17. Mobile applications examples Machinarium Machinarium , an award-winning, point-and-click adventure and puzzle game developed with Flash technology is now the #1 iPad app in all paid categories in the U.S. and 12 other countries after just one day! Altoros Systems (c) | www.altoros.com
18. Mobile applications examples Age of Defenders Age of Defenders is a tower defense game for browser (Win, Linux, Mac), iPad, Android and soon to be launched on BlackBerry PlayBook. The game is built with Flash and ported to tablets with Adobe AIR. Altoros Systems (c) | www.altoros.com
19. Mobile applications examples Politifact Politifact just released their Flex-based application on iOS, Android, and Blackberry and it has already hit the top of the charts. It is currently the #1 paid news application on the iOS App Store. Altoros Systems (c) | www.altoros.com
Hello! I'm Valery Pesetski and today I'll show you my online presentation about cross-platform development in Adobe AIR. During the session you can write me questions in the chat or questions bar and I will answer them with a great pleasure. If you want to use your m I crophone than, please click button with hand and I'll provide you m i crophone access. If you experience any technical troubles during the presentation please do not hesitate to Skype me. You may see my Skype on the screen. Let start !!!
First let me introduce myself. I'm head of Flex department at altoros systems and manager of Belarussian Adobe Flash Platform User Group. I'm working with this technology more than 5 years, and during this period of time I developed different web, desktop and mobile applications. I like Flash Platform technology and today I'm here to talk about how this technology could help you to cut your costs in application development process.
What I will speak about: During my session I will explain you what is cross-platform development and it's advantages I'll show you what is adobe AIR, how does it works , where it could run, possible features and development tools overview . Then I'll show you popular desktop and mobile applications examples and at the end of my presentation - I'll show you how to c u t development costs with Adobe AIR.
So why do I want to introduce this technology to you: As we know the number of mobile devices worldwide is growing very fast. And the main disadvantage is that these devices use different operating systems So to cover this amount of devices we should port our application to different platforms and it costs good amount of money. Today to create a sucessful application and bring it to market you should keep in mind the following cri te ria:
So what is cross-platform development ?
The main idea of cross-platform development is that you write your code once and than port it everywhere .
This idea has a lot of advantages: flex developer doesn't need additional knowledge transfer and he can use his existing skills your applications uses one code base and runs on different platforms you will do porting faster your code is ready to be ported to another platform
The Adobe AIR runtime enables developers to deploy standalone applications built with ActionScript and Flex across platforms and devices — including Android, BlackBerry, iOS devices, personal computers, and televisions.
Where can we run it ? Adobe AIR runs on popular desktop and mobile operation systems and Adobe Flash player runs in popular web browsers. With Flash Player and AIR, you can easily move content between the browser and native operating systems to reach different devices. S i nce the Adobe runtimes share a common codebase, developers can reuse code to deploy content though both AIR and Flash Player.
Development tools Adobe provides large set of tools to develop AIR applications. In Adobe flash cs5 developers and designers can draw different animations and vector assets and write Action Script. Adobe Flash Builder based on Eclipse provides good environment to write source code, profile and debug applications. Adobe device central contains a big amount of emulators which support Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash. Flex sdk has Flex framework and a lot of tools (including packagers) for applications development. With Adobe Flash Catalyst developers can easilly skin existing flex applications or just make wireframe prototypes. Also there are lots of other good tools for applications development as intelliges idea, FDT plugin for eclipse, flash develop, realaxy editor and etc.
And how does it work? Source code written in ActionScript and MXML compiles to binary swf file. SWF file is played by Flash player in browser and AIR runtime on desktop and mobile. Application can use different protocols to communicate with different backends written in Java, .Net, Ruby, PHP etc.
How packager works: To port our flash application to iOS devices we should use ADT packager provided with Adobe AIR sdk . SWF file byte-code converts to native ios application byte-code Packager makes ipa package with application bytecode, it's assets and certificate. Than ready application we can deliver on device for testing or publish to apple store.
What is supported by Adobe AIR: Mobile applications build with Adobe AIR have access to large amount of mobile features such as geolocation, accelerometer, both cameras, screen orientation, multitouch and gestures. One of the new features is StageWebView , this feature enables us to show webpage content inside application without browser usage Another feature is encrypled local storage where we can securelly hold local user data and more over if target device has a feature that is not supported in ActionScript than we can write native extensions in another programming language and use it from our application. Soon will be available 3d graphics support and HTML5 compiler called FalconeJS more features you can see on provided Adobe webpage
Adobe AIR usage As we see AIR runtime is very popular today and is used by huge enterprices. We can run installed AIR applications directly from the webpage. We also have availability to include AIR runtime inside the application package and run it without any additional installations.
Now let see what is implemented with adobe AIR and Flash There is a large amount of application types: Different learning, social, and online games. Enterprise c o mpanies use it for: document management applications, photobook editors, online graphic editors , finance software with different charts , medical applications and etc. M e dia companies uses : video chats, audio and video players, webTV and IPTV solutions. Also this technology uses for Embedded systems GUI, multi touch interfaces, console games , tv widgets and etc.
Mobile applications build with Adobe AIR appeared on mobile market some months ago and some of them became #1 in several categories. Machinarium is one of them. This award-winning game developed with Flash technology is now #1 in all Paid categories in the U.S . and other countries.
Age of def e nces This is a tower defence game for browser build with flash technology and ported to different devices. It is available in Google market and apple store. As you can see it on the screen this application is running on different devices simu Lt aneously.
As you know Politifact is a well-known web-site. They developed mobile client on Flash for mobile devices and this enabled to publish it in 3 markets at a time.
During the next part of my presentation I'll show you 2 different development scenarios. While the first scenario you will cut cost of your application development by employing one developer only and during the second scenario you will learn how to cut application development time and beat your competitors in tim e to market strategy.
If we start the development process, we will see the difference on the following Line Chart This chart shows how your expenses vary during the development year . Red line shows your expenses if you employ 3 different developers - you will need to pay about 300k $ instead of 100k $ with one flex develeporer only. The grey area shows that one Flex developer needs a bit more time to port his application on different platforms because he should work both with desktop, mobile interfaces and layout behaviour. But anyway it will be 3 times cheaper.
Of course 3 Flex developers will develop your application faster (about half a year) , you will publish your application in the social networks and mobile markets faster and your application will start bring you money while your competitor will continue to spent his money. After the year of development you both will have your applications ready but application build with Adobe AIR wiil be more familiar to users, tested by them and will have more features, bringing you more money. Next year you and your competitor will be working on application live updates. 3 flex developers will make the same update faster and your application will be flexible for changes and it will bring you more money. After 2 years you will finish the development and move application to support mode. You can leave only one flex developer and your opponent would need to keep 3 different developers - ofcourse he should pay more.
Let me summarize my presentation:
My presentation is over Thank you very much for your attention, if you have any questions - you are welcome to ask them.