About Tablets and Smartphones

Lately, it is quite impossible to attend a software conference and not see sessions dedicated to mobile development. This is the hot topic of the day and rightly so, I believe. However, I have the impression that many people think that tablets and smartphones are almost the same thing. This is something that I do not believe is true. Furthermore, I think that because of this belief held by others many tablet applications end up being just a scaled up version of smartphone apps. If a tablet is just a phone with a bigger screen then a tablet app is just a bigger resolution smartphone app, right?

Let’s see why do I think that a tablet it is not just a bigger phone.

Tablets are more powerful than smartphones

This seems to be just a truism. Well, it is and yet most applications that run on tablets and smartphones tend to offer the same set of features and experience.

This is suboptimal because on a tablet you have more storage space, a more powerful processor, and a bigger screen. And, if the battery doesn’t last for a full day it is not a tragedy. Is not like you end up in the middle of nowhere with a dead phone :)

All these differences should be exploited to create tablet applications that help people to do more than what they are able to do on a smartphone. If you take into account only the bigger screen you have something that enables people to read for hours without getting teary eyed. When more storage space is available , for example, why not let the user decide how many GB your application can use and offer him a true offline experience for things like email, news, RSS feeds, videos, and so on.

Tablets are shared smartphones are personal

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the feeling that, at least in the case of home users, a tablet is shared. This is not the case with your smartphone. You don’t say “hey mate, here is my phone. Just return it in four hours.”

And if this is true, why are so many tablets apps built with a single user in mind? How can you have a tablet shared when you have to logout from your social or email accounts in order to let the other user do something?

Again, this feels to me like a big opportunity that it is missed. Why not enable multiusers for them and support on all the apps for which it makes sense? Remember, you do have plenty of storage space…

The Missed Opportunity

I think that this tablet shortsightedness is part of the reason for what we are seeing today: there a far fewer apps for tablets than for phones. And this is true for all the application stores.

I think that developers have a real opportunity here, and that for now it is just being missed. Once we fully understand that tablets and smartphones are different and people want and should use them differently, we will see much more innovation.

July 29, 2011 | Filed Under Mobile, Others | 3 Comments

Adobe AIR and Sony Tablet Opportunities Webinar

Today, July 20th, join Adobe & Sony for a webinar on Sony Tablet devices and the Adobe AIR App Challenge. Fellow evangelists, Ryan Stewart and Mark Doherty, will present the two webinars:

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM US/Pacific Time – Mark Doherty
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM US/Pacific Time – Ryan Stewart

You can register here.

July 20, 2011 | Filed Under Others | 4 Comments

Adobe AIR App Challenge for Sony Tablets

Yes, you heard me right! Sony has just announced not one but two tablets based on the Android 3.x (Honeycomb) operating system. As you can see in the picture above they look pretty impressive. What’s more, one of them has a two screen design. I really look forward to seeing what creative Flash/Flex developers can put together for such a device.

And what better way of getting you mobilized and working on your AIR app for the Sony tablets than entering in the Adobe AIR App Challenge for Sony tablet.

The big prize is nothing short of $100,00 and there are many more (in fact there are another 7 prizes ranging from $10,000 to $20,000).

All you have to do is write your app optimized for these tablets, make sure you upload the final app to http://www.airappchallenge.com/, and publish it to the Android Market before November 11th. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

All the finalists (top 80) will receive a prototype of these two tablets so they can test and fine tune their apps before the final round.

If you want to get a shot at the MAX Showcase App prizes you have to finish your app by September 16th.

Now get started because the contest just started today :). You can read more here.

PS. In case you’re wondering how you’ll be able to create your app for the Sony Tablet S2 (code name for the one with two screens) then here is the answer: you’ll be able to use one of the coolest features of AIR 3 (the upcoming version of AIR) called Native Extensions. Using this feature you can expose Android APIs to your ActionScript code and use them in your AIR app.

July 13, 2011 | Filed Under Others | 4 Comments

Coding for Curious ActionScript 3 Workshop

It is my great pleasure to make some noise for a workshop on ActionScript put together by Fernando Colaco. I first met Fernando at the 2010 gotoAndSki() conference. His passion for beautiful and highly functional UIs and his passion to share and teach others are behind his work on organizing the gotoAndSki() Swiss conference, “Coding for Curious” workshop, and other events.

While “Coding for curious” event is not a free event, I encourage you to take a look at the event page. In his words it is all about:

[...]attendees will build a simple game from scratch in this ONE DAY INTENSIVE WORKSHOP, and will learn several advanced concepts and useful tricks along the way. No previous coding (or even Flash) knowledge needed at all. No scary technical jargon will be used to make things sound complex, because they are not.

ACTIONSCRIPT 3 is the ideal language to learn how to program, specially thanks to how easy it is to use and manipulate images and graphic elements, and adding interactivity. The approach will be in the most accessible way, actually without computers in the first hour, using attendees on stage to explain in a practical way how a program works and “enact” concepts like variables, objects, functions, loops and conditions. Then, it’s hands-on and the pace will progressively get more and more interesting.

