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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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.
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Research in Motion will launch a cloud-based capability for its popular BlackBerry Enterprise Server by the end of 2011, RIM officials said Thursday.

The launch of the cloud capability could depend on either partners, such as telecommunications carriers that would host the BES service, or it could be hosted by RIM itself, said Pete Devenyi, vice president of RIM’s communications platform group. “We’re not yet saying how it will be rolled out,” he said.

RIM’s architecture for a cloud-based BES creates an open BlackBerry Common Messaging Interface between various mail adapters and BES Services software as well as a BES database.

Read more details here.

To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.

SmashingMagazine prepared an overview of useful web and mobile user interface kits, handy PDFs and resources that we can use in our projects. They’ve carefully selected the most useful kits and resources to get you going in the early stages of a project. Enjoy!

(vai Vivek) – Nice presentation “a selection of thoughts on the 2010 mobile landscape from yiibu.” Enjoy.

Nokia continues to invite developers to apply to the Open Screen Project Fund to get money to create mobile apps and distribute them in more than 190 countries worldwide via Nokia’s Ovi Store.

For more information, or if you know someone that should submit an idea for an app, please visit:http://www.openscreenproject.org/developers/get_started.html

If you own an Android 2.2 (Froyo) device you must know that you can already start building (and testing!) your AIR 2.5 applications for Android. There’s more: if you are an FDT user like me you should be glad to know that is very easy to build and package our AIR4Android applications without even leaving our favorite tool!

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Nokia just announced the top 10 finalists for the Ovi app wizard prize category in the Calling All Innovator 2010 competition. All submissions were reviewed based on the following judging criteria: Innovativeness of the apps, Cumulative number of downloads on July 15th, Quality of your marketing materials.

Here the top 10 finalists for the Ovi app wizard prize category:

• Alessandro Pace: FlashLite4Nokia
• Dale Rankine: Toy Tragic
• Hany Gohary: GoNintendo
• Chintan Umraliya: MobApps.org
• Steve Litchfield: The Phones Show
• Oscar Iñiguez de la Torre Bernabeu: PickUp Lines
• Nur Nachman Eytan: Purple Cookie
• Jussi Soro: DJ Jussi Soro Application
• David Adhira: What Miami
• Jean-Francois Barsoum: Skeptical Science

A big congrats to all the finalists! …and GOOD LUCK!

Lucian Tomuta, from Forum Nokia, has just posted a really informative video showing the Nokia Qt SDK in action. The video shows how easy is to build and test a Qt application on both the desktop Qt simulator and on a real device.

The original article is available here.