Since BlackBerry is giving away a BlackBerry Playbook to developers who submit a qualifying app to the BlackBerry App World, I thought it was high time to show how to make an app using Flash Professional.

Setup

This tutorial shows how to turn a Flash Professional project into an app for the Blackberry Playbook and then test it in the BlackBerry Playbook Simulator. Steps include installing the Blackberry SDK for AIR as well as the Blackberry Playbook Simulator. Here are the files you’ll need to download the following:

• BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR
• BlackBerry Tablet Simulator
• VMWare Fusion for Mac or VMware Player for WIN
• Flash Professional CS5 Extension for AIR 2.5 (has the AIR SDK and publishes -app.xml and .swf files needed)

Packaging

Once you’ve created an -app.xml and a swf file of your project, you’ll then need to package it into a .bar file, which is BlackBerry’s app format. Here are those steps on a Mac:

1. Open a Terminal window (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
2. Using the Terminal window type in the following and hit enter: cd desktop
3. Confirm that the following are on your desktop:
   • BlackberrySDK folder
   • BoardroomBingo.swf and -BoardroomBingo-app.xml
   • icons folder with icons: icon48.png, icon72.png, icon36.png
4. Using the Terminal window, point to the blackberry-airpackager and package up all files (listed above) into a BoardroomBingo.bar file.  Launch the bar file on the Playbook Simulator (-device 172.16.176.133)

ptranis-MacBook-Pro:~ ptrani$ BlackberrySDK/bin/blackberry-airpackager -package BoardroomBingo.bar -installApp -launchApp BoardroomBingo-app.xml BoardroomBingo.swf icons/icon48.png icons/icon72.png icons/icon36.png  -device 172.16.176.133 -password johnson


Thanks to Renaun Erickson for his post on this process.