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Adobe Device Central CS 3 [MacUser]
COMPANY:	PRICE: TBA Adobe
RATING:	ISSUE: 23 7 DATE:

Device Central is the only completely new application in the suite, and although its easy to dismiss it as a gimmick, it's actually a very rich tool designed to help you produce content for mobile phones.

It does essentially two things. First, and most simply, is lists the specifications for many mobile phone handsets, along with their capabilities. Select a few handsets from the list - our beta copies only had a few models available, but Adobe promises us that the list will be extensive by the time the final product hits the shelves - and you're presented with a product matrix with collapsible sections relating to their web capabilities, video playback, Flash support and more. While it's unrealistic to test your site on every mobile device available - they run the gamut from dumb mono screened handsets that make calls and nothing else to full-blown pocket computers - this at least lets you check the capabilities of a pool or genre and make decisions based on the kinds of users your projects may exclude.

It enables you to create groups of products and to search for specific attributes, and there are some preset filters in place - for example, grouping devices by which version of Flash Lite is installed. It's possible to create your own smart groups based on set criteria - all Nokia devices that run the Series 60 operating system in Europe, say - but the process could be more obvious.

The list of each device's capabilities can be used to create smart groups.

Skins

While this information may seem a little abstract and dry, the other feature of Device Central helps bring it to life. Here, projects passed to the application from Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver (plus Premiere Pro and After Effects, courtesy of Adobe Media Encoder) are rendered as if they were loaded onto a mobile device. The device profiles also include a skin to give your projects a real sense of context. You can preview variables such as backlight dimming and simulate how the project will look in various lighting conditions. The skin isn't purely aesthetic, however: you can interact with your projects using the phone's keyboard, either by pointing and clicking on its virtual buttons or by using your own keyboard.

Better still, Device Central can begin to simulate the effect the running assets have on the phone. We say 'begin to' as the emulation's not perfect - a fact acknowledged by a note tucked away in Flash's documentation that recommends still testing projects on physical devices - but it does give a good

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idea of how responsive you can expect, say, a Flash project to be.

This performance is partly governed by raw stats - such as how much memory the phone has - but also by calibrating your Mac's performance against a standard test that has also been run on the phone. In the case of memory allocation, for example, you're given a live visual representation of how much RAM the project has grabbed, and what effect various areas of the project have on memory; you can reduce the dynamic heap size to simulate other running applications on the phone. Other attributes, such as the time the virtual phone thinks it is, can be changed to test, say, time-sensitive content generation.

Device Central allows you to preview how the content looks and behaves on various mobile devices - here we're simulating indoor reflections.

Testing, testing

When testing Flash projects, you're actually using the version of Flash Lite specific to that handset, rather than the desktop version of the Flash player, and there's an output panel to aid in debugging and optimising. The panels shown depend on the type of content.

The ability to pass assets from Photoshop and Illustrator are useful mostly as a way of quickly prototyping designs from a visual point of view such as for client presentations, but bringing in projects designed in Dreamweaver does allow you to simulate how well your websites render on small screens.

In summary

Device Central is a welcome addition to the suite. Creating content for mobile devices may be an industry in its infancy, but it's not unlike the state the web was in a decade ago, and the coming years are likely to see a huge growth in people consuming media through increasingly capable mobile devices. Its emulation may not be perfect, but it's good enough to streamline testing considerably. Indeed, initial evaluation suggests the results are accurate enough to be taken as a good real-world indication of performance.

We would have liked the ability to package up skinned simulations to share previews of work with clients as standalone Flash projects, but until that happens, you can at least show them the simulation within Device Central.

Read reviews of the other applications in Creative Suite 3