Our fabulous instructor Lawrence just showed me what he’ll be covering in the continuation of his PhoneGap course. We’re holding off until CS6 is out, and we can demonstrate some of what’s featured in this preview from Adobe.
Wait till you see QR Code at the end. How weird is that?!? Maybe I’ll start pointing my phone’s camera at those things in my day-to-day life and see if an app pops up. I thought those were just price tag checkers =)
Well the Adobe CS6 line is getting ever closer to release, so I guess its time I start looking into what’s ahead. To be honest, I grimace a little every time there’s a new version because I can’t avoid the inevitable spend, its hundreds straight out of my pocket, regardless of whether the upgrade is worth upgrading.
But this time around there’s at least two features that will make me actually reach for my wallet. Seems like CartoonSmart’s website will see a return of some simple animation using Flash CS6′s export option for HTML5. As some of you might remember, the site used to have a lot of Flash, then very little, then almost none at all. Sorry, I love my iPad. But if I can animate even simple image transitions or fades in Flash, then export it to HTML, I’m there.
And then the other VERY interesting feature is this Sprite Sheet generator. Is that alone worth a few hundred bucks, meh, who knows. There are some free sprite sheet programs out there, but for a hardcore game developer, this will come in really handy. And I think this feature further steers Flash in the right direction, being used for game graphics/animation instead of web animation.
You can read about some of the other features, on Adobe’s site. OR from another blogger here
A couple people wanted to hear my thoughts on this….
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html
… and I’m an optimist, so I think its a really good thing from an innovation standpoint. It does sound like the War is over and Adobe is conceding defeat, but I’ve been on an iPhone for years now, and its felt that way to me for a long time already.
I read that Adobe cut 750 jobs the other day, so it sounds like resources are tight over there. And I’m sure their team for constantly optimizing the mobile version of Flash Player was a talented bunch that was pulling their hair out every time some new Android based phone introduced something that made the player run funky. And why spend the resources retooling Flash Player Mobile when there’s an option that could (over time) make everyone happier.
Hopefully Flash CS6 has a well built Publish to HTML5 option. It would be crazy if it didn’t now. And maybe what HTML5 is already capable of doing will make Adobe have to step up what Flash does. Because Flash doesn’t do enough as is. I’ve complained a lot about the Filters being “as is” for the past few versions. Maybe will we get some Filters that are Publishable to HTML5-only. We saw the same thing a while back when publishing to Flash Player 7 greyed out using Filters and only the sites willing to step forward and force people to use the latest version gave their users the freshest experience. So this feels like one of those “draw a line in the sand” type moments for Adobe. Give us cooler tools to use in Flash, but make them HTML5 only.
What if tomorrow their press release said ,” to be as innovative as possible, Flash has to go on without Flash Player at all, for mobile and desktops. Flash Player 12 will be the last version”. Its not gonna happen, but would you abandon the swf format, if it did mean your development tool of choice got dozens of awesome new features. Hmmm.
So anyway, its an interesting article, just to hear where Adobe’s head is at, but for anyone hooked on an iOS device like me, a Flash-less mobile device is already a reality.
Well this is darn easy to use. I just downloaded it and within a couple minutes moved an image around a bit and saved it as an HTML5 animation. All you do is hit Save and you’ll get a whole slew of files .css, .js, .html, some Edge include files and an Edge project file ( the only thing you wouldn’t need to upload to your server when you’re done).
Well worth checking out!
Lab link here. And whats awaiting you in this version…
Huh. I thought that MovieClip.isPlaying was already around for a bit. Maybe in my dreams.
Also thanks to Ma-Ma-Mario yesterday for pointing out a cool Minority Report style Flash interface. Here’s a link to how it was done, and some video of it….
Whoa. Just noticed that was done waaaay back in ’09. Practically decades ago =)
Okay, this is just odd to me. Adobe has made an iPad app called Adobe Nav which will let you choose your most used Photoshop tools, and then…(wait for it)…select them in Photoshop on your desktop computer. Right. So instead of using a hot key or selecting those same tools with the mouse, you can switch from computer to tablet to NAV-igate your software. Sound strange? Watch it in action here.
And correct me if I’m wrong, Photoshop is one of Adobe’s programs that does NOT allow you to customize your own hotkeys. UPDATE: ANNNNND my friend Mike did correct me for being wrong. You can customize your hotkeys in Photoshop IF you stop looking in the Preferences panel (like I’ve been for years and years and years) and just look into Edit. Seriously, how many versions have I been looking in vain in the Preference menu. I guess Keyboard shortcuts are more of an Edit thing??
Bottom line: Its cool Adobe or ANYONE for that matter, can now mess with the software through an iPad interface, but my hunch is that only people that want to look more productive instead of actually being more productive will move their hands off the keyboard and onto a tablet to work.
First off. I’m not that bright. And I’m definitely not classically trained with old school computing like using command lines. Command lines scare me. Everytime I open a command prompt I feel like I’ve entered The Matrix and immediately gone blind and died.
Anyway, here’s whats up… Adobe just updated the AIR 2.6 runtime, which is required if you want to upload an app to Amazon’s Android store to sell. Well okay, I THOUGHT all you needed to do was replace the old AIR file with the new files. And that was kinda true, but it turns out you ALSO need to use the command line (here on the Mac, thats done with the Terminal) to change one small little thing. Amazon wants people downloading the AIR plugin from them instead of from Google, if the user of the app doesn’t have AIR yet. Which makes sense, so keep in mind if you are going to sell in both stores, you need to publish two APK files (the .apk is the app you’ll eventually build and submit).
