Air for Blackberry Playbook

[monkey500]

Hi guys,

Has anyone tested flash and got good results on the Playbook? Compared to the ipad?

I'm setting up as a Blackberry developer, but I'm unclear about installing it. I installed their SDK, and selected my AIR 2.7 folder

which is in my Flash cs5.5 folder.

1. I was expecting a nice 'Air for Blackberry' option to appear when I opened Flash, but it didn't happen. Can't be sure if it's installed right..

2. Do I just choose an 'AIR' template?

3. If I use Air 2.7, will it still export out and be compatible for Blackberry air 2.5 OS?

Thanks,

Matt

p.s I'll post any findings as I go on this thread.

[p-wing47 · Accepted solution]

Just submitted my first app to BlackBerry the other night, waiting to get approved now.

There was a slight learning curve to publishing it; like you said, there's no "AIR for BlackBerry" option right now, but I've heard it's coming. Hope this is true.

These were the two most helpful resources I found. Good luck!

http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Tablet-OS-SDK-for-Adobe-AIR/Tips-Definitive-guide-to-AIR-apps...

http://www.hsharma.com/tech/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/

[monkey500]

Thanks for the links and for confirming the Air option doesn't yet exist!

I tested out the Playbook yesterday in a shop. The flash worked in a website browser, but it wasn't all that fast. Perhaps half the

speed of the web.

I tested a few other tablets and the Motorolla Xoom was the best for Flash. It had no slowdown on my site at all!

I'm now looking forward to try the 10inch Samsung Galaxy tab. Hopefully this will be a big player, and a good Tablet to design for..

Matt

[p-wing47]

Sure thing, although going through the steps to build it via command line isn't really as daunting as it looks. After you figure it out the first time, it isn't too terrible. We'll see how soon we get a AIR for BlackBerry option (if at all, considering RIM seems to be pretty much getting annihilated right now). Time will tell.

Thanks for the info on the diffrerent tablets' performance. This should be helpful to others that don't have any sort of tablet testing device (which is probably the majority of us).

[monkey500]

I have a feeling that the Playbook will sell well, just because it's a cool name and famous brand, although for me the screen

is too tiny, and the flash speed was slow on first test. But this leads to another question:

I was playing my Flash animated website (desgned for web, unoptimised) in the browser. I have a stripped down version

which I've converted to AS3, for apps. If I publish this as a self contained app, will the performance be any better than

if it plays in a browser?

Because if not, can I just put up a webpage of the app, go into the shop and test it. Or perhaps the Air packaged version uses

the CPU chips better? Any thoughts?

cheers,

Matt

[Innovatology]

Any Flash game will need to be optimized for mobile devices. Don't expect your web swf's to play well on mobile without tweaking or more, depending on the quality of your code.

Be aware that AS2 content is not supported for AIR apps, you'll need AS3 to install it as an app

AIR runs really well on PlayBook. In fact, much of the OS interface is actually AIR too.

When you install the Tablet OS SDK (which you download from Blackberry) you should get an option in FlashBuilder 4.5.1 to target Playbook in addition to IOS and Android. You can use Flash and FlashBuilder together.

[monkey500]

cool, thanks for the tips Jon.

It would be good if people can post their finished Blackberry Apps in this forum, so we have a collection of Flash Apps and see what's possible.

[quecocinohoy]

I developed an Flex app and export to playbook with AIR 2.6. You can download in appworld:

Que cocino hoy

http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/38544?lang=en

Its an spanish recipe search with more than 2500 recipes!

The great of AIR is to export this app to android and iOS with the same code! (or 95%)

[Rangora]

I am working on a complex application that need a lot of system resources to render forms dynamically from XML files. I tried it on an iPad 2, a Galaxy Tab and a blackberry Playbook. The Playbook is amazing! My apps is 2x faster on the playbook than on Android or iOS devices! The screen size is perfect for our needs. (The iPad screen is too big if you need to hold it for a few hours in a row... The Playbook fit in a hand. I hope the 3G version will be release soon...

[Colin Holgate]

I believe the PlayBook doesn't use GPU, it's just using CPU for Flash apps. It may be that the may you're using the GPU on iPad and Android is performing badly, which can even make it worse than using CPU. So, try it on an iPad with the publishing set to CPU instead of GPU. Then it might be more like you see on the PlayBook.

[monkey500]

Thanks guys, I work in CPU mode at the moment anyway, so it should be easy to port across to the Playbook..

[Rangora]

Thank you!!

I now have almost the same performance on IOS, Android and Playbook! This will help our project approval!!!! Thanks for the hint!