Contextual Applications: Be Aware & Adapt

With today’s release of Flash Player 10.1 Beta, Adobe has made delivering Contextual Applications for Mobile possible.  In theory Contextual Applications are Smart Rich Internet Application, practically these applications adapt to the execution environment. If an application needs to adapt to certain factors, firstly it should be aware of them. And the guidelines set for developing Conceptual Applications are based on three awareness context.

1. System Aware: Adapt to hardware specific factors, resolution, interaction mechanism and extended features of the hardware such as Accelerometer, GPS etc.
2. Network Aware: Adapt to bandwidth, and optimize content delivery mechanism. Also determine state of connection (Online/Offline) and accordingly switch instances for persistence.
3. User Aware: Adapt to User’s preferences and social circle, and accordingly suggest/deliver content.

On the Adobe Labs you can find an AIR app called WorkFlowLab, and in the pre-installed workflow templates you can find the Contextual Application Workflow developed by Ryan Stewart, which pretty much gives the outline of the whole design & develop toolset for working with Contextual Applications.

Contextual Application Workflow

With Flash Player 10.1 on Mobile, it would be possible to design and develop using Flash CS 4/5 platform, that would make applications understand various soft and hard context, and accordingly adapt. Further to this note, it would be exciting to see collaborative and contextual applications hitting our devices and hence making the Rich Unified Applications theory much more practically possible.