The Kindle Fire could be the first truly successful Android tablet. It touts a very reasonable $200 price tag, a well-curated app store, easy access to Amazon’s cloud-based services, brand trust and recognition.
One of the reasons why I guess it can be a success is because the failing point of many existing 7-inch tablets as that they thought of the iPad as their competition the Kindle Fire instead has embraced a different way.

The device is an Android device and it supports Gingerbread, rather than Honeycomb, Android’s tablet-specific build.

The main features of this new devices are

• Stunning Color Touchscreen
• Magazines in Rich Color
• 100,000 Movies and TV Shows
• Fast Dual-Core Processor
• Ultra-fast web browsing – Amazon Silk (Yet another browser!)
• Children’s Books
• Free Cloud Storage

As you can see the Kindle Fire is a device created for content consumption, not creation — for reading, listening to music and watching video and even more it doesn’t need to have big storage capabilities due to the fact that is uses the Amazon Clouds.
The expectations are that this device will finally give developers a reason to develop tablet apps for Android due to the audience (i.e. the Amazon’s users) that is so big and to the device that is pretty.

Amazon has several advantages over other tablet manufacturers that have tried to compete with Apple. It has an established, built-in audience of loyal customers, whether of the Kindle, its e-books or the wide range of retail goods it sells. All of these give Amazon better brand recognition and loyalty than any comparable manufacturer except perhaps Apple, at least in the United States.
Amazon also deals in a wide range of other media perfectly suited for tablets, including video, magazines, games and apps. It’s customizing Android and its Appstore specifically for its own tablet hardware, potentially solving the fragmentation problem that’s plagued Android on smartphones and tablets.
Finally, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color showed that customers do want smaller tablets if they can deliver quality media at a low price. Even Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad death-and-resurrection debacle shows that there’s pent-up demand for a multi-function tablet that’s much less expensive than the iPad.

As soon as the first devices will be shipped the users reaction will make the fortune or the ruin of this device, I strongly believe it can be the first valid alternative to the iPad.

Modern smart phone applications include web browsing, multimedia, gaming thus demanding high performance that are comparable to that of desktop and laptop machines.
Data access optimization and caching is one of the key factors that can dramatically improve performance and therefor the user experience.

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Adobe is launching today Adobe Mobile Challenge, a competition that gives you and your members a chance to win a ticket to MAX.

What’s it all about:
1.  Develop a mobile AIR application using a pure AS3 project or the Flex framework. It can be a game, a productivity application, a lifestyle app, an artistic experience… any kind of engaging application.
2.  package and publish your applications on the three leading marketplaces before the 1st of September: the Android marketplace, the Apple Store, the BlackBerry AppWorld.
3.  Register for the competition and win a trip to MAX.

In order to start in the right way the Adobe Mobile Challenge web site contains a list of tutorials from which you can start to build you mobile application.

The official rules are available here , the deadline for all the submissions is the 1st of September 2011.

More details on the competition here: http://www.adobemobilechallenge.com/

Often happens that customers require to implement transitions between pages, nice animations, etc. also in a mobile web sites.
This kind of effects usually belong to Flash web sites but unfortunately on iOS devices there is still no support for Flash. Thanks to “Stevie” in fact the web on the mobile is growing up without the Flash Player but the request the customers have are always the same: nice transitions, cool effects, etc.
The result is that we have to use technologies that are pretty new and without a strong background like Flash to satisfy customer’s request.
Anyway, let’s see hot to create a transition effect on an iOS device with CSS and the webkit transitions.
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The Nook Color is a color version of the Nook e-reader device by Barnes & Noble. It is a 7-inch tablet with full-color multitouch touchscreen input.The device is designed for full-color viewing of books, newspapers, magazines, and children’s picture books. A limited number of the children’s books available for the Nook Color include interactive animations and the option to have a professional voice actor read the story. It was announced on 26 October 2010 and shipped on 16 November 2010.

One of the most popular games today, Angry Birds, made its way on to the NOOK Color in April when the tab received the awesome 1.2 firmware upgrade. Angry Birds gets even better now with the “Magic Places” concept that unlocks new content (for free) in the game based on players’ location. Barnes & Noble’s Android device is the first to bring this feature to customers via its WiFi network in-store.

Barnes and Noble has a dedicated NOOK Developer Program where Android, Adobe Flash and AIR developers can go for information on how to create applications for the product. In addition the program has a NOOK Software Development Kit (SDK) for helping in the building of applications for the NOOK Color.
Developers can create Android applications compatible with Froyo Release (2.2) API 8 and also Adobe Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.6 content as the latest release (v1.2) supports these features.

Nearly 2 million apps have been downloaded by NOOK Color customers in the weeks following the launch of NOOK Apps and they’re asking for more.
A very interesting event has been published today the NOOK APPS TECHNICAL WORKSHOP FOR ADOBE AIR, it will take place Thursday, July 14 at San Francisco, more info available here.

Today delivered an update to Adobe® Flash® Builder® 4.5 and Flex 4.5 software to enable developers to build applications for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook. Support for Android devices was released in April 2011. Developers now have a single platform for building highly expressive mobile applications that can be distributed via the Android Market, Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World. Offered standalone or as part of Creative Suite® 5.5 Web Premium and Master Collection, Flash Builder 4.5 enables the creation of applications that work seamlessly across leading mobile device platforms.

