Develop Once and Deploy on Multiple Platforms Says Adobe
Here’s how Adobe Mobile Application Framework helps in solving the hurdles relating to the following four parameters:
1. Design and Development:
The holistic approach of allowing the designing and developing of apps with its integrated tools is of a great help in segmenting the development activity into executable tasks which cuts down heavy labor from the developer fraternity.
2. Performance:
Based on the type of the apps to be developed the choice of selecting the right approach using the Adobe mobile framework is possible for that complete workflow management with the bare minimum data integration with backend and so on.
3. Footprint left behind by the Adobe Framework on mobile apps:
Android takes all the advantage of this framework as the Adobe AIR (which is one of the early components of mobile development with Flex) is a part of the Android OS and thus will leave a smaller foot print by not contributing to the size of the application. On the contrary, the i-OS is not having this framework on its platform but is a part of the app and this scenario will leave result in an increase in the overall footprint of the application.
4. Deployment left untouched by the Adobe framework:
It is important to note that Adobe has not taken initiatives to provide any mechanism to deploy apps and because of this the developer has to follow the tradition process of app deployment by as specified by the guidelines on the respective mobile platforms.
Analysis on the Adobe mobile application framework API’s
1. Screens:
Screen densities, dimension, orientation are some of major considerations while developing mobile application from UI Perspective.
2. Touch input:
Adobe handles touch input efficiently. It auto maps the single-finger gestures (single finger tap on a button) to the corresponding mouse events. AIR also supports multi- touch inputs.
3. Text input:
As the virtual keyboards are more common on the mobile devices, handling them for appropriate text fields are necessary requirement for all the applications and platforms. The AIR package supports this and whenever a virtual keyboard displayed, the screen gets repositioned in such a way that both the text input area and keyboard will be visible onscreen.
4. Sensors:
Most of the mobiles are equipped with geo-location and accelerometer hardware. The AIR package provides Location API’s to interact with physical hardware.
Geo-Location: This gives the device’s geographic position (latitude and longitude) and movement (heading and speed).
Accelerometer: This returns events reporting the current force being applied to the device along the x, y and z axes. Both of the above can be enabled for a certain interval so it can dispatch the result events.
Overall, Adobe provides an extensive support in developing mobile application that suits for multiple platforms. Right now, the multi platform approach is available only for few popular mobile platforms such as iPhone, Android and Blackberry Tablet. As the market share increases for other platforms there is expected to be huge demand for such frameworks for applications to sustain in the market.
