Before explaining what OSP is, let’s take a step back and look at some of the industry trends and dynamics that motivated OSP First dynamic - The number and diversity of devices continue to explodeMobile phones already outnumber PCs and becoming more powerful with improved batter life, processing power, and screen qualityIn emerging countries, 1 billion people will experience the Internet through a mobile device without having ever used a PC 2 ) Open is slowly coming to mobile and TV platforms. On desktop, we’re used to a very open model – anyone can download any SW on their PC’s. However, we see trend changing to more openness in mid/long-term. 3) Third trend: Customer’s Expectations are rising: Consumers want more from their devices – they want video and the full Internet experience across all the screens in their lives.
Whether they’re accessing the Internet, interactive content or applications on their PCs, their mobile phones, or their TVs – consumers are demanding a seamless and integrated experienceHaving a consistent experience doesn’t mean the same exact thing on all devices – rather it’s an experience that “respects the soul of the device” – it’s customized for the different displays and the different context they’re used in, but runs on the same underlying technology. Moving from a single screen world to multi-screen experiences that live both inside and outside of the traditional browser.
However, the problem is that there is fragmentation across devices, operating systems, and browsers, so users can’t easily access content and applications across different screens. Holding the industry backNone of the existing technologies (Java, HTML, smartphone Oss) yet provide a consistent, reliable environment for des/devs, who struggle to make applications work across dozens of mobile handsets. We’re just talking here about mobile – you can imagine having to do this not just for mobile but also TV &PCAnother challenge we face is that runtimes on devices are not easily updatable, so new versions of runtimes introduce incompatibility over time, even if it’s the same technology.
The chart speaks for itself, today there are countless numbers of mobile phones and consumer electronics.As more and more of these devices become connected to the Internet, users of these devices are demanding access to their favourite services and applications online
For many years now the Flash Platform has enabled the delivery and creation of Rich Internet Applications. These experiences span gaming, social, enterprise and video applications that millions of users engage with everyday. With the onset of widely available and stable network connections more and more applications are moving to the cloud. We’re talking about services that are agnostic of their delivery platform. Facebook can be considered a cloud service, but also an application platform. But this application, and service is presents different information on a mobile phone than on your desktop browser; the interface is contextual.Some of those contexts include mobile phones, consoles, laptops, desktop computers and even televisions. So successful applications of the future are those which can provide service to their users on any device, and this is where the Flash Platform is going.
To address these challenges and opportunities, we’ve established the Open Screen Project in May of 2008The vision is for consumers to be able to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhereWith the goals of:Drive consistent, rich Internet experiences and innovation across devices and Enable developers, designers to seamlessly publish content & apps across connected devices The way we do this is by delivering a consistent runtime environment for open web browsing & standalone appsWhat is it: OSP is an industry initiative, led by Adobe with the participation of industry leaders.
OSP partners to date are listed here – close to 70 industry leaders in the mobile, PC, and TV spaceSpan all key parts of the value chainChipset/silicon vendors World’s leading handset and device OEMsCarriersContent providersWe’ve added many new members to the OSP since MAX – continuing to see strong participation by technology partners. Now focus has recently shifted to seeing a lot more energy on the content partners, who are working with the developer beta of our runtimes to make sure their content works, and to provide improved experiences for those using devices on the Flash Platform.
Applications are becoming available on an exploding number of devices (laptops, desktops, phones, tablets, TVs, etc.) powered by Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile, etc.On devices, the trend is to build standalone apps as opposed to browser apps: for example, if you want to do Home Banking on your phone, Bank of America will drive you to their standalone app sitting on your phone “desktop”, not to their browser app.But building native apps for each device (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile) in addition to the desktop operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux) is unsustainable for many organizations.The Flash Platform and AIR offer an abstraction layer on top of these devices and will allow you to build your application once and deploy it on all of these devices (with the exception of iOS devices): same programming model, same language, same toolset, same code.
The innovation that the Flash platform has contributed to the web has enabled entirely new categories of Web applications and content.Once Flash has enabled the category, the innovation doesn’t slow down, it accelerates. Video improves from low quality to HD, from progressive download to dynamic streaming. Games move from 2D to 3D virtual worlds. Interactive experiences transition from simple animation to immersive, highly customized, commerce enabled experiences. Flash is now the preferred platform for these categories of web development.
Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices. Flash Player 10.1 is now available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. Supported mobile device operating systems include: Palm webOS, Microsoft Windows Phone 7, Android, and Symbian. This release does also support Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) desktop operating systems. The consistent Flash Player browser-based runtime is the most productive way to deliver content to users across operating systems and devices. Runtime consistency reduces the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different device, software, network and user contexts and helps improve business results. Flash Player 10.1 has been engineered to take advantage of upcoming Adobe media servers and hosted services that will provide innovative new ways to deliver rich and premium media experiences and create new business models.
Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices. Flash Player 10.1 is now available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. Supported mobile device operating systems include: Palm webOS, Microsoft Windows Phone 7, Android, and Symbian. This release does also support Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) desktop operating systems. The consistent Flash Player browser-based runtime is the most productive way to deliver content to users across operating systems and devices. Runtime consistency reduces the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different device, software, network and user contexts and helps improve business results. Flash Player 10.1 has been engineered to take advantage of upcoming Adobe media servers and hosted services that will provide innovative new ways to deliver rich and premium media experiences and create new business models.
Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices. Flash Player 10.1 is now available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. Supported mobile device operating systems include: Palm webOS, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, Android Éclair, and Symbian S60. This release does also support Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) desktop operating systems. The consistent Flash Player browser-based runtime is the most productive way to deliver content to users across operating systems and devices. Runtime consistency reduces the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different device, software, network and user contexts and helps improve business results. Flash Player 10.1 has been engineered to take advantage of upcoming Adobe media servers that will provide innovative new ways to deliver rich and premium media experiences and create new business models.
Note: The performance improvements represent averages across 5 different benchmarks for each metric, using an HTC Fuzesmartphone running Windows Mobile 6.5. Software rendering performance represents an average framerate. Many of the optimizations are specific to phones. For example, we added optimizations that only apply when the screen is 16-bits-per-pixel, which is common on phones but non-existent on desktops. We wouldn’t expect to see a dramatic speed increase in the Windows/Mac desktop version of the player.To make it possible to deploy SWF content on smartphones and other mobile devices that have limited processing power and memory availability compared to PCs, a tremendous amount of engineering work has gone into to making Flash Player 10.1 “ready for mobility”. This work includes performance improvements, such as rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations, in addition to hardware acceleration of graphics and video. Improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage, and rendering/scripting performance benefit PCs as well as mobile devices. New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities including support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation, bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience.Contextual applications that span different devices can adapt to different software and device contexts to provide optimized user experiences and deliver improved business results.
The broad reach of the runtime makes it easier to deliver applications with minimum installation and bandwidth hassles. The large number of developers has lead to a robust ecosystem of open source projects, developer tools, and consulting agencies – all of which make it faster and easier to bring applications to market.
Keep references to AIR not Flash PlayeriPhone solution today, Android solution at MAX, representation on other platformsSkip 2.0 bullets, focus on 2.5Move to authoring for multi-screen, workflow, better support for a wider range of designers/developers
Delivering the new runtime for mobile phones requires a set of new features and investments.We have completed a huge amount of engineering to increase performance and use less memory on devices.As well as that, the new runtime supports features that are common on these new mobile platforms.We have added multi-touch support, Accelerometer, and new APIs for globalization, error handling and text input
Flex is a highly productive, open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops and operating systems.
Flex is used in a wide variety of applications both outside the firewall and inside the firewall. The six are common use cases for Flex applications in the world today.Product Configurators – From motorcycles, automobiles, custom clothing, shoes, and more, providing people with the ability to select and customize products and services help them explore products, add options, cross-sell to related products and help customers get what they want. LOB applications – Line of Business applications are some of the last applications to migrate to the web. There are still thousands of installed, client-server applications that are core to running businesses, that are now being migrate to the web through the use of the Flash Platform. These applications deal with complex data, multiple windows and screens, and drive many of the core business processes in companies.Data Visualization – The ability to visualize complex business data in a way that allows people to quickly understand it leads to faster decision making and more accurate understanding of business operations. In addition, summarize large volumes of more complex data in highly visual systems helps people assimilate information faster.Rich Media Applications – Rich media is an obvious sweet spot for Flash, and we therefore see the majority of rich media applications today built in Flash.Self-Service applications – Self Service applications, whether B2B or B2C applications, help empower users to have more control over transactions with businesses today. These application reduce costs while increasing revenues through upsell/cross-sell opportunities. Product Selectors – Providing a visual means for people to select product from complex portfolios, help people order the products that meet their needs, while exposing them to potential upsell offerings. From electronics, to entertainment offerings, visual product selectors help people find what they are looking for faster.
Let’s switch gears a bit a walk and help you understand the Flex and Flash Builder are. We start with the open source Flex framework. It provides the core programming language, compilers, and component libraries needed for creating rich Internet applications. Adobe Flash Builder is a professional-grade IDE, build on the popular Eclipse framework. Flash Builder helps developers accelerate the design, development and testing of Flex applications.