To download or trial Flash Builder 4.5, please go to www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder.html. Street price is US$249 for Flash Builder 4.5 Standard, US$699 for Flash Builder 4.5 Premium. Flash Builder 4.5 Premium is also available as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium and Master Collection. Upgrade pricing for Flash Builder 4.5 is $49 and volume licensing is available. Flex 4.5 is available as a free open source framework. Also, Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP today supports mobile application development for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS.

Some useful links

Hello World and mobile applications
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash-builder/articles/hello-world.html

Build iOS applications with Flash Builder 4.5
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/build-ios-applications-using-flex-and-flash-builder-45/

MuniTracker app for Android and iOS
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/munitracker-app-for-android-and-ios-built-with-flash-builder/

Mobile mapping app with the ARCGis API
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash-builder/articles/mobile-mapping-app-arcgis.html

il 14 Giugno, presso il centro Svizzero di via Plaestro 2-4 a Milano si svolgerà l’atteso “Meet the BlackBerry Playbook”.

La giornata è divisa in due sezioni: una tecnica (curata da Adobe e Rim) e una propriamente di marketing (curata da Rim).

La partecipazione è completamente gratuita previa registrazione al seguente link

Seguiranno maggiori informazioni sul programma completo.
Noi ci saremo!

After the recent release of the new AIR 2.6 SDK people started again to discuss which can be
the best way to deliver an Flash Platform application on Android devices.
As often happen the right answer is “It depends!”.
The aim of this post is to outline the most important differences between Flash Player and Air based applications
in order to help developers to make the right choice.

The Flash player 10.1 became available in Android 2.2 in June 2010 and runs within the device native browser. There are several similarities and differences between the
two environments and it’s very important to understand them in order to make the right choice for a mobile application.

Both types of environment are intended for cross-platform rich media applications. They both use the ActionScript language but Air for Android only supports AS3.
In order to keep the size of the runtime down the mobile version of AIR is not distributed with WebKit bundles, it means that is not possible to use HTML and JavaScript to create a mobile app like in the desktop.
To let developers able to show HTML content in the API there is the StageWebView class that provides a simple means to display HTML content on devices where the HTMLLoader class is not supported.
The class provides no interaction between ActionScript and the HTML content except through the methods and properties of the StageWebView class itself.

Both benefit from the recent performance and optimization improvements such as hardware acceleration for graphics and video, bitmap manipulation, battery and CPU optimization, better memory utilization and scripting optimization.
It’s strongly encouraged to use only Spark components for both of them and even more always keep in mind that a native application lives in the OS without the restriction of the browser sand boxes.

The Flash Player based applications are typically located on a web site, there is no need of installation and updates / bug fixing are easier, the AIR applications require packaging, certificate and installation on the device.
The Flash player is subject to the browser sandbox and its restricted environment. The browser security is high because applications may come from many unknown websites.
The AIR applications security has to be handled by developers and an app can access to most of the OS features and /or files.

The Flash Player based applications store data suing Flash Local SharedObject and there is no access to the file system or any way to access with other applications to the SharedObject data.
AIR applications on their hand function as native applications and have access to local storage and system files. Persistent data may be stored in a local database that can be used also by other applications.

AIR has additional functionality unique to mobile devices such as geolocation, accelerometer and access to the camera. Multi touch and gesture input is currently supported in AIR but not on the device native browser.

A new book from O’Reilly about Android app with AIR is coming Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR, we strongly encourage to consider it because this topic cannot be covered with a blog post.

The turning point

In the last months of 2010 Apple has removed many restrictions in its developer agreement and published guidelines about the apps it will accept and reject.

Between these restrictions there was also the impossibility to submit to the appstore apps built using the packager for iPhone.

Flash on the iPhone ? really ?!

No, not really.

This is made possible by a Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure developed to understand AS3 code and able to output native ARM assembly code.

Porting to iPhone/ipad your AS3 projects is pretty easy and through the Packager for iPhone and Air for Android you can theoretically develop cross-platform application that looks exactly the same regardless the device it runs on.
Read more »

In the past days the mobile developers community got the announcement about a new partnership between Nokia and Microsoft that would use their complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem.
The main aspects of this strategic partnership from a developer point of view are that Nokia would adopt Windows Phone as its principal smartphone strategy and that Nokia would help drive the future of Windows Phone contributing
to it with its expertise on hardware design, language support, etc. On the other side Microsoft will bring a consistent expertise about Operating Systems and a good toolbox full of development tools.

There are a lot of developers that believe this step is a very desperate move to stay in business and admitting that Nokia isn’t in any way capable of creating an attractive smartphone eco-system, moreover there is a general
sense of frustration between the ones that has invested a lot of time and money following the Nokia strategies and created products for the Nokia platform.
The feeling we have about this partnership are different, we believe the decision was not because of today, was because of Nokia in the next years. What we see right now on the market is that Blackberry is consolidating a partnership
with Adobe for the new playbook, google is working in the same direction to improve even more their app market place and the Apple is quite solid and is trying to became a mobile operator.
Create a strong relationship with a company like Microsoft doesn’t seem a bad solution also because Nokia demonstrated more than once to trust and support the developer community so it’s still possible to have a Qt porting (I don´t
know what Microsoft thinks about it) and to force Microsoft to include some of the Nokia-related tools up to today (Flash Player at least).

Some years ago the Flash Platform developers community have had the same feeling about Adobe and Macromedia. Adobe did one great marketing effort to demonstrate it was a marriage, right now most of the developers are happy about the marriage
but not all of them.
It’s too early to get the right feeling, again it’s something that is up to the high level management, the important is that there is the need for clarity about tools and developers program like Forum Nokia, after we got some clarifications we will be able to follow up and state if it’s a funeral or a marriage.