I’ve been wondering for some time whether Google would be opening some way for artists and labels to distribute music through the Android Market. There have been rumors for some time and as a user of Google Music Beta, I’ve enjoyed other music-based offerings provided by the company. When I initially saw that Google had now opened up an artist portal, I was intrigued but didn’t actually check it out right away simply because I wasn’t sure I wanted to dedicate the time in setting up yet another outlet for my studio recording project, “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced“.

Google Music artist search...

Once I did get around to checking out their service though, I was met with a number of pleasant surprises. The first being that Google already was aware of my project and had even prepared a sort of stub artist page for it. When an artist or label enters the artist hub to add an artist, they will first be provided with a search mechanism as seen above.

Uh... awesome! :D

The biggest surprise came when I actually claimed the page and set up a payment plan through Google Checkout. As seen in the screenshot above, Google actually waived the $25 setup fee! It says that they are doing this since they already had a page set up for me- so mileage on this one may vary. I can image though, a lot of artists are much more well known than my little project so if you are interested… go claim your page right away as they most likely will not be offering this waiver forever. Who knows. Kudos to Google either way.

Setup of the actual artist page is very straightforward. You supply an image, bio, links… standard fare. Setting up albums is a really nice experience though. You must create a new album, which is populated with a title, price, release data, type of release, and high quality album artwork. You’ll next need access to your CD-ready files from mastering, so hopefully you have those handy :) They obviously take some time to upload, after which you can then provide track meta-data along with individual prices. You can also allow certain tracks to provide limited free listens, if desired. Once finished, you hit publish and it generally took, in my case, a few hours for Google to approve the album.

Android Market: An Early Morning Letter, Displaced

At this point, you can have a full artist page and albums for sale on Android Market. Pretty cool, no?

One side note: this is not yet available in all countries… so many non-US artists will feel miffed, initially. I do hope Google is able to expand these services beyond the United States very soon!

ActionScript 3 library for Google Analytics

I’ve dealt with Google Analytics and Flash in the past using the Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash ActionScript 3 API which, from my experience, is still very useful. I even did a session on it at the FITC Unconference during Adobe MAX 2009.

Grab the code or check out a quickstart.

The latest news is that Opera’s Jon von Tetzchner has come out in favor of Flash claiming “It is the only proprietary part of the Web we support”. A pretty big deal coming from Opera! Along with this news is that Nokia is also banking on Flash.

This all comes just one day after news broke that several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won’t retool their video libraries for iDevices.

Last week, online video giant Hulu spoke out in support of Flash while explaining features of their (very slick) new video player:

Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user.

This follows the end-to-end support of Flash and AIR by Google during their Google I/O conference where Flash was showcased in the browser, on devices, and also as a major part of Google TV and the WebM initiative. Tech writers who have had access to Android 2.2 (FroYo), Flash Player 10.1 and AIR for Android have had surprisingly (to some) positive reviews.

While these recent developments are new and encouraging for Flash developers, do not forget that for over a year now, a number of high profile companies have thrown full support behind the Flash Platform through the Open Screen Project. As an aside: the Open Source Media Framework version 1.0 was just released today!

Looks like a lot of big players disagree with Steve Jobs and his “Thoughts on Flash”. Also looks as if the United States government is increasingly unhappy about Apple’s shady business practices… remember, if the United States is this concerned, chances are the European Union will tear Apple to pieces over these issues.

Good luck, Steve (not really).

• Android 2.2 “Froyo” – Honestly, Google wiped the floor with Apple’s used up corpse with this release.
• Flash Player 10.1 for Android – Beta now for Android 2.2 “With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds.  Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources.” -Wired
• AIR for Android – You can read all about it and sign up for the prerelease.
• Google TV – Google TV includes Flash Player 10.1 integrated directly into the Google Chrome browser delivering the full Web to consumers on their television sets

Now we just have to wait for carriers to ready and distribute OTA Android 2.2 updates… Hopefully it won’t take as long as 2.1 took to get to my Droid.

• Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack – Full HTML5 and CSS3 support in Dreamweaver CS5 including the super useful Multiscreen Preview panel.
• Flash Player Support of VP8 – Google open sourced the VP8 video codec through the WebM effort and Flash Player is going to support it.
• The Google Font Directory – Open source, non royalty fonts you can use across most browsers… even IE6? Cool!
• Unity on Google Native Client – Lots of possibilities here for all sorts of stuff. Unity bypassing installed plugins altogether!
• Android 2.2, AIR for Android, and Flash Player 10.1 mobile for Android – Heh. To be continued…

Last week, I published a short video demonstrating an educational application called “StudyShuffler”. While it did function just fine, there wasn’t so much to it. Well, I’ve done some more work on it and the experience of using the app is now much more rewarding. I’ve recorded another video to demonstrate this which you can find directly below:

Something is happening… a shift in thinking. A movement to embrace the best technologies available to provide developers with the most compelling platforms, and users with the most pleasant of experiences. A shift away from single gatekeeper systems and toward the wide open planes of freedom and choice. I’m thankful, and grateful, to be a part of this shift.