Well done Fernando and hope to see you soon :)

June 7, 2011 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

Airgile – one of the best online project management tools

Last month, João Saleiro of WebFuel.pt sent me an email about his latest project: Airgile. I logged in using the demo account and looked around. After 10 or 15 minutes of trying various workflows I replied to his email congratulating him and his team for a great job.

So what is Airgile? It is professional online tool for project management. You can:

Manage tasks and projects
Track and plan projects
Collaborate with your team
Communicate with your clients
Share documents
Work remotely

In terms of price and deployment options it offers anything you want: free accounts (it offers a good balance between the features), paid accounts, and deployment on your servers if you want to have complete control over the information.

What about what is under the hood? I talked to João and here are some details if you are curious about how the product works:

Backend. They use PHP and MySQL. For client communication they are using Flex remoting with AMFPHP. They use PHPUnit for testing. Also they are able to update the product with a new version without stopping/restarting the machines.
Frontend. They used Flex framework 4.5, Swiz, and a home baked framework for data management.
What’s next? They are working on integration between Airgile and Eclipse/Flash Builder using Mylyn, SCRUM and Spring planning support, and a mobile version.

Great job João!

June 2, 2011 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

HBase/Hadoop Meetup in Adobe Bucharest Office

If you live in Bucharest or close enough and you do stuff with HBase or Hadoop you shouldn’t miss this event. On May 31 we will host a meeting and you’ll have a chance to meet, talk, and listen Lars George of Cloudera (Cloudera Solution Architect for Europe).

Here’s the agenda:

HBase intro – Lars George
Big Data with HBase and Hadoop at Adobe
Talk 3 – TBD
Lightning talks (10m each)
HBase status and roadmap – Lars George
Q&A/Open discussion
Beer at Rock’n Pasta or downtown

If you want to speak at this event drop a comment here and if you want to register go here. You have to hurry up because there are only 29 seats left.

PS. In case you didn’t know we are doing lots of stuff with HBase/Hadoop at Adobe and some of this is happening in the Bucharest office. So you’ll have a chance to meet our engineers and talk to them about real life use cases.

May 26, 2011 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

Adobe’s Evangelist Super Blog

Greg Wilson seems to have a habit of coding while sleeping. Of course he won’t admit it (he says that one night he wasn’t able to sleep and …). It really doesn’t matter how he did it, what matters is that if you want to follow all Adobe Evangelists (and I mean all of them) you can use this link: http://adobeevangelists.com/superblog/ (it has an RSS feed too).

Now you don’t have any excuse for missing our posts :)

May 25, 2011 | Filed Under Others | 2 Comments

Adobe Developer Week – June 20-24

Next month, between June 20 and 24 we will host 17 webinars. The topics range from building desktop applications to mobile, from using PHP with Flex to Java and Flex. Here is the complete list of webinars:

Introduction to Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5
What’s new in Flex 4.5
New Features in Flash Builder 4.5
Flex and PHP Integrated Development with Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP
Build Your First Mobile Application With Flex 4.5
Architecting Flex Applications For Re-Use Across Web, Desktop and Mobile
Multi-Density and Multi-Platform Authoring for Smart Phones and Tablets With Flex 4.5 SDK
Migrating from Flex 3 to Flex 4.5: Understanding Changes from Halo to Spark
Creating Expressive Applications with Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst
Building Mobile Applications for BlackBerry Playbook
Coding Productivity Features in Flash Builder 4.5
Next Generation Application Development for the Enterprise
Building Data Driven Flex and Java Applications
Flex and BlazeDS Integration with Spring
Maximizing Flex Application Performance (Mobile and Desktop)
Creating Performant Skins and Item Renderers for Mobile Applications
Anatomy of an Enterprise Mobile Application Built with Flex 4.5

If you are interested in any of these topics, go ahead and register yourself here.

May 24, 2011 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

Slides from Flash Camp Milan

As I promised, here are the slides from the two sessions I had at Flash Camp Milan – WHYMCA. And from here you can download a tutorial and five projects to help you get started with Flex Mobile development for Android, iOS, and PlayBook.

Mobile Development With Flash Platform

Getting startedwithflashmobiledevelopment

Thank you guys!

May 20, 2011 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

SourceMate for Flash Builder 4.5

It is always exciting to see how our partners build on top of our ecosystem. This time the excitement is about SourceMate 3.0, which was released recently. This release targets Flash Builder 4.5, and once it’s installed the hardcore developer side of your personality will be delighted with:

Code generation (organize imports, generate AsDoc comments, etc)
Smart refactoring (change method signature, extract interface/method/constant/variable/parameter/class/superclass, disable all trace statements)
Swiz framework support (Swiz project creation wizard, new instance wizard, beans view, bean autocomplete, new bean wizard, events view, event handler autocomplete)
Localization support (externalize strings, resource bundle editor, automatic translation, etc).
Miscellaneous (todo/fixme/XXX task markers, generate Ant build.xml from project settings, medata tag validation, E4X expression console, etc)