Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM) and Adobe Systems expanded their collaboration and announced that creative professionals and application developers will be able to use the Adobe Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite content development and authoring tools to easily create rich content and application experiences for BlackBerry smartphones.
The upcoming versions of Adobe Creative Suite will help the designers to create optimized graphic assets, such as image and video content, from tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects, for the BlackBerry platform.
The other products of Adobe such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Device Central software will also be enabled to support the creation and testing of BlackBerryWidgets and web content optimized for the BlackBerry® Browser. Additionally, users will be able to directly import photos and video captured on their BlackBerry smartphones and edit them using Adobe’s consumer offerings including Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.com.
The aim of this collaboration is to accelerate the mobile application and content development workflow between BlackBerry application and web content developers and creative professionals that use Adobe tools. It will also minimize the re-creation of graphic assets and iterations that designers and developers have to go through to generate rich application user interfaces, animations, images and video content when supporting multiple platforms.
Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, Research In Motion said, “There is tremendous opportunity for RIM and Adobe to align our platforms to help developers create BlackBerry applications that are highly engaging and deeply integrated in order to deliver the best user experience in the market”. He continued, “We are working closely with Adobe to enable our developer communities to build rich content services and BlackBerry Widgets that leverage the latest runtime environments, APIs and network services through Adobe’s industry leading design and development tools.”
Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe said, “RIM is at the forefront of driving smartphone innovation, and it’s only natural that further integrating our respective platforms will set new standards for engaging content and applications”. He also said, “The expanded partnership between both companies will open up great new opportunities by making it even easier for content designers and mobile application developers to create rich and compelling content for the BlackBerry platform.”
The recent announcement is that the two companies are working together as part of the Open Screen Project to bring the Adobe Flash Player browser runtime to BlackBerry smartphones. The two companies will also be collaborating to adapt other key components of the Flash Platform including Adobe AIR.