Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., is coming to the TV screen, the company announced today at its developer conference Adobe MAX 2010. With the launch of Adobe AIR 2.5, the software, already supported on various smartphone, tablet and desktop platforms, is being extended to televisions with the first AIR-enabled TV shipping in Q1 2011.
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Samsung will be the first hardware OEM to ship AIR 2.5 in its SmartTV devices, but no exact launch date was given.
AIR currently supports smartphone operating systems like Android, Blackberry's Tablet OS and even iOS, says Adobe. Acer, HTC, Motorola, RIM and Samsung are all expected to ship the AIR runtime pre-installed on number of devices, including both tablets and smartphones.
Because Adobe software has had a shaky history on Apple's mobile operating system, we quizzed the company on how well AIR on iPhone was doing today. In return, Adobe provided a list of several top AIR apps available for the iPhone now, including the following:
Adobe also noted that there are hundreds of AIR for Android available on the Market today, some of which can be seen here on AppBrain, an Android Market search engine and recommendation site.
What's New in AIR 2.5
AIR's expansion to the TV is notable as this platform is becoming an increasingly important battleground for attracting developer interest, thanks to both Apple TV and Google TV's plans in this area.
However, big screen support was not the only important update for AIR today. The newly refreshed runtime also now includes support for the accelerometer, camera, video, microphone, multi-touch, gestures and geo-location, the latter which will enable developers to build location-based mobile apps using AIR software.
Also new is AIR's ability to display native browser controls within the application for the integration of HTML and .SWF content and SQLite support for databases to be cached and stored within an app. Hardware acceleration is enabled across major partners, reports Adobe, including Intel, nVidia, ST Micro, Trident, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and more.
Availability
Adobe AIR 2.5 and its associated SDK (software developer's kit) will arrive today on Adobe's website. Android users running the latest version of the Android mobile operating system (2.2, aka "Froyo") will be able to download the updated version of Adobe AIR directly from the Android Market today. AIR 2.5 for Blackberry's Tablet OS and Samsung's SmartTV will arrive next year.
Adobe also announced new releases of Flash Platform tools, including the AIR SDK and an update to the open source Flex framework.
Adobe will soon introduce its Creative Suite 5 to the public. A tool in the new suite will allow for easy import of Flash animations into HTML5 Canvas code. Once IE9 launches, all major browsers will support Canvas. At that point, any Flash creation can be viewable by just about anyone without downloading the Flash plugin. It also means, clearly, that devices that cannot accept the plugin can nonetheless run the animations built on it.
Those who are excited about this probably think of Flash is a space hog. As ReadWriteWeb has discovered, it sometimes is, though not always.
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One of the points of interest regarding this development is the fact that Apple products block flash from "access to the required APIs." HTML5 may prove a way around for Flash users and the users of Apple devices, like the iPhone and iPad who wish to use the content.
On the video below, "Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist" Michael Chaize compares performance of Flash 10.1 and HTML5 on mobile devices.
Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.
Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.
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The New File Organizer
The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.
The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer's hard drive, the service introduces something called "collections." These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.
Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don't yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.
Also new is the organizer's "import and edit" feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don't have to click a link to open the uploaded file - it happens automatically.
Other New Features
The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don't offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.
The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.
Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry
One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone's camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.
The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available - a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.
According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they're also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they're not an enterprise play yet and they also won't reveal how many people use the premium version of the service - only that they're "happy" with the number thus far.
If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.
Today Adobe released new beta versions of the company's Flash Player and AIR. The Flash Player 10.1 technology now includes HTTP streaming and hardware decoding of H.264 video. The company plans to bring the updated Flash Player to mobile devices too, starting with the Palm Pre and then completing versions for other major smartphones by the first half of 2010 (with the notable exception of the iPhone, of course).
However, out of the two updates, it's Adobe AIR 2 that received the biggest overhaul. The new runtime allows developers to create entirely new types of applications that simply weren't possible using AIR 1. What sort of apps are those? Adobe's gallery of sample apps should give you some ideas of what's to come.
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1. Mass Storage Detection
In Adobe AIR 2, apps can now detect when a mass storage device has been inserted into the computer. That means the app can "see" your USB flash drives, external drives, and even some digital cameras. For example, developers could build an app that recognizes when your Flip camera is plugged in and lets you automatically upload videos to YouTube.
