Adobe Systems has begun accepting applications from testers for the first public betas of both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0, which promise to bring advanced multimedia capabilities to smartphones. Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0, which are optimized for high performance on mobile screens, have been specifically designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer, more immersive user experience.
With the release of Adobe Flash Player 10.1, developers will be able to use the same Flash Player on mobile devices and the desktop. Since posting separate sign-up pages for registrants over the weekend, developers have already been able to rapidly create “several cool games and applications,” noted Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow in a blog.
“Jobe Makar, the lead developer at Electrotank, has posted his thoughts on the ease and speed of development as compared to his experiences with the often-painful Apple processes,” Brimelow wrote. “He has posted a couple of videos of a game that he was able to port to Android in a few hours, and that ‘includes downloading and installing the SDKs, walking through a Hello World tutorial, charging the device for a little while, and making some minor code edits.'”
Countering Apple
The renewed emphasis on platform development for smartphones is part of Adobe’s strategy to counter Apple’s new iPhone OS 4.0 software developers kit language, which, according to Brimelow, appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms.
“What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them,” Brimelow wrote. “This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and, more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe.”
The bad news from Apple…