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.

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!

Read more »

The Forum Nokia Developer Summit will take place in London – September 14-15. This year the Nokia Developer Summit is held in conjunction with Nokia World. As Nokia’s biggest event, this offers you new opportunities to meet professionals from every part of the mobile industry. You’ll also find big-name guest speakers, business streams, and an Experience Lounge packed with the very latest products, services and solutions.

Take a look to the official event website for more info.

(via Scott) – Paul Trani posted a presentation about creating Flash Content for Mobile Devices. Enjoy:

For those of you who want to take advantage of the new features of the Flash player 10.1 and AIR2 using Flash Builder 4: the Flex 4.1 SDK includes Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. Just download the Flex 4.1 SDK, unzip it and point your Flash Builder projects towards the new location. To see the new API’s (MultiTouch, Geolocation, Accelerometer…) show up in code hinting simply change the target Flash Player version in the project’s properties to point to 10.1.0. That’s all! Cheers to Renaun for pointing this out.

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.

Adobe Systems Incorporated 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. Flash Player 10.1 allows you to make your web content contextually relevant and reach more users across a wide spectrum of Internet-connected devices, including smartphones, netbooks, and PCs. New mobile-ready features take advantage of native device capabilities that include support for touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer, and screen orientation, bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience.

Discover how to optimize web content for mobile delivery in this interesting article.

Nokia today did a series of announcement, especially targeted towards individual developers, and with the precise aim of lowering the barriers for developing and publishing apps for Nokia devices.

The first important announcement is that, starting today, individual developers can register and publish their apps to the Ovi Store, a thing previously allowed to companies only. This is a huge step for the Ovi Store itself, as the importance of individual developers in contributing to the growth and success of application stores is absolutely primary.

The second announcement, not less important, is that Nokia started a public beta for signing Symbian apps for free. As the cost of Symbian Signed is historically one of the major targets of criticism, this step from Nokia is surely welcome and a sign of interest (maybe just a bit slow..) from Nokia towards its developers. More informations about packaging and signing are available here.

If this is not enough, Nokia just released the official release of Nokia Qt SDK, shipping with integrated support for the Smart Installer (that allows to dynamically download dependencies for your Qt apps), and allowing to publish apps for Nokia N97 mini and X6.

Absolutely well done, Nokia!

Smokescreen is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5 to run where it previously couldn’t and better interoperate with webpages where it previously could. With Smokescreen you can reach new platforms without learning any new tools; your Flash is automatically converted to JavaScript/HTML5.

Smokescreen will soon be released for free under an open source license. I tested some demos with my iPhone 3GS and, while performances on the iPad seems to render very well, on the iPhone there’s still some work to do. I really look forward to test the tool after the release, so, stay tuned!