The FINANCIAL — Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) on October 25 launched the new BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles.
The new Software Developer Kit (SDK) enables developers to quickly and easily create AIR applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet using Adobe's powerful, familiar and industry-leading development tools. With the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR, developers can leverage the uniquely powerful capabilities of the BlackBerry Tablet OS, as well as access all of the richness of Adobe AIR, to deliver incredibly engaging and high-performing AIR applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook.
“The BlackBerry PlayBook, with its dual-core processor and multi-processing OS, is a multi-tasking powerhouse that is also the world’s first tablet to be built from the metal up to run Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR applications in a fully integrated, fully optimized fashion,” said David Yach, Chief Technology Officer, Software, Research In Motion. “The new SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook unleashes a wealth of opportunity for the Adobe and BlackBerry development communities to easily create value-added applications and experiences for customers and we are extremely excited by the positive feedback received from developers in early trials.”
"The BlackBerry PlayBook with BlackBerry Tablet OS supports Adobe AIR 2.5 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 at its core. This integrated support and the BlackBerry PlayBook’s exceptional processing power (including a 1 GHz dual-core processor, true symmetric multiprocessing and multi-threaded rendering) give developers the ability to deliver incredibly rich content and applications with highly-responsive and fluid touch screen experiences," BlackBerry informs.
“The close collaboration between RIM and the Adobe AIR team has achieved an implementation which we expect to be the first to include high performance optimizations for tablet devices,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Creative and Interactive Business Solutions at Adobe. “This, combined with great tooling integration and full Flash Player 10.1 support, makes the BlackBerry PlayBook an outstanding platform for more than three million Flash developers.”
Building the Best Flash/AIR Applications for Tablet Computing
RIM has designed the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR to allow developers to leverage the uniquely powerful capabilities of the BlackBerry PlayBook and Adobe AIR 2.5 to build industry-leading applications that provide a distinctly compelling experience for BlackBerry PlayBook users. The new SDK provides developers with support for:
Hardware-accelerated playback of video and graphics-intensive content, both in the browser and within AIR applications, enabling a smooth, high fidelity viewing experience on the BlackBerry PlayBook, even with up to 1080p HD content
Web View to enable AIR apps to display HTML and Flash content and to leverage the BlackBerry PlayBook's WebKit browser
UI components that have been built specifically for the touch screen experience on a tablet device, including support for multi-touch and gestures
Powerful APIs to advanced features such as the front and rear facing cameras, accelerometer, geo-location, in-app payments and more
Application notifications, which allow developers to bring events generated by AIR applications immediately to the user’s attention, even if the application is running in the background
Seamless communication between AIR apps on the BlackBerry PlayBook, allowing the creation of “Super App” experiences
Extending Adobe AIR applications to use native C++ extensions, providing developers with the ability to write part of their application in the BlackBerry Tablet OS's native code (subject to availability of the upcoming BlackBerry Tablet OS native SDK)
Porting existing Adobe AIR applications quickly and easily to the BlackBerry PlayBook
What Developers are Saying about Building Flash/AIR Apps for BlackBerry PlayBook
Several BlackBerry Alliance members are already working with the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR as part of an early access program.
“eUnity enables health care professionals to access and manipulate full quality medical images from a Flash-enabled web browser,” said Steve Rankin, President and CEO of Client Outlook. “Bringing our application to the tablet form factor for the first time was incredibly fast and easy using the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR. In fact we had eUnity running on the BlackBerry PlayBook in less than 2 hours! We are excited about the opportunity to access our innovative server technology through the power of Flash to provide our healthcare clientele with the ability to dynamically interact with diagnostic images that render amazingly fast, on an ultra portable device.”
“With help from Adobe's development tools we've been able to create an exceptional eReading application that will be pre-loaded on the BlackBerry PlayBook," said Dan Leibu, CTO of Kobo. "The SDK enabled us to achieve the right level of performance for the delivery of rich reading content and a world-class reading experience."
“Mobile and social technologies are the future of enterprise computing,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “The BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR will enable us to seamlessly deliver real-time collaboration with Chatter Mobile to business users around the world on the BlackBerry PlayBook”
“SAP customers want to free their SAP applications from the confines of the desktop and truly mobilize their workforces,” said Nicholas Brown, senior vice president, Mobility Market Development, SAP AG. “Analytic dashboards are a clear use case in which everyone from the C-level executive to line-of-business manager to sales rep can analyze and access information in real time. The BlackBerry PlayBook SDK for Adobe AIR made it incredibly easy for us to build applications using Flash development tools– it took our developers just a couple of days to convert an existing SAP application into an AIR application for BlackBerry PlayBook. It looks impressive and most importantly is incredible easy to use on the new tablet.”
“The BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR, allowed us to create a highly engaging experience utilizing existing coding knowledge, which makes creating PlayBook applications extremely fast," said Brett Cortese, CEO, Universal Mind, Inc. "We simply dropped the SDK into Flash Builder and the controls were available and the ball was rolling."
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