Research In Motion (RIM) has announced the new BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR. The SDK is intended to let developers quickly create AIR applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet using Adobe's development tools.
"The BlackBerry PlayBook, with its dual-core processor and multi-processing OS, is a multi-tasking powerhouse that is also the world's first tablet to be built from the metal up to run Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR applications in a fully integrated, fully optimized fashion," said RIM CTO David Yach.
The BlackBerry PlayBook with BlackBerry Tablet OS supports Adobe AIR 2.5 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 at its core. This integrated support and the BlackBerry PlayBook's exceptional processing power (including a 1 GHz dual-core processor, true symmetric multiprocessing and multi-threaded rendering) give developers the ability to deliver incredibly rich content and applications with highly-responsive and fluid touch screen experiences.
The new SDK provides developers with support for:
- Hardware-accelerated playback of video and graphics-intensive content, both in the browser and within AIR applications, enabling a smooth, high fidelity viewing experience on the BlackBerry PlayBook, even with up to 1080p HD content
- Web View to enable AIR apps to display HTML and Flash content and to leverage the BlackBerry PlayBook's WebKit browser
- UI components that have been built specifically for the touch screen experience on a tablet device, including support for multi-touch and gestures
- Powerful APIs to advanced features such as the front and rear facing cameras, accelerometer, geo-location, in-app payments and more
- Application notifications, which allow developers to bring events generated by AIR applications immediately to the user's attention, even if the application is running in the background
- Seamless communication between AIR apps on the BlackBerry PlayBook, allowing the creation of "Super App" experiences
- Extending Adobe AIR applications to use native C++ extensions, providing developers with the ability to write part of their application in the BlackBerry Tablet OS's native code (subject to availability of the upcoming BlackBerry Tablet OS native SDK)
- Porting existing Adobe AIR applications quickly and easily to the BlackBerry PlayBook