To demo this capability, Adobe has released FileTile, a sample app that does just this (minus the video uploading). FileTile recognizes external devices and lets you see the files and open them with their default application.
The native process API allows developers to better integrate their AIR apps with existing code libraries or extend their apps using native code. With the new native process API, this can now be done without compromising the cross-platform capabilities of AIR which allows it to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Developers using this new functionality can now deploy their apps with operating-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, .rpm, and .deb instead of an .air installer file.
To demonstrate the native process API, Adobe released SearchCentral, an application that taps into Mac OS X's Spotlight feature for desktop searches. It also lets you do web searches on Google and Wikipedia.
Here's a video explaining in more detail how the native API works:
3. Microphone Data Access
Like it sounds, the microphone data access feature lets you acquire the sound data from a computer's microphone without the need of a server. For example, a developer could build a note-taking application that lets users record audio clips even when they're offline.
To get started, a simple app called Microphone is now available which does recording and playback with variable playback speeds supported.
The new "file promises" feature of AIR 2 lets you drag remote files out of an AIR application. A file promise, as described by Adobe's Christian Cantrell, is "what you put on the clipboard when you want the user to be able to drag and drop files that do not yet exist, or that exist elsewhere (not locally on your machine)." It's a promise to deliver a file at some point, but not an actual file.
For example, an app could generate a CSV file but only when a user tries to drag and drop the file. It could also refer to files on a remote server, like an FTP server. When a user grabs that remote file and pulls it into the AIR app, the app could then download the data. It even supports files accessible via a URL like those hosted on Google Sites.
Unfortunately, this feature is Windows and Mac only.
A sample app called S3E provides a graphical front-end to your Amazon S3 account to demonstrate this feature.
Adobe AIR 2 also adds support for new networking capabilities including UDP, secure sockets and peer-to-peer. To demonstrate the possibilities, Adobe released KeePIPE, a javascript app that lets users on the same network share files using peer-to-peer technology. It also lets VMWare users transfer files between a virtual machine and a host computer.
Perhaps the most exciting enhancement in AIR 2 and in Flash Player 10.1 are the new multi-touch APIs. In Windows 7, AIR apps can respond to multi-touch and in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, they can respond to gestures.
In this video (below), Adobe's Kevin Lynch demos a multi-touch app on an HP TouchSmart computer:
Obviously, Adobe is excited about this new feature, too, because they've released not one but four sample applications that demonstrate multi-touch in action:
GeoTest: Lets you move images around the screen using a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source
PhotoPhysics: A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source
SpriteFract: A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine that demonstrates a mouse-compatible, direct-manipulation interface. It also uses PixelBender to asynchronously process a large amount of geometry data. Download Installer | Source
TouchTest: Lets you drag, scale, and rotate images on the screen. Download Installer | Source
Other Features
Other features in Adobe AIR 2 include the following (courtesy of Rob Christensen):
A new API lets you open documents with its default application
Global error handling
Enhanced printing support, including vector printing support on Mac and new APIs to query the local machine for a list of printers or print without a dialog box.
WebKit in AIR 2 is now based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3 which includes support for JavaScript profiling, SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine performs 50% faster using SunSpider tests, CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors), styling scrollbars via CSS and Canvas enhancements.
IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input.
Increased maximum size of NativeWindow: AIR 2 apps can have a window size of 4095 x 4095 where before the maximum was 2880 x 2880.
DNS lookup
Network interface enumeration
Database transaction savepoints
Screen reader support in Windows
IME API and IME text input enhancement
Smaller runtime installer sizes
More efficient CPU usage and reduced memory size
Adobe AIR 2 is available for download here on Adobe Labs. You can send Adobe feedback here or participate on the user-to-user forums here.
Adobe announced that it plans to lay off almost 10% of its workforce earlier this week. At the same time, though, the company also announced that it plans to expand its investment in e-books and digital publishing. Adobe is creating a new organization within the company that will focus on products for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. With Bill McCoy, however, the company is also losing one of its most visible advocates for open e-book standards in this week's layoffs.
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Reorganizing Adobe's E-Book Groups
This new organization within Adobe will bring together the e-book business groups that worked on the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, as well as the group that worked with the New York Times on the Times Reader 2.0. The new group will focus on developing products and business opportunities for digital publishers. These will include support for business models like subscription, advertising and retail.
