RIM, Adobe Ally To Enhance App Development For BlackBerry Smartphones

Research In Motion (RIM) and Adobe Systems have 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.

“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,” said Jim Balsillie, co-CEO, Research In Motion. “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 design and development tools.”

“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,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. “The expanded partnership between both companies will open up new opportunities by making it even easier for content designers and mobile application developers to create rich and compelling content for the BlackBerry platform.”

Future versions of Adobe Creative Suite starting with Adobe Creative Suite 5 will provide the ability for designers to create optimised graphic assets, such as image and video content, from tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects, for the BlackBerry platform. These graphics assets can then be easily imported into BlackBerry application development tools, including the BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse and the BlackBerry Web Plug-in for Eclipse, for use in applications and user interfaces. Backgrounds, icons and images created with Adobe tools such as Adobe Photoshop will also be able to be used in the new BlackBerry Theme Studio to create compelling BlackBerry themes.

Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Device Central software will also be enabled to support the creation and testing of BlackBerry Widgets and Web content optimised 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 collaboration aims to accelerate the mobile application and content development workflow between BlackBerry application and Web content developers and creative professionals, who use Adobe tools. It will also reduce 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.