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As most of you know I was a member of the AIR for Android Prerelease program at which time I built Happy Peg using AIR and shot a video of the process.

Well today I am happy to announce the prerelease program has been opened to the public, all you have to do is sign up, download the files and get coding. However you will still be bound by standard NDAs, so be sure to read all of the “Welcome” information and follow the rules.

Enjoy this special opportunity, go out and get a Android phone (if you don’t have one) and start porting those apps for mobile consumption.

I will be posting lots of tutorials and information once I am able to, follow Scriptplayground to stay up to date on all things Android.

Soon after the whole iPhone blow to the Flash community was felt, the VP of Engineering for Android wrote an guest post on Adobe’s blog showing love for AIR on Android.

Here is an excerpt, read the full post.

Google is happy to be partnering with Adobe to bring the full web, great applications, and developer choice to the Android platform. Our engineering teams have been working closely to bring both AIR and Flash Player to Google’s mobile operating system and devices. The Android platform is enjoying spectacular adoption, and we expect our work with Adobe will help that growth continue.

We also look forward to all the innovative content and applications created for Android and Flash. Join us at Google I/O in May to learn more about our work together with Adobe to open up the world of Flash on mobile devices.”

– Andy Rubin, Google VP of Engineering, Android

This couldn’t be more perfect for the Flash community. Not only will you be able to develop for the Android platform soon enough its pretty safe to assume Google is okay with it.

It will be interesting to see if this changed Apple’s views at all, but then again, does it really matter?

You may have heard some things regarding developing Android apps using Flash CS5 and AIR? Well I have been given the opportunity to be a part of the prerelease and have been given permission to show off one of my apps, Happy Peg.

Update: Since the video was released on Tuesday it has been picked up by a few really high profile sites, such as Lee Brimelows blog and even the Official Adobe AIR Team blog. It has also been spotted on other Flash and Android sites.

Early this year I posted about this app being developed using Flash CS5 and deployed on the iPhone App Store. Well with no code changes, about 2 hours to have the graphics tweaked (thanks to @pneal), I was able to port Happy Peg over to Android.

In the following video you will see it running on a Google Nexus One which was given to me by Adobe (special thanks to Michael Chou). The second device in the video is my iPhone 3GS. As you will see using Flash CS5 I was able to build and deploy Happy Peg to both devices with no coding changes.

Once the tools are out of private beta I will write a more in depth guide and a series of tutorials, stay tuned. These certainly are exciting times for Flash developers.

Follow me on Twitter @mkeefe and Scriptplayground @scriptplay.

Mike Chambers has posted some very interesting information about Growl notification support over on his blog. This basically means that with the help of the Growl team, they have created a way for AIR applications to display messages via Growl, without Java or other external apps installed on the users system.

Update: It seems there is also a project for Windows notifications. Maybe this will be added to AIR soon as well.

Back from PhotoshopWorld and it was a great time. I got to hang out with some great people, learn various lighting and studio techniques from Eddie Tapp and the Canon guys and see new products. Adobe announced the announcement of Creative Suite 4 to be held on September 23rd, make sure you register for that, it looks HUGE.

This PhotoshopWorld was also very interesting for mkeefeDESIGN. We had the chance to develop a video kiosk for PhotoshopCafe.

This kiosk was built using the Adobe AIR runtime and Adobe Flash, you can read more about the project on my portfolio.

While in Vegas I also took some time to photograph some things and once I get a moment I will post those to flickr. For now, I intend to catch up on work and get some much needed sleep.