Sony, for example, currently uses Adobe's Content Server to power its DRM solution for e-books. While Sony offers its e-books in the ePub format, it also uses Adobe's Content Server to wrap a proprietary DRM solution around the open ePub format.
Bill McCoy is Leaving Adobe
Bill McCoy drove Adobe's push towards making ePub the default format for eBooks. McCoy, however, is leaving Adobe as part of the restructuring. We can only hope that the company will continue to push for open standards in McCoy's absence. More details about McCoy's role at Adobe can be found at TeleRead.
Early this morning at the MAX 2009 Conference, Adobe previewed Flash Professional CS5 and announced that the new release will let Flash developers export their files as iPhone apps. The significance of this announcement is that development time for thousands of Flash-based gaming and music companies will be cut significantly. In the past, developers have had to create separate iPhone apps and web-based tools. While this is not the Flash plugin for Safari that many have asked for, the closed-beta version of Flash Professional CS5 eliminates the need for separate iPhone development. In other words, developers avoid building their applications twice.
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Lumosity, a learning games community with more than 1 million members and a Flash-based iPhone portal, is particularly excited to see the CS5 announcement. Said resident game designer Ben Ketz, "We release new products every month. This is an interesting solution that Adobe's decided to pursue, and so far it looks like the transition will be smooth. Our development time will depend on whether these applications actually look and feel like native apps."
High-traffic Flash-based gaming communities like Lumosity, Newgrounds and PopCap Games will be some of the first groups to utilize Flash's Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure. If these groups really do find the Flash customization as easy as it sounds, Adobe will be opening the floodgates to casual gaming. PopCap's titles alone have been downloaded more than 1 billion times by consumers worldwide. With reduced development time, it will be interesting to see the fortunes amassed by gaming houses. Some of the light games that have already been created using CS5 include Chroma Circuit, Fickleblox and Just Letters.
Tomorrow at MAX, Adobe's worldwide developer conference, Adobe Systems
Incorporated will announce with partner Research In Motion (RIM) their progress in bringing Flash support to BlackBerry devices.
RIM, the company behind BlackBerry's wireless platform, including email and touchscreen technologies, is joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, a 50-organization-members-strong organization that aims to promote better apps for richer mobile, television, and desktop browsing experiences for users.
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With this announcement, 19 out of the top 20 mobile handset manufacturers are now collaborating with Adobe to integrate Flash technology into their devices.
Also at MAX, Adobe and Nokia are jointly announcing the funding of more than 35 multi-screen applications as part of the Open Screen Project Fund. Several apps will be demonstrated at the show, including Twitter client Twittle, interactive map MyFestivalGuide, entertainment app SmartGrooves, frequent flyer app MileBlaster, real-time audience feedback app Live TalkBack, and many more.
Adobe is also announcing support for HTTP streaming and several new mobile-ready features, including multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer, and screen orientation.
Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent browser-based runtime from the Open Screen Project that offers browsing of Flash-based web apps, HD video, and other content on smartphones, netbooks, other Internet-enabled devices.
Flash support is also expected for several other mobile platforms, including Google Android, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Windows Mobile. A public developer beta will be available for Windows Mobile, webOS, and desktop operating systems before the end of the year. A public developer beta for Android and Symbian should be announces early in 2010, with general availability and publicly available devices coming in the first half of 2010.
Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., is coming to the TV screen, the company announced today at its developer conference Adobe MAX 2010. With the launch of Adobe AIR 2.5, the software, already supported on various smartphone, tablet and desktop platforms, is being extended to televisions with the first AIR-enabled TV shipping in Q1 2011.
AIR's expansion to the TV is notable as this platform is becoming an increasingly important battleground for attracting developer interest, thanks to both Apple TV and Google TV's plans in this area. 
Adobe will soon introduce its 
Adobe's online office suite, 
One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called 
Today 
The native process API allows developers to better integrate their AIR apps with existing code libraries or extend their apps using native code. With the new native process API, this can now be done without compromising the cross-platform capabilities of AIR which allows it to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. 
Adobe 
Early this morning at the MAX 2009 Conference, 
Tomorrow at