Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

Research In Motion (RIM), a leading provider of wireless technology, recently announced the launch of the new BlackBerry (News - Alert) Tablet OS SDK for the Adobe AIR, at the Adobe MAX conference, which was held in Los Angeles. Using Adobe’s familiar, powerful and industry-leading development tools, the Software Development Kit (SDK) essentially enables developers to easily and quickly create AIR applications for the uniquely powerful BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, as well as access the richness of Adobe AIR 2.5 in order to deliver high-performing and engaging AIR applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

The new SDK provides developers with support including, hardware-accelerated playback of video and graphics-intensive content; both in the browser and within AIR applications, enabling a smooth, high fidelity viewing experience on the BlackBerry PlayBook, even with up to 1080p HD content; Web view to enable AIR apps to display HTML and Flash content; UI components that have been built specifically for the touch screen experience on a tablet device, including support for multi-touch and gestures; powerful APIs to advanced features such as the front and rear facing cameras, accelerometer, geo-location, in-app payments and more; Application notifications; seamless communication between AIR apps on the BlackBerry PlayBook, Porting existing Adobe AIR applications quickly and easily to the BlackBerry PlayBook.

In a press release, the Chief Technology Officer of Software for Research In Motion, David Yach, said, "The BlackBerry PlayBook, with its dual-core processor and multi-processing OS, is a multi-tasking powerhouse that is also the world's first tablet to be built from the metal up to run Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR applications in a fully integrated, fully optimized fashion. The new SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook unleashes a wealth of opportunity for the Adobe and BlackBerry development communities to easily create value-added applications and experiences for customers and we are extremely excited by the positive feedback received from developers in early trials."

The Senior Vice President of Creative and Interactive Business Solutions at Adobe, David Wadhwani, commented, "The close collaboration between RIM and the Adobe AIR team has achieved an implementation which we expect to be the first to include high performance optimizations for tablet devices. This, combined with great tooling integration and full Flash Player 10.1 support, makes the BlackBerry PlayBook an outstanding platform for more than three million Flash developers."