Google, Adobe, Mozilla, and other worldwide partners are working to solidify the underlying technologies we work with everyday and to empower the experiences we will interact with in the not so distant future. Google has placed full support behind the Flash and AIR runtimes for Android devices. They have made Flash an integrated component within the Chromium project. Mozilla, Google, and Adobe are working together on a new plugin architecture for browsers that will elevate de facto standards such as Flash Player to the same level as HTML and CSS within the browser; fully integrated experiences no longer separated from one another as has been the case up to the present day. Over the next decade, specifications such as HTML5 will push the native browser experience forward as well, simplifying and empowering web development and hopefully increasing compatibility across web browsers. These are the technologies that will drive the future of computing and will shape the experience of users for years to come. Even Microsoft is jumping onto the openness and cooperation bandwagon!

These technology giants, along with a host of dedicated partners are also committed to shaping a bright future on mobile devices, tablets, and other hardware that achieves total parity with the desktop experience we are all so used to. Just yesterday, Google announced through Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering, that they are throwing their full support behind Adobe AIR for Android as a premiere platform for developing Android applications across supported handsets. The tech world is preparing itself for unprecedented growth across devices in the coming year, with the Android operating system leading the charge. The world is becoming connected in ways no one could have imagined even five years ago.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the AIR for Android team at Adobe in creating a prototype application for the University of Denver’s CourseMedia™ system called “StudyShuffler“, as mentioned in Lee Brimelow’s post “Google Reinforces Commitment to Adobe and Flash” (also on the Adobe AIR Team Blog). So far as I am aware, we are the only university which is so deeply involved in this effort. Not only are we consumers and users of this technology- we are providing input and shaping the future of device interactions across screens and systems.

This is a HUGE shift in the technology sphere. We are on the forefront, and we must continue to support and encourage such efforts as these!

I’ve been reformatting a lot of the presentations and webinars I’ve done over the past year and plan to host them all on Vimeo, at some point. So here is “Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics”:

FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX
Los Angeles, California
October 2009

With the ability to define and report custom events from within your Flash application, you retain control over how specific events are reported and the information contained in these reports. This presentation will cover the implementation of the Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash ActionScript 3 API for generating custom events and emulated page views from within Flash.

BTW: the FITC and Influxis people are really great to work with!

Firstly, Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.1 is coming for almost all mobile operating systems including Android, the BlackBerry® platform, Symbian® OS, Palm® webOS and Windows Mobile®. Flash Player 10.1 is the first version of the Flash Player released through the cooperation of over 70 organizations including 19 of the 20 top mobile providers through the Open Screen Project.

View an excerpt from the Google Keynote:

It was also announced that AIR 2.0 would be coming to these same platforms over the next year, allowing Flash Platform developers to create applications distributable through application stores such as the Android Marketplace.

See what Nvidea has to say about Flash and AIR:

A plethora of new tablet devices were announced, all of them supporting Flash and AIR runtimes. Many of these devices allow open development, full multitasking, and extensive hardware configurations.

What perhaps may be the most important long-range announcement is that the world’s largest wireless operators (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, and Vodafone among them) are uniting to create “an open international applications platform” in an effort to tap demand for mobile applications. As things stand right now, the mobile world is fragmented across different operating systems, runtimes, networks, and application distribution mechanisms. This new platform would provide a single point of entry for application developers and meshes well with the open, cross-platform application distribution environment made possible by Flash Platform technologies.

Mobile is huge right now and will only gain greater momentum in the years to come. The fact that so many mobile players are collaborating on these various runtimes and initiatives should be heartening to anyone invested in the future of mobile application development.

It’s a great time to be a mobile developer, and an absolutely stellar time for Flash Platform developers!

More info:

• Adobe Unveils AIR on Mobile Devices; Readies Flash Player 10.1 for Launch
• Android catching up fast!
• AIR and Flash Player coming for Android and Mobile Devices
• The unofficial Nexus One Flash demos

Looks like it’s running very nicely on the device!

I’ve been using a Motorola Droid, myself, and have been quite pleased with the Android OS.