QueTwo's Blog

One of the major announcements that came out of Adobe MAX was the availability of AIR 2.5, which is the first SDK to support televisions as an output.  While most of you may be scratching your heads as to why this is a big deal, the few of you who have ever attempted to write an application for a STB (set-top-box) or directly for a television know that they are one hard nut to crack.

Generally, up to now if you needed to push an application to a television-connected device, (including DVD players, Blueray players, STBs, or TVs themselves), you either had to learn the vendor’s propriety language, go with the vendor’s interpretation of Java, or just pay them to make the app for you.  Additionally, it has only been a very short while that the manufactures have even given the developers the ability to push apps to these devices (with Samsung really paving the way in the past few months). 

In comes Adobe with their OpenScreen Project, where they are allowing common RIA developers to simply create applications that can be deployed to these television connected devices.  The dream of write-once-publish-anywhere just got extended to another class of devices.  Mind you, these will be high-end devices at first (for example, take a look at Samsung’s TV lineup (filter by Samsung Apps in the features section) to get an idea of what you will be targeting. Read more of this post