Adobe announced today that the first Android device to be shipped with the Flash plug-in is the HTC Hero. Though not clearly expressed anywhere in the announcement, this device supports Flash Lite 3.1 and not the previously announced full Flash Player 10. This means that ActionScript 3.0 is not supported, and only up to Flash Player 9 movies made in AS2 will be playable. Adobe claims that this means that up to 85% of Flash on the Internet will be supported.

As seen from the announcement video, the integration of Flash in the player is excellent, the user could double click any Flash object to have that object displayed in full screen landscape mode. This makes viewing Flash video nice and makes playing games comparable to standalone applications.

There is no doubt that this is a great development for Flash, however, the fact that Flash Lite 3.1 does not support AS3 will be a barrier for entry for many developers.

There are no updates on whether Flash will ever be seen on the iPhone, but the other recent competitor, the Palm Pre, is expected to have the full Flash Player 10 sometime next year.

You can learn more about Flash on Android at the Flash Mobile Blog and Adobe.

A drawback in using Flash websites instead of HTML websites is that it is hard to track the path in which the user follows in a website in order to analyse and assess the effectiveness of that website. “Use It Better” hopes to solve this problem by introducing an analysis service for tracking events and mouse movement in Flash websites. The service will store the data on the servers of Use It Better to allow developer to view stats or even replay whole sessions as navigated through by end users.

Use It Better seems like a very promising project, implementing it in actual websites is supposed be a process that involves simply including the Use It Better class in a Flash project. The service works with both AS2 and AS3.

It is not clear how much the service could affect the performance of Flash websites using it as it could potentially be used to track and record all sorts of information from mouse movement to caching of SharedObject data and XML files. The service could also potentially have privacy considerations as personal data might be recorded in the process (e.g. XML data containing personal information).

Use It Better is currently in private beta. You can sign up to receive an invitation by using the form here.

[via .swfGeek]

 Electric Rain released today the new version of Swift3D, the 3D modeling and animation tool of choice for Flash designers. The new Swif3d v6 features new boolean operations for merging and punching objects out of each other, enhanced speed and performance, support for Papervision3D 2.0 to create real time 3D Flash graphics, and other new features.

I was personally not impressed at all with the implementation of Papervision3D in the previous version of Swif3D, so I hope the implementation of Papervision3D 2.0 is better.

v6 is instantly available for purchase for both the Mac and Windows at the price of $250. Trial versions are not out yet. You can learn more about Swift3D from the official website of Electric Rain.

 We would like to thank Wix.com for sponsoring Republic of Code a number of times. Wix is a powerful online Flash-based application for creating Flash websites without using any ActionScript. Using this tool you can create simple Flash websites, widgets, and galleries by simply dragging and dropping various elements from a clip art collection or by directly uploading them from your desktop.

If you are interested in quickly putting up a Flash website or gallery make sure you check out Wix.

Adobe released yesterday the public betas for Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. Flash Builder 4 is the new version of Flex Builder which got renamed as Flash Builder recently, it is the tool to use to create rich internet applications using MXML and ActionScript.

Flash Catalyst on the hand is a new tool aimed at designers to allow them to transform Photoshop and Illustrator file documents into rich internet applications using a number of actions and user interface elements.

You can download both betas from Adobe Labs. You can get a quick start with these tools by checking the introductory tutorials for Flash Builder 4 from Adobe and the new video tutorials on both Catalyst and Builder from gotoAndLearn.

 The Flash Blog reports that Adobe will start calling all upcoming versions of the Flex Builder as Flash Builder. Flex Builder is an Eclipse based IDE for creating Flash web applications and Adobe Air applications using a the Flex framework.

The Flash Builder will still use the open source Flex framework for developing rich internet applications, the new name is simply used to clear any confusion as to the product created using this tool – it creates Flash movies in SWF format that do not require anything other than the Flash Player to run. 

While this might help clarify that Flex Builder is essentially a product to make Flash content, this might create confusion between Flash Professional and Flash Builder as people might wonder what the purpose of Flash Professional is if Flash could be built using Flash Builder.

The beta release of the new version of the Flash Builder is expected to come out this summer. You can learn more about this from here.

 HexoSearch is a new search engine dedicated to ActionScript content. Instead of attempting to index all websites on the internet, HexoSearch uses a semi-manual process for selecting relevant ActionScript resources and showing results only from pages within these websites. The search results are improved through a social element by which users can vote for a link if they found it relevant.

HexoSearch seems to be more effective than traditional tutorial search engines as the tutorials do not have to be manually submitted. I played around with it a bit and thought that the were already ordered through a good ranking logic as the top results seem to be more relevant than the ones in the bottom even where no votes have made for any of the links. The voting mechanism is also implemented through a nice minimal framing technique that shows the controls on the side of the actual tutorial page found through HexoSearch.

If you are one of those people who are always Googling for ActionScript tutorials then make sure that you check out HexoSearch, it might just do the trick.

[via Rimp]

 Adobe released yesterday a free update to Flash CS4 that fixes many of the bugs of the program. I am one of those people still on CS3, but CS4 users have been complaining about many crashes and performance issues with CS4. This update is directed at these complaints. The whole list of updates could be seen over at Adobe’s Richard Galvan’s blog.  The update could be downloaded from the Adobe Flash Support Center.

 Twitter is a micro-blogging platform to get the latest updates from friends and family. It could also be used to stay up to date with the latest news about a specific topic if you find the the people to follow! I thought I’ll make a post on some Twitter accounts which could be interesting to Flash and ActionScript developers.

The obvious ones to follow are Flash Platform, Air, and Flash SEO, which are all from Adobe and should keep you up to date with all the official announcements and will give you an inside scoop on what’s happening.

A more discrete discovery is Edward Sullivan of Adobe who seems to always have something interesting to share about AS3. Another good account to follow for general Flash updates is FlashForum which talks just about that and updates from that community.

You can also check out Twibes for the ActionScript twitter directly – which for some reason doesn’t seem to want to open for me.

And of course you should follow the Republic of Code on Twitter if you haven’t done that already!

Has anybody else managed to find other interesting Flash and ActionScript Twitter accounts to follow?

 The Ovi Store is Nokia’s response to Apple’s App Store. It is hoped to help developers reach out for Nokia phone users by having the application store integrated in Nokia devices. Nokia recently launched the Publisher section of the Ovi Store to allow developers to register for free as Ovi Publishers. Publishers can sell their applications for a specified amount or offer them for free. If any applications are sold, Nokia will share the profit with the developer on a 30-70 basis (the same percentage used by Apple).

Java and Flash developers should check this out if they are interested in publishing mobile content on Nokia devices.

You can check out the video below to learn more about Ovi.