Two product “evangelists” and the Product Manager of Flash Professional show designers and attendees how to design once but deploy to different hardware and software platforms and screen sizes.
Instead of designing for the standard desktop monitor at standard screen resolutions, end-users are accessing web content using a whole range of devices with different screen sizes/resolutions, and on different hardware and software platforms.
These devices range from the traditional PC to the whole range of smartphones and more recently the tablets and web TVs.
Flash Professional Product Manager, Richard Galvan, went through the trends of the day and predicted that the number of people surfing the Internet using smartphones and tablets will surpass the number using PCs by 2013 – maybe earlier.
He demonstrated how the existing and upcoming versions of Adobe’s Flash Professional and Flex application development platform facilitates the ability to develope apps only once but deploy to devices running different operating systems such as Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry.
The product “evangelists” Paul Burnett and Michael Stoddart also illustrated how the software assisted coders by providing features such as code hints, code completion and code snippets – so much so that even designers could have a go at the coding.
Some of the sneak peeks of features being explored for future products were also presented. Some of these were first shown in Adobe Max 2010 developer conference in October last year.
The beta version of the BlackBerry Playbook, which made its first appearance during Adobe Max, was also displayed for the first time in Singapore.
Photoshop on a tablet?
Galvan also gave a demo on the recently released Wallaby – an experimental piece of software for converting Flash files into HTML5.
The simple animation he converted were identical before and after conversion – handy for banner ads without audio, video, or ActionScript.
Multi-touch interface for a future version of Photoshop?
Galvan believed that Flash and HTML5 were complementary instead of being mutually exclusive. He emphasised that Flash and HTML5 will continue to complement each other into the future, with Flash providing additional features and capabilities to HTML5 based content.
The roadshow was held at the NTUC auditorium at One Marina Boulevard from 8.30am to 5.30pm.
