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 »

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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Google has just launched Google App Inventor:

From the App Inventor’s website:

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend’s faces. You can even make use of the phone’s sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android’s text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

Apart from the coolness of the tool, the question that arises into my mind is: is there the need for these development tools for non-developers?

As I can’t imagine a developer using these tools, I can’t equally think of a non-developer even imagine that such a tool can exist: what do you think about it?

Hi all, what I’ve been into lately is testing some tools for getting a descent cross platform development framework. What I’ve been testing most was PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium, Golden Gecko and Whoop. The last 2 are not open platforms neither do they target developers (but rather designers) so I won’t mention them any further. For those of you who may be interested you may contact the guys for a demo. The first 2 are open source. Read more »

Adobe released a test version of Flash to the public about a month ago, but this is the real launch of the finished product. Flash 10.1 should now be available for download on phones using the latest version of Android, 2.2, which is known as FroYo.

And the company says it has shipped Flash to its other device partners, so that Flash should soon be available on BlackBerry, Palm webOS, Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian phones — basically, all the major smartphones except for Apple’s.

Read the full article here.

Few days ago Sencha just released the first HTML5 framework targeted for mobile devices: Sencha Touch.

As stated on Sencha’s website:

It comes with a comprehensive UI widget library, complete touch event management with CSS transitions and an extensive data package.

If you have an HTML5-ready browser, you can take a look the demos here.

Want to see Froyo (Android 2.2) running on the iPhone? If so, take a look at the ideo below:

Gadgets DNA have the instructions on how to load Froyo onto your handset, but don’t expect the world just yet: neither sound nor WiFi are working at the moment, but youcan send SMS. Which is good, I guess. (via MobileCrunch)

Lee Brimelow (Platform Evangelist at Adobe) just published on gotoAndLearn.com couple new video tutorials. One focusing on responding to Raw Touch Data and handle multi-touch:

I just uploaded a new tutorial that explains how to respond and handle raw touch data in Flash Player 10.1. In a previous tutorial I showed how to respond to gestures, but intouch mode you can track all of the touch points on your screen. The 3M display that I am using supports up to 60 touch points, although I have yet to think of an example of how to use them all.

And the second one about AIR for Android (part 1):

I just uploaded the first tutorial in a multi-part series on developing AIR applications for Android. In this first tutorial I explain how to get your development environment setup and how to create and load a simple application onto your device using Flash CS5. Future tutorials will cover topics like using the emulator and performance optimizations.

Enjoy!

(via MobileCrunch) – Motorola just announced the square-shaped Flipout: Android 2.1 device including a refreshed implementation of Motoblur, which now includes resizable widgets, feed filters, and push corporate email.

The phone will be released in Europe some time this quarter. You can read the full press release and spec sheet here, or check out some videos from Motorola’s YouTube channel.