Before I start, let me introduce this new series of blog posts/roundups I am starting by saying that if there is such a thing as too much reading then I read too much. In keeping up with hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts and other resources, I tend to see some pretty amazing stuff being created by the Adobe developer community. Luckily, part of my new role as Web Community Manager for Flash Platform within the Learning Resources group here at Adobe is to keep up with how the community is using and writing about Flash Platform products. This is the first in what I plan to become a regular series of posts covering some of the recent posts or articles that stood out to me (as in these were my personal favorites, not necessarily endorsed by my employer). Please, if you have something you’d like me to share, feel free to email me, post in he comments or dm/reply to me on Twitter.

I had the pleasure of writing another article for the Adobe Edge which was released today. This article is almost a companion to my accelerometer tutorial from earlier today (if this morning's post was part 2, this would be part 1). The article walks you through installing the Android SDK from Google, getting all the AIR bits from Adobe and getting your first working mobile application up and running on your Android phone. The application itself is quite simple but that's kind of the point. It does show the basics of capturing the swipe gesture to navigate within a mobile application. The sample application was built with Flash CS5 using the AIR for Android extension. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the article, feel free to share.

Getting started with Adobe AIR for Android

After writing an article that should be out soon for the Adobe Edge on AIR for Android, I have become fascinated with the possibilities this opens up for Flex and Flash developers who want to develop applications for mobile. One of the first hings you may think of when developing your mobile applications, particularly if you are interested in game development, is the accelerometer. As most of you are aware, the accelerometer makes for a very useful control mechanism for many mobile games. My goal with this application was simply to understand how to use the accelerometer to move an object around the screen. It turns out that its a pretty simple task and hopefully this sample application will help you understand the values being passed from the accelerometer.

I am busily working on an article about developing AIR for Android following the instructions from this excellent video tutorial by Lee Brimelow. However, when I connected my Nexus One and ran the ./adb devices command from the Console, it returned me an empty list of items. It turned out to be a very simple problem. I simply needed to enable USB debugging on my device. This setting was found at Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging on my Android phone. It seems that by default this setting is turned off (which makes sense really since few people really need it). Once I turned this on, running ./adb devices returned the connected device and I could continue developing and publishing to the device.

I recently wrote an article for the February edition of the Adobe Edge newsletter. This is a beginning tutorial covering creating desktop applications in Adobe AIR using HTML, JavaScript and jQuery. I focused on using tools built into Dreamweaver for this although I realize most of the readers of this blog probably use Eclipse-based tools. The audience for this article is intended to be front-end developers who already have HTML and JavaScript skills but with less emphasis on back-end coding (i.e. no ColdFusion in this one - rather I use existing API's). In this audience, I would think Dreamweaver is the dominant tool as opposed to Apatana, so I stuck with what would be comfortable for that group.

If you are looking for a introductory tutorial for building JavaScript-based AIR apps, please check out the article. It also includes some discussion of using the New York Times movie API as a means of highlighting that the Times makes a number of fantastic API's available for free. You can find the article here.