Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Following on from the inagural meeting of the Adobe RIA usergroup at Skills Matter in London last month, details of the next two sessions have been published.

The first is an Introduction to BlazeDS and LCDS, taking place next Wednesday (23rd), which will include information about LCDS 3 and the data modeler plug-in for Flash Builder 4. More information about the event and registration details are here.

Then on October 21st, Borre Wessel from Lab49, will present a session covering the development of the Morgan Stanley Matrix application – included will be a discussion on the patterns and practices that made Matrix possible, the challenges faced along the way and guidance for those embarking on a large-scale Flex project. More information about the event and registration details are here.

I hope to see you at one or both of these meetings.

Just over a week ago I had the pleasure of meeting up with Iain Dodsworth, founder of TweetDeck – one of the most-downloaded applications that have been built using Adobe AIR.

In this video Iain talks about how and why he went about creating TweetDeck, why he built it using Adobe AIR, what worked well (and what didn’t) during development, what he and the team have learnt from the whole process and his plans for the future of TweetDeck. He also offers up some advice for anyone else thinking about embarking on a startup venture.

The full version (below) is approximately 20 minutes in length, but I’m working on a shorter highlight video that hopefully we’ll get posted on Adobe TV – I’ll post a link to that in due course.

Last week we released an updated version of the AIR runtime, version 1.5.2, which includes bug fixes related to reliability, compatibility and security – the details of which can be found on the Adobe AIR team blog and in the developer release notes.

This minor update does however also make a change to the install dialogue that is displayed to the user when installing an AIR application. In versions prior to AIR 1.5.2, the user would be presented with the following dialogue when installing an application that had been signed with a certificate-authority issued certificate:

We received feedback from some end-users to suggest that this dialogue, which verified the publisher identity, but which also warned of unrestricted system access, made them unsure as to whether or not the application should be trusted, even if they recognized and trusted the publisher of the application.

From an application publisher perspective, there was no option in the AIR deployment process to package an application with an alternative level of system access, hence additional reassurance was often required, in the form of step-by-step install guides or FAQ documents published online, to reassure the end user that the application was OK to install.

With the release of AIR 1.5.2, the install dialogue for all newly installed applications (i.e. not just those that have been updated to work specifically with the new version), signed with a certificate-authority issued certificate, is as follows:

This simplified dialogue removes the specific warning about unrestricted access, but still (correctly) challenges the user to answer the question “Are you sure you want to install this application to your computer?”. Most end-users I’ve spoken with understand that “installing” something requires a certain level of trust and I think the revised dialogue is more in line with existing OS dialogues and more appropriate to the level of risk involved.

For application publishers it should remove some of the overhead that was required to support end-users during the installation process and remove a concern that might otherwise have put them off completing the installation.

It should be noted that there has been no change to the dialogue for self-signed applications – this dialogue, quite rightly, makes it clear to the end-user that there is increased risk associated with the installation of the application.

You can download the latest version of the AIR runtime from here.

AgencyNet are the digital agency behind the impressive multi-screen ‘Fanbase‘ application, which was developed for Atlantic Records. The team used Adobe AIR and the Flash Lite Distributable player to bring the application to consumers, accessible as both a desktop application and mobile service.

David Brown from AgencyNet has kindly agreed to present an online session in which he will uncover the key factors to consider when developing and deploying content to multiple devices with Adobe’s distributable player solution. Topics include Multilingual content, multiple input types, and consistent user experiences across screens.

The presentation is TODAY (Thursday, 30th April) at 11am PST, which is 2pm EST, 7pm UK and 8pm CET.

To join the session just register here.

We announced some pretty significant new numbers in relation to adoption of the Flash Platform today – the full press release can be found on our website, but here are the all important stats:

55% of computers already have Flash Player 10

“Adobe Flash Player 10 was installed on more than 55 percent of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release.” For more information see the published penetration statistics here.

Over 100 million installations of AIR

“In less than one year after its initial release, there have been more than 100 million installations of Adobe AIR.”

1 million downloads of developer SDKs and tools

“In the last 12 months, there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), the free open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex® Builder™ by developers.”

80% of online videos viewed using Flash

“Adobe Flash Player content reaches over 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops, and over 80 percent of online videos worldwide are viewed using Adobe Flash technology.”