The Webby Awards just published a great list of the ten most influential Internet moments of the decade. It’s great to see that they didn’t forget to give props to Flash Player for causing the online video revolution:
Online video revolution (2006)
In 2006, a perfect storm of faster bandwidth, cheaper camcorders, and the groundbreaking use of [...]
One of the popular features in the prerelease versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 is the multi-touch capability. If you haven't seen it, you should check out this video of Kevin Lynch showing a couple of innovative examples using the multi-touch and "gestures" capabilities on the HP TouchSmart during the keynote at the MAX developer conference last month. We hope you will be able to explore and innovate using the new features in Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. See what you can do with them.
We just released the first public beta 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 [...]
Wohooow… It’s always great to wake up to new toys to play with! Flash Player 10.1 and AIR2.0 are now available on Adobe Labs.
This is a very exciting release for Adobe. Not only is it the first time that we sim-ship Flash Player and AIR for all 3 major operating systems (Mac, Windows & Linux), [...]
Tonight we’ve released the AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas on Adobe Labs (direct download links for Flash Player and AIR). This is the first time we’ve simultaneously released the desktop (AIR) and browser (Flash Player) runtimes for all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) at once which is a great milestone for the Flash Platform. So what is this release and why should you care? One thing to note is that this is just the desktop runtimes, not any mobile runtimes. Those will be coming later. Luckily a lot of the work we did for mobile in terms of adding new APIs and optimizations are all in these releases so you’ll still get a lot of the benefits.
Lots of new stuff in Flash Player 10.1 including the multi-touch APIs, the performance gains