Research in Motion (RIM) and Adobe Systems today expanded their association to incorporate Adobe Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite content development and authoring tools to create new content and applications for BlackBerry.

“There is tremendous opportunity for RIM and Adobe to align our platforms to help developers create BlackBerry applications that are highly engaging and deeply integrated in order to deliver the best user experience in the market,” says Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, Research In Motion. “We are working closely with Adobe to enable our developer communities to build rich content services and BlackBerry Widgets that leverage the latest runtime environments, APIs and network services through Adobe’s industry leading design and development tools.”

“RIM is at the forefront of driving smartphone innovation, and it’s only natural that further integrating our respective platforms will set new standards for engaging content and applications,” adds Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. “The expanded partnership between both companies will open up great new opportunities by making it even easier for content designers and mobile application developers to create rich and compelling content for the BlackBerry platform.”

For designers of new applications, the availability of the two suites from Adobe will enable them to create optimized graphic assets using tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects for BlackBerry users. The graphics can be imported into the BlackBerry application development using BlackBerry Java Plug-in and Blackberry Web Plug-in for Eclipse. Backgrounds, icons and images can also be used in the new BlackBerry Theme Studio.

Application developers will also be able to make use f Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Device Central software to be able to create and test BlackBerry Widgets and web content for Blackberry Browser.

The two parties, Adobe and RIM are additionally working together as part of Open Screen Project to offer Adobe Flash Player browser runtime to BlackBerry smartphones.