So to make this little change, you need to repackage your app from the command line instead of from Flash CS5 (which Adobe says they will update soon for this 2.6 change). Well here’s what Adobe says to do...
The version of ADT in the 2.6 AIR SDK supports the new
airDownloadURLcommand line option when packaging your APK file. To make your AIR 2.6 application compatible with the Amazon Appstore for Android, your ADT command should look something like this:adt -package -target ( apk | apk-debug | apk-emulator )( CONNECT_OPTIONS? | -listen <port>? )( -airDownloadURL http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android/com.adobe.air )?SIGNING_OPTIONS <output-package>( <app-desc> PLATFORM-SDK-OPTION? FILE-OPTIONS | <input-package> PLATFORM-SDK-OPTION? )
Yes, love that quote. “Your command should look something like this”. And in the parenthesis it should say afterwards, “(tell ya more later, I’ve gotta catch my train home)”.
So lets suppose you are like me (dumb), and JUST getting started making Android apps with FlashCS5. Hopefully you’ve been following the past blog entries about how to do that (maybe even bought this tutorial) so you know how to setup your Publish Settings to actually build the apk file and test on your device. Great. Lets assume you’ve gotten that far.
When you publish, you’ve got…
Now probably somewhere else you’ve got your self signed certificate, and lets assume you called that mycert.p12 (to publish you had to have already made that and entered your password)
Great. Lets make this easy on yourself. Take all those files, EVEN your certificate, and copy them to your user folder. In my case thats called “JustinsClone” (remember I’m on the Mac)
Now AFTER you’ve downloaded the Adobe AIR 2.6 tools , go ahead and copy those to your user folder as well. So now you’ve got a folder called AdobeAIRSDK beside all those other files above. Now open up Terminal. Here’s the line I used to get this to compile…
/Users/JustinsClone/AdobeAIRSDK/bin/adt -package -target apk -airDownloadURL http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android/com.adobe.air -storetype pkcs12 -keystore mycert.p12 -storepass mypassword ninjatoss.apk ninja_toss-app.xml ninja_toss.swf icon48.png icon72.png icon36.png
Which looks confusing without line breaks so here’s what it looks like broken up…
/Users/JustinsClone/AdobeAIRSDK/bin/adt -package
-target apk
-airDownloadURL http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android/com.adobe.air
-storetype pkcs12
-keystore mycert.p12
-storepass mypassword
ninjatoss.apk ninja_toss-app.xml ninja_toss.swf icon48.png icon72.png icon36.png
Notice at the end are ALL my files to include. Yours will obviously have your own names so change that to suit your files. Same thing goes for the certificate, mycert.p12 needs to be renamed in the command if you didn’t call yours that. Also mypassword will need to be your certificate password.
And another BIG thing to note, I couldn’t get this work unless the -airDownloadURL http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android/com.adobe.air part was before the -storetype pkcs12 part. Which is contrary to everything else I’ve seen about adding that. So maybe its just a Mac thing and if you’re on the PC you need to run that line after the -storepass line
So why go crazy and put everything one place? Well, I did test this out a lot with the files in different locations and I kept running into errors, and it seemed like every forum about that particular error included one guy suggesting to just keep all your files in the main user directory. And I can’t argue with what works.
And did this work?? Well I hope, I’ve resubmitted my App to Amazon once again. But I feel good because I think if Terminal didn’t spit back out an error after the command above, its done the trick.
For those of you making AIR to Android apps , you might want to head over and download the latest runtime (AIR 2.6) and read the official word from Adobe.
It sounds like the packager for the iOS has some big improvements regarding playback (which was definitely very sluggish before)
And this update to 2.6 is required if you want to submit your Flash-made Android apps to the Amazon Store. My app got rejected (hopefully for the last time) because it wasn’t built with 2.6
After downloading the AIR SDK, they kiiiinnnda neglect to mention what to do with it. I guess the smart folk all just sorta know, but for me, I just replaced the same files and folders that were in with my Flash CS5 Application folder. So there was a folder called AIK2.5 and I just took the 2.6 stuff, overwrote it, reopened Flash, and republished the app. How do I know that worked? Well the .xml file that got published with the latest version of the game, now reads 2.6 in one of the tags. So thats proof enough for me. Here’s a look at that folder I put the new stuff in…
Maybe but not really. This is something my dad and I have talked about for years, which is this idea of “TV/ movies everywhere”. For example, he and I have both bought the Big Lewbowski and Groundhog Day on every format possible (including those now dead non-blue-boxed HD DVDs). Which the studios obviously love because they keep ringing their cash registers with each better format. But their is a sting to buying the same movie over and over again.
So anyway, you can read the article here about this Adobe Pass service. Whats most interesting to me is that Adobe is the company (or most recent company) trying to get this rolling.
Awwww yeah, its about time right?? Actually, I think Adobe is WAY ahead of the game in releasing this converter. Here’s the official words from the officials at Adobe labs…
“Wallaby” is the codename for an experimental technology that converts the artwork and animation contained in Adobe® Flash® Professional (FLA) files into HTML. This allows you to reuse and extend the reach of your content to devices that do not support the Flash runtimes. Once these files are converted to HTML, you can edit them with an HTML editing tool, such asAdobe Dreamweaver®, or by hand if desired. You can view the output in one of the supported browsers or on an iOS device.
How cool is that?
