New Flash Player release enables H.264 GPU decoding on Mac OS X

We’ve just released a new version of Flash Player: 10.1.82.76, which includes support for H.264 video GPU decoding. This was previously available in a beta release code-named Gala. On top of this new cool feature, there were a number of bug fixes, so you definitely you should install it as soon as possible.

You can get the installers from here (including debugging versions). You can read about the security updates here.

LATER UPDATE:

I almost forgot to tell you about the new version of Adobe AIR (2.0.3). Like in the case of Flash Player, besides a number of bug fixes, we added support for GZIP compression for Windows (this was already available for Mac OS X and Linux).

You can get the runtime from here.

August 11, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | 1 Comment

50 resources to get up to speed with the Flash Platform

For the past six months we’ve been rolling out a lot of goodies, some of them in the form of final releases, others as betas. It’s no wonder you have to spend some time in order to get up to speed with the latest features of AIR 2, Flash Player 10.1 for Android, AIR 2.5, Flex 4, or Flash Builder 4. Thus, I thought it’d be a great idea to put together a list of resources to help you learn about these goodies.

So here I go, in no particular order.

Peer 2 Peer

Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 brings new capabilities to the table when it comes to Peer 2 Peer. The best resource to learn about this is my fellow evangelist Tom Krcha (some say his dreams are multicasted, but only a few are lucky enough to receive them :D):

Flex and server side technologies

Christophe Coenraets wrote about tuning client-side performance using Flex 4 and LiveCycle Data Services
Ryan Stewart’s article on creating a basic CRUD application using Flex and PHP with Zend AMF
If you prefer to use the Data Centric Development features of Flash Builder when working with Flex and PHP check out this article
Debugging Flex and PHP projects with Flash Builder 4 and Eclipse PDT/XDebug
Using Flash Builder 4 to build a Flex application that consumes a .NET-based web service written in C#

AIR 2

AIR/Flash Player 10.1 and Android

Mark Doherty’s P2P Video Calls on Android tutorial
AIR 2.5 StageWebView demo
Geolocation in AIR
Video chat for Android using LiveCycle Collaboration Service and AIR
Android apps that connects to desktop apps using Peer 2 Peer: here and here
Setting up the tools for creating AIR for Android apps and accessing the camera from AIR
Android Trader Desktop with Flex and AIR for Android
“VoiceNotes for Android”: Sample App using Flex, AIR, and the Microphone API
Serge Jespers’s native installers packager

Flex 4

Other Flash Builder 4 related resources

Enjoy!

July 29, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android, Flash Builder, Flash Player, Flex | 3 Comments

Flash for mobile contests

This summer you have many contests to pick from if you want to create Flash content for mobile (Android 2.2) and win something while doing it. You can win fame/money/software/mobile devices — not neccesary in that order and not all at once– but you get the point :D.

For more details, check out these contests:

Kongregate Mobile Flash Game Contest (almost $30,000 in prizes)
Mochimedia Made for Mobile Contest ($20,000 in cash plus CS5 Master Suite licenses)
Cell Your Flash Game ($30,000 in prizes)
Adobe Czech Republic AIR Mobile Contest 2010 (Nexus One phones and software)

Good luck!

July 15, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android, Flash Player, Mobile | 2 Comments

Flash Player and Google TV

If you watch the news or what’s happening at Google I/O 2010 chances are that Google TV is not a novelty anymore. However you may not know that Google TV uses Flash Player 10.1 (Google’s browser, Chrome, integrates Flash Player). This is something I know for sure I want. Being able to watch YouTube videos on my TV with my whole family, instead of huddling around a small computer screen, is really nice.

On the other hand, I can’t believe how fast the time flies and how fast the technology evolves and morphs these days. One year ago I was in Berlin talking with journalists for the first time about Digital Home, where the TV sets can handle both the web and regular TV shows.

Here you can see a video with Google TV running Flash content:

May 21, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | 5 Comments

Developing for Android using the Flash Platform

I’ve been doing web and desktop development for the past ten years. However, I have never done any application for mobiles. There were couple of things stopping me from developing for mobile devices:

The only technology that I could leverage from my previous experience was Java.
While I believe that I’m doing a good job as a developer, my user experience design skills are below zero Kelvin degree, if you know what I mean. And I know how hard is to get the right UI for a desktop app. A mobile app takes it to a whole new level.

However these things are going to change. At least for some mobile platforms such as Android. We, at Adobe, are working harder than ever to make Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR first class citizens on Android devices. As the number of Android phones grows it is becoming an interesting market for people who want to make money on mobile apps. And it seems the market wants all sort of apps: casual games, enterprise apps, social apps, and so on.

Once the Flash Platform is available on Android phones I’m ready to build my first mobile application. With all the expressiveness of the platform I might be able to build a great user experience (here I’m in denial of course). Actually, I’ve been working on a mobile app with my friend and colleague Tudor Muscalu (UXD at Adobe) for the past two months. And his experience helped me to design the screens and workflows. At this point I haven’t written a single line of code all that we’ve done are mock-ups.

There is something else I want to share with you regarding developing for mobiles: it really grows on me the excitement I felt when I created my first app many years ago.

If you want to know when Flash Player 10.1 becomes available for Android click here, and for AIR on Android click here.

Are you ready for your first mobile application created with the Flash Platform?

April 21, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android, Flash Player | 6 Comments

Flash Player and Google’s Chrome integration

Today Google made available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. This the result of the collaboration between Adobe and Google and more will come from this collaboration, so stay tuned.

From Chromium blog:

When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.

Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.

With Adobe’s help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome’s “sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.

What is even more interesting is that we are working with Google, Mozilla, and others on a new API that will improve the integration between plug-ins and browsers. This API will replace the venerable NPAPI and it will make the browser/plug-ins combo much faster, reliable, and secure.

More about this on Flash Player Team Blog and here you can read about the current integration.

What do you think?

March 30, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | 9 Comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.