What do you get when you combine Adobe LiveCycle ES2, Forms & Adobe AIR? Tetrapod!

Created by my Adobe colleagues in Poland, it provides your end users with desktop access to forms and other content via a simple menu system. Tetrapod exposes information stored in LiveCycle ES Content Services and initiates forms based processes in LiveCycle ES Process Management.

You can watch a presentation on Tetrapod here: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/tetrapod-demo/ or download Tetrapod and trial it yourself: http://devnet.host.adobe.com/download/tetrapod/ and finally a few extra videos on Tetrapod on Piotr Walczyszyn’s RIASPACE blog

Tetrapod Workflow from Piotr Walczyszyn on Vimeo.

Quick post to share a great utility for anyone like me who would like to show off their Android app on a projector. In my case I’ve been demoing the latest Adobe Reader, LiveCycle client, Acrobat.com, Photoshop Express apps from Adobe as well as some samples created with the upcoming AIR for Android.

The problem is that I used to use a web camera and try and hold the phone in front of it while demonstrating. What I’ve started using now is AndroidScreencast (http://androidscreencast.googlecode.com). It’s a java app that displays whatever is on your Android device onto your PC. The screen refresh rate is not amazing, but it does work on Mac, Windows & Linux!

All the gory details are on the project site, but it works great!

At the recent MAX conference Adobe announced that it was working on new versions of both Flash Player & Adobe AIR. These new updates are now available in prerelease format to allow developers to download and test the new enhancements.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent browser runtime release of the Open Screen Project that will enable uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across the desktop and devices.

Apart from being the first release to target non PC devices like mobile phones, its faster. A LOT faster!

Adobe AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1.0, allowing developers to create more reliable and feature-rich applications in the desktop context, and they can easily add AIR 2 functionality to update current AIR 1.0 applications. New AIR 2 features include enhanced support for mass storage devices and native application processes, as well as peer-to-peer and UDP networking.

Watch Kevin Lynch at MAX talk about AIR 2.0.

Download both the Flash Player & AIR 2 prerelease betas at labs.adobe.com

Last week I made a quick note of the release of Tour De LiveCycle, an Adobe AIR application that provided a quick reference to a wealth of material & documentation for newcomers and experienced users of Adobe’s LiveCycle ES.

Adobe have released another free tool called LiveCycle Café, another AIR application focused on LiveCycle, but this one focused on providing timely news, access to events, forums, notes and even an RSS Reader.

Download LiveCycle Café from Adobe.

Australian journalist Brad Howarth recently interviewed me regarding my opinions on what Adobe is doing with Flash and has included my comments in an unbiased article recently published in February 20th B&T magazine.

Apart from choosing the technology that can get your message to as many people as possible, one key takeaway from the article is the importance of understanding the workflow between your developer and designers. This is especially important now that the demand for a great user experience is important.

Having creative people burn cycles slicing and dicing their artwork for developers is time consuming and costly. Developers cannot afford to ignore the user experience as there audience expect higher engagement and “that will do” is no longer an option. In fact, many projects are now start with a “front to back” approach (designing the user experience first then wiring it up behind) rather than the traditional “back to front” method which leaves the user interface as a final consideration.

Adobe has put an amazing amount of effort into the latest release of Creative Suite, CS4, that specifically targets these designer / developer workflows. New functionality such as being able to move from Photoshop to Fireworks to CSS compliant HTML in Dreamweaver are easier than ever before. Improvements such as Subversion support in Dreamweaver makes it even easier to sit alongside a dev project.

If you add to this that Flash is no longer constrained to a web browser and can be included in a desktop application (Adobe AIR) or inside a PDF (Acrobat 9) then all of a sudden your creative efforts have been leveraged across many different mediums.

While you can implement the new workflow improvements today, what many of you are waiting on anxiously is Flash Catalyst (previously codenamed Thermo). Catalyst will tighten the designer / developer workflow even more allowing true round tripping between tools.

While I intend to write a whole lot more about this, you can see a snippet of information held in the slides and samples from the recent Refresh event.

You can also read Brad’s full article by downloading the RTF files in Brad’s latest blog post. or purchasing the print edition as I did.

For the last week two weeks, Brian Chau, Andrew Spaulding and I have been traveling around Australia giving the web designer & developer community a “Refresh” on what’s happening with Adobe technology that is relevant in the web space.

For the keynote we covered a wide range of topics, starting with an overview of all the major releases that the Adobe Engineers have come up with in the last 12 months, including Flex 3, AIR, Acrobat 9, Acrobat.com, LiveCycle ES Update 1 as well as Creative Suite 4.

Demos shown include;
David Gilmour PDF – Flash Video recording inside a PDF.
Acrobat.com – Many things including free web conferencing!
FIAT ecoDrive – AIR application that talks with your car and tells you how you drive.
Telstra Business – Flex application used to choose a mobile phone.

After some quick demos showcasing the latest shipping technologies, we went on to discuss & demo the latest advances in Flash and how the complete Flash Platform is coming together as a collection of devices (desktops, laptops, mobile devices, set top boxes etc). Those in Melbourne & Brisbane were able to see the Sony PlayStation 3 display flash video content thanks to the built in Flash Player (Sydney had internet troubles!).

Andrew showcased some of the latest Flash examples;

Hobnox – A great audio tool.
“The Cloth Demo” – showing the performance of Flash 10
Flash Player 10 feature demos – Several more demos

We then covered the latest from the Open Screen Project before moving on to a very important topic, the Designer / Developer workflow. The most exciting part of this was Andrew’s demonstration of Flash Catalyst (previously known as Thermo). Andrew will be posting a recording of his demo soon.

Below are the slides from the keynote, which include plenty of information and links where you can find out more information.

Adobe Refresh 2009 was a great event for us, and I especially enjoyed the conversations with so many of you during the breaks. We still have the Auckland Refresh event coming up on March 5th, so if you can make it please register at http://events.adobe.co.uk/cgi-bin/event.cgi?country=pa&eventid=7651

This wont be the last web designer / developer activity from the Adobe Australia / New Zealand team this year. We’re in planning mode right now for some rather fun and informative activities that will be announced rather soon…