the first devices to support web browsing with the new Flash player…”

Read more,here.

This is interesting news and there are lot of people coveting to get Flash player running on their handsets. But there are few queries to address few queries like – will PaperVision3D kind of libraries be possible to use, considering the limited computing capacity of the device. Flash Player renders extensive support to 3D and lot of Game engines have been scripted in AS3. We will have to wait till the official release is made to know more on this.

Also known is the fact that porting of Flash Player to iPhone is also in progress <Read>. And quite soon, Flash player can claim to be truely ubiquitous platform running across PCs, handsets and consumer electronics.

Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet.

For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.

For consumers, the stakes are much higher. This jostling will determine what your mobile phone will be able to do, and who will control it. These rich environments have the potential to offer capabilities that bypass the control of the carriers who want to charge fees for features that might otherwise be free. See our discussion of how Verizon blocks Google’s mobile mapping software from getting data from the GPS system built into some phones.

Apple, so far, is limiting the iPhone to applications that can be run on its Safari browser and that use its own development environment, which will be introduced Thursday. It does not support Flash, which is how most free online video is published. The effect of this is to drive people who want video on the iPhone to use Apple’s iTunes store to buy it. (UPDATE: The iPhone does link to lots of YouTube video and other video in Apple’s Quicktime format, there is a great deal of video, especially from professional sources, only in Flash that it can’t play.)

Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is just emerging in the market, is meant to allow for a variety of online applications, but it has particularly deep capabilities for video. Nokia said Tuesday that it would include Silverlight on its high-end S60 smart phones that use Symbian and on its midrange Series 40 phones. This is, of course, a big win for Microsoft, as Nokia is the world’s top cellphone maker. But it is not an exclusive deal: Adobe’s Flash Lite also works on many of these Nokia handsets.

An interesting test of the market will be to see how Microsoft treats Windows Mobile, which is second to Symbian in the market for smartphone operating systems. Right now, there are versions of Flash Lite that ship on many Windows Mobile phones. (The carriers have a say in what actually goes on many phones.) Will Microsoft make it harder for Adobe to support Windows Mobile once its Silverlight is available for that platform later this year?

The news from Google Tuesday is much smaller, but still intriguing. It is software that is meant to support applications that run on mobile browsers, initially Internet Explorer running on Windows Mobile. Google Gears was initially introduced for general Web browsing. It lets you load crucial pieces of online applications onto your computer, so you can use them when you are not connected. Google’s first use of this for its own services was a version of its Google Reader newsreading site that can load a bunch of articles so users can read them on an airplane or anywhere else.

Now Google will offer the same for mobile devices. So uses of the Zoho office-in-a browser package on their cellphones will be able to read their documents when they are not connected. Microsoft, never one to leave a feature uncopied, says it will develop a system to use Silverlight when offline. (On computers, offline use has been a major thrust of Adobe, which is promulgating its AIR system as a superset of Flash.)

If you are not a programmer or wireless executive, I don’t blame you if all this makes your head spin. But the impact of how this shakes out will be important, and not just for mobile phones. The same environments that drive phones are likely to also power interactive features on television sets and all sorts of other devices. The Chumby, for example, is meant to replace a clock radio, and it delivers application written in Flash Lite.

We can all get behind the idea of software environments that will let us do what we want, on any device we want, without asking anyone’s permission.

UPDATE: A Google spokesman wrote in to point out that Google Gears is open source and thus doesn’t earn Google any license fees.

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