A magical device for me: HP’s slate

When I saw the videos with HP’s upcoming slate device, and I learned that it will support Flash Player and Adobe AIR I knew this is the magical device for me and my family. The only question I have is how much it will cost.

My wife is a heavy Internet user (movies, social networks, casual games). Since we became parents she is using all these social networks even more than before:

- “Look Mihai, our friends posted a new video with their baby! Look at this video with your son playing with a bear! Isn’t he amazing?”

Well you have the picture :D . Now, most of these sites rely heavily on Flash Player. At the same time it seems the table in front of my wife is becoming smaller and smaller due to all sort of UFOs (do not mistake with alien ships, to dads these are the Unknown Funky Objects used by moms). Thus the form factor and size of this device I think it will be just perfect. Probably I could use it on vacations to save photos and videos as well.

Now, I just have to wait until it gets launched! I wonder if it will be out in time for our anniversary :)

What do you think about this device?

 

March 9, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player, Mobile | 12 Comments 

Performance advancements in Flash Player 10.1 on Mac

Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash Player team, wrote a post about the performance improvements of Flash Player 10.1 on OS X 10.6 and some of the internals. I know this is a hot subject these days, so I thought I’d let you know about this. I think this demonstrates that we really want to improve the performance across all operating systems and we are really working towards this goal.

You can read the post here.

February 12, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | Leave a Comment 

Open Screen Project, iPad, and buzzwords

A buzzword (also fashion word and vogue word) is a term of art or technical jargon that has begun to see use in the wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context by nonspecialists who use the term vaguely or imprecisely.

We are deluged with buzzwords on a daily basis, especially because we are working in the IT industry. Though, I think it has become more of an issue lately. I’m too young to know what ‘70 or ‘80 looked like, but I’d bet they were not even close to what we experience today.

I remember the late ’90s and early 2000 years. Everybody was talking about XML. And shortly after that, about his best friends XPath and SAX. It looked like the closest thing to the Holy Grail that humanity ever created. The lesson I learned? It seems we are far better at marketing or PR than applied sciences. We can convince a lot of people about a particular subject, although there is no “scientific” proof to backup our statements.

We are assaulted by new “things”. Some of these things are just buzzwords, while others are the real deal. And they have the potential to change your life for the better. The question is how do you pick up the right ones? When you are a developer or entrepreneur, you can look at these novelties as opportunities. An opportunity to do new kinds of projects (maybe you’ve gotten bored by doing the same thing over and over), an opportunity to create new products, or an opportunity to get rich :D . Unfortunately you are limited by time. You cannot pursue all of them; you have to pick a few.

How can you increase your chances of making a sound decision? I will tell you one method I use: when something new appears I try to look behind the marketing talk. One way to do this is to see if that “thing” is starting to deliver on its promises.

Let’s have a look at the Open Screen Project. When it was first announced, back in 2008, it looked like something extremely cool. At the same time, I bet many people thought it couldn’t possibly be a success. I mean its mission is to “enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere”, but in order to do this, Adobe needed to work with companies from different industries (chipset manufacturers, telco companies, publishers, networks, and so on) and most likely with companies that otherwise compete against each other.

osp_partners

A little more than a year after the launch, the partners list looks amazing and the project is delivering on the promises: we have demoed a prerelease version of Flash Player 10.1 running on Net PCs and on a number of smartphones (Nokia, Motorola, Google, Toshiba, HTC, Palm). By working close with our partners we were able to tweak the Flash Player to make the most out of the hardware platform and at the same time increase battery life and decrease memory usage (early tests showed an improvement by 87% of rendering performance and a 55% reduction in memory consumption). This means you can watch video for 3.4 hours and play games for 6.5 hours on mobiles.

I think the key element to take away is this: all these partners realized that the Flash Platform can help their platforms to bring more value to consumers. And they realized that by working with Adobe they can be sure they will provide great experience to their users. Needless to say that Apple is not a partner of Open Screen Project and it doesn’t look like it wants to be anytime soon.

And this brings me to Apple’s latest device, iPad. Apple claims that iPad is “the best way to experience the web”. I think this is, to say the least, a big overstatement. Like it or not, plug-ins are part of the today’s web. Java, Flash Player, Silverlight, Unity 3D are examples of plug-ins that move the web forward and are used by millions of people out there. And what it happens when you surf to any of the web sites that depend on these plug-ins on an iPad? Nothing. Literally. Because iPad doesn’t support plug-ins. In fact you can’t even install another web browser. Apple is acting like a guardian or a “benevolent” dictator and decides for you what is good or bad for you. I said it before but I will say it again. Maybe because I was born and raised in a communist country I’m extremely sensitive to products or companies who “think” for me by limiting my liberty. And because I’m free, I can choose to buy or not. Thus, I am the proud user of a MacBook, but I don’t own an iPhone nor do I want to buy an iPad in its current incarnation.

PS. You can see here an illustration of how a big part of the web is seen on iPad.

Later Edit: Mike Chambers has a great take on another fear I have, fueled by the moves Apple has made lately.

January 29, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player, Others | 2 Comments 

5 Flash applications

The latest issue of the Edge newsletter has a bunch of interesting articles (Data-centric development in Adobe Flash Builder 4, Object relational mapping for the Adobe AIR developer, An easy way to bring 3D content into your Adobe Flash projects). But the one that caught my attention was The edge of Flash by Rob Ford. Rob presents seven Flash projects ranging from personal sites to corporate sites. All these sites are great examples of what a talented designer/developer can achieve today using the Adobe Flash Platform. Out of these seven projects, the closest to my heart was one called Machinarium. It is an adventure game and it is so beautifully crafted that my wife couldn’t resist and made me buy the game as a small Christmas gift. For me it was an excuse to remember the Monkey Island 1 days. The scenes are designed with attention to detail, and it feels almost like a Japanese anime (Tekkon Kinkreet ;) ). If adventure games are your thing and you want to kill some time then I recommend this little gem. The game is created by a Czech company.

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InfoDome is a browser based online database solution. You can create a database visually from scratch or you can import an existing one. You can build reports and share live data with remote users. You can integrate the reports and forms with your website. Almost forgot to tell you, the front-end is created with Flex.

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Express is an Agile project management tool built with Flex, BlazeDS, and Spring. It includes features such as backlog management, iteration management, and a virtual wall. It is built by some smart Aussies.

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Air Analytics is a complete analytics solution for Adobe AIR applications. It works online/offline and it is very easy to integrate with your application. You can use the application to track custom numbers and types, OSes, error, app installs,  usage and more. At this is time it is still in beta but it looks promising (on November 5th they reached 1 million items tracked). I think I’m gonna try it myself on my next AIR project.

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OpenZoom offers an SDK for the Flash Platform that enables you to create Zoomable User Interfaces by using high resolution bitmaps. You can use this framework for demos, introductions, presentations and more.

 

 

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January 14, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Flash Player | 2 Comments 

Flash Player 10.1 running on Motorola’s Droid phone

Yesterday, we saw a preview of Flash Player 10.1 running on Google’s phone, today you can watch Flash Player 10.1 running on another Android phone, this time it’s about a Droid from Motorola.

 

January 7, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | 7 Comments 

Preview of Flash Player 10.1 running on Google’s Nexus One phone

As you all know by now, Google recently launched their first mobile phone: Nexus One. It is built by HTC and it is running the latest Android version, 2.1.

I saw the demos, and to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind at all having one of these as my primary phone. Especially because this phone will run Flash Player 10.1 pretty soon. Until then you can watch Adrian Ludwig demoing a couple of web sites that use Flash (just to be clear Flash Player 10.1 for mobiles is not available yet).

 

January 6, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | Leave a Comment 

AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 samples added to Tour de Flex

If you open the Tour de Flex application today you’ll get an update and among other things, you’ll see samples for AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 features.

air2_tdf

Did you try AIR 2? If so, what do you think?

December 16, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Flash Player | Leave a Comment 

Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 first public betas

We just released the first public betas for the two client runtimes: Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2. You can grab them from here and here.

The cool thing about this release is that there are versions available for all three operating systems Win, Mac OS, and Linux (openSUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu) right from the beginning.

fp1 air2

For now Flash Player 10.1 is available only for x86-based computers/netbooks. Later on we will have other releases with support for mobile.

Here you can see public demos and interviews for Flash Player 10.1. You can learn more about features like hardware video decoding, graphics acceleration, instance management, multi-touch support, or microphone access.

You can install sample applications for AIR 2 from here. Here is a list with the new AIR 2 features:

You can read more about this here and here.

If you have feedback, please don’t be shy!

November 17, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Flash Player | 12 Comments