Distribution Service extension for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional



    About making applications shareable

    The Distribution Service extension for Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional provides Flash developers with tools to help site visitors share applications, to track the sharing activity of the visitors, and to earn income through the ad network. Distribution Service extension for Flash CS4 enables you to create an application from scratch that incorporates a Share menu, or to add a Share menu to an existing FLA or SWF file.
    Sharable applications are rich media applications, typically designed in small formats for embedding in web pages, and for sharing among users on social networks.
    When visitors click a button on a shareable application, the Share menu is displayed over the application. The Share menu lets visitors do any of the following:

    • copy the embed code for posting the shareable application onto another page,

    • post the shareable application directly on their blog or social networking site,

    • bookmark the shareable application with a social bookmarking service such as Delicious, Digg, or Google Bookmarks,

    • e-mail the shareable application to others.

    • Download and install a desktop or mobile version of the application.

    To use all the functions and tools of Distribution Service extension for Flash CS4, you must have a Partner ID. You can obtain a Partner ID with the Distribution Manager.

    You can earn money by joining the ad network. If you choose to participate in the ad network, you could be paid to promote shareable applications from top-tier brand advertisers.

    Install the Distribution Service extension for Flash CS4 Professional

    1. Log into the Adobe web site at http://www.adobe.com/go/fps and follow the instructions to download and install the Distribution Service extension for Flash CS4 (MXP file) to your local hard disk.
    2. Double-click the MXP file to install the extension.
    Note: For general information about installing Flash extensions, see Flash Help.

    Using the Distribution Service extension for Flash CS4 Professional

    Once you have installed the Distribution Service extension for Flash Professional, you can get access to the extension by following these steps:

    1. Open Flash Professional.

    2. Open the FLA file that contains your shareable application’s content, or create a new file using the Share template (File->New->Templates tab).

    3. Click Window->Other Panels->Share to display the Share panel.
      Note: Although the Distribution Service extension is an Adobe extension, and is installed using the Flash extensions menu and processes, the Share panel is not displayed under Window->Extensions. Rather, as described above, you access it through the Other Panels menu.

    Sharing applications with mobile devices

    In addition to making applications shareable across social networks, bookmarking services, and desktop runtime environments, applications are shareable with mobile devices. You can share applications with mobile devices either as Flash Lite® 3.1 content or as native application content that is specific to a phone platform.

    Adobe offers the Distribution service to mobile devices as a free, Beta service and reserves the right to change the pricing, availability and other aspects during and after the Beta period. Initially, the configuration to enable mobile sharing is available only by using the Distribution Service extension for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional and it is not available for applications created in Flex Builder or Dreamweaver CS4.

    When sharing an application with a mobile device, the advertiser or publisher will almost always have one or more mobile-optimized versions of the application that is separate from the web version. All variants of the application binary, however, will be shareable by way of the Share menu and should offer a similar experience to the end user. Depending on the destination that the end user chooses, whether it is social network, bookmark service, desktop environment, or mobile device) it’s possible to have a different variant of the same application that is optimized for each destination. In the case of mobile devices, it is the rule rather than the exception.

    To enable your application to be shared with mobile devices, you must complete these steps:

    1. Configure the Share menu in the web version of your application to support sharing to mobile devices.

    2. (Optional) Create a variant of your application for Flash Lite® 3.1, and then package it into a native installer as a .CAB file for the Windows Mobile platform.

    3. (Optional) Create native variants of your application for the Apple iPhone, Nokia S60 and other device platforms.

    4. Deploy your application to the web and optionally to the various mobile application stores so users can discover and share them.

    The Mobile sharing user experience

    The user’s experience of sharing an application with a mobile device is similar to that of sharing an application with a social network. The process consists of the following steps:

    1. A user discovers your application on the web and clicks a button to open the Share menu.

    2. The Share menu presents a tab named Mobile for sharing the application to a mobile device.

    3. After clicking the Mobile tab, the user is asked to provide his or her telephone number and pick the country where his phone is registered.

    4. Almost immediately, the user’s phone receives a text message containing a URL to click to install the application.

    5. When the user clicks the link, the installation process begins and installs the Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player, if necessary. If the publisher has not created a version of the application that’s suitable for the user’s phone, a web page that has been chosen by the publisher displays.

    The contents of the text message is one of two formats, depending on which version can fit in a single text message. The messages are:

    • Your application name is available to download: URL to download. Please ignore if this was not requested.

    • Your application is available to download: URL to download. Please ignore if this was not requested.

    Where application name is the name of your application set in the Share panel configuration and URL to download is a short URL generated by the Distribution service. The generated URl is available for six hours after the initial text message is sent.