Adobe
Systems enhanced its support for mobile application development with the
new Adobe
Creative Suite 5.5 release featuring new Flash Builder and Flex Builder
tooling.
The
new tooling software includes Flash
Builder 4.5 for developing, testing and deploying mobile applications on Android,
BlackBerry
Tablet OS and iOS
platforms. Meanwhile, Flex 4.5, an open-source framework, includes new support
for building mobile applications for Android, and support for BlackBerry Tablet
OS and iOS platforms is expected in June 2011. This new approach in mobile
development enables developers to leverage a single tool chain, programming
language and code base to easily create highly expressive applications across
leading mobile platforms, greatly improving performance while reducing
development time and cost of delivery, Adobe officials said.
“With
these releases, developers for the first time have a single development platform
for building highly expressive Web, mobile, and desktop applications, marking a
leap forward for mobile app development,” said Ed Rowe, vice president of
development tooling at Adobe, in a statement. “With the proliferation of
smartphones and tablets, enterprises now need to ensure that their applications
work seamlessly across many different types of devices. Flash Builder 4.5 and
Flex 4.5 will now allow companies to standardize on a common platform capable
of delivering rich and consistent application experiences that perform great
across Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS devices.”
Flash
Builder 4.5 accelerates the development of Flex
and ActionScript
projects, including new round-trip workflows with Adobe
Flash Catalyst CS 5.5 software that allow designers and developers to work
in parallel throughout application development. Flash Builder 4.5 also includes
new capabilities to enable faster and more productive coding as well as
performance enhancements. The addition of Flash Builder 4.5 Premium to Adobe
Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium software provides a major update to the suite
of software for Web designers and developers.
Flash
Catalyst CS5.5 features a new round-trip workflow with Flash Builder 4.5,
allowing designers and developers to work in parallel. Now designers can open,
make changes and save Flex projects that were created or previously edited in
Flash Builder, leading to faster delivery of applications, Adobe officials
said. Additionally, designers can rapidly prototype user interfaces for
resizable Flex-based Websites and applications with new components, craft more
precise and expressive transitions and effects, and efficiently design
developer-built custom components. Flash Catalyst CS5.5 is also available in
the Design
Premium, Web
Premium, Production
Premium and Master
Collection editions of Creative Suite 5.5.
“We
use the Flex skinning architecture and Adobe Flash Catalyst to automatically
generate graphics, which has cut our development cycle by 20 percent,” said
Aaron Pedersen, founding partner and Web application architect at
DevelopmentArc, in a statement. “This workflow has helped the process of
skinning and stylizing the look of Flex applications to meet the designer’s
needs.”
Meanwhile,
in June, Adobe plans to release updates to the Flex framework that will enable
developers to reuse most or all of their code across applications that target
multiple platforms, including Web, desktop, Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and
iOS. Moving an application across different mobile platforms is often as simple
as a recompile. New components expand the Spark
skinning and component architecture introduced in Flex 4, while
enhancements in Flash Builder 4.5 accelerate coding for Flex and ActionScript
projects with best practice code templates, code completion and code generation
features.
The
new mobile development features in Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 are targeted
at creating stand-alone installed applications using Adobe
AIR for mobile devices. In addition to Android
Market, BlackBerry
AppWorld and Apple’s
iTunes AppStore, mobile apps can now be deployed to the Amazon
Appstore for Android, providing companies with additional monetization
options through the largest online shopping destination. With advanced tooling
and new features, such as soon-to-be-deployed native code extensions, AIR is a
way to deliver applications across multiple screens and platforms such as
Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, iOS and desktop operating systems.
Sharing
his view of the new Adobe tooling capabilities, Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC,
said:
“FlashBuilder
4.5 is also a mid-cycle kicker for the IDE which will include support for the
major tablet and smartphone platforms on the market today, that is iOS and
Android devices and tablets, and the BlackBerry Playbook OS. Add this to
Dreamweaver’s multi-screen preview capability and overall single-project
handling for code; this has to be one of the richest tool stacks that target
all these platforms, plus desktop, with a single language and development
environment. Adobe has been executing steadily in mobile, and while the closed
nature of mobile platforms has been a setback, I think Adobe has made
substantial progress here. I will keep watching for webOS and Windows Phone 7
support with the AIR runtime.”
Recognizing
the need for a better mobile experience, Standard
Chartered used Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 to create a fully
transactional banking application that offers an engaging consumer experience
across desktop computers, tablets and smartphone devices.
“For
the tablet and smartphone-based app, we cut time to market by 40 percent and
investment by two-thirds by leveraging Adobe tools and our existing code for
the Web-based application,” said Aman Narain, group head of remote banking at
Standard Chartered, in a statement. “Building a native application for each of
these devices would not have been financially feasible.”
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