Adobe Device Central

» see adobe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Most software dies when somebody stops selling it. This one died when the list inside it stopped being worth refreshing. Device Central was a preview window that shipped with Creative Suite from March 2007, and its actual product was not the window at all. It was the library of handset profiles behind it: over two hundred phones at launch, each with a screen size and a memory ceiling recorded against it, updated by Adobe every three months because the phones on sale changed every three months.

You opened it from Photoshop or Flash Professional, picked a phone off the list, and your work appeared inside a picture of that handset at its real pixel dimensions. Then came the part that made it more than a ruler. You could dim the backlight to see what the design looked like on a dying battery, or lay a reflection over the glass to approximate reading it outdoors. The color balance could be shifted toward whatever a cheap panel would do to your palette, and later versions would fake a location fix and an accelerometer reading.

It existed because of Flash Lite, the cut-down Flash runtime that phone manufacturers licensed and preloaded in the years before anyone said "app". Content built for it had to run inside a few hundred kilobytes of memory on a screen that might be 128 pixels wide or 240, and there was no way to know which without checking. Device Central was Adobe selling the checking.

I was never on the authoring side of this. Around 2007 the phone in most pockets here was a Nokia running Symbian, mobile data was sold by the megabyte and priced as though it were scarce, and the mobile web in Turkey was a thin thing that most people used by accident and then worried about the bill. The whole category this tool served existed at the far end of a connection nobody wanted to keep open.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the list of phones ~

The quarterly update is the part worth keeping. For a stretch of about six years the world's mobile phone market was small enough to enumerate and large enough that you had to. Manufacturers shipped dozens of models a year and carriers ordered variants of those models with different screens bolted in. A designer had no way to reason about any of it except by consulting a table.

Adobe maintained that table and gave it away inside a product people bought for other reasons. It is a strange thing to have sold, a piece of software whose value decayed on a fixed schedule, kept alive by a team somewhere collecting spec sheets. Anyone who has fought device fragmentation since has fought a version of the same problem with better tools and worse odds.

~ the year the list stopped being a list ~

Apple refused Flash on the iPhone and said so publicly in April 2010, and in November 2011 Adobe announced it would stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers at all. That ended Flash Lite as a business, which removed most of the reason Device Central existed. The last release was version 3.5.0 in October 2011, alongside Creative Suite 5.5.

The deeper problem was that the table itself had stopped describing anything. By 2012 a designer did not need to know about four hundred handsets. They needed to know about two operating systems and a range of screen densities, which is a different question with a different answer, and no quarterly download was going to supply it. Adobe removed the product from Creative Suite 6 on 23 April 2012 without much ceremony, and the phones in that library were already being thrown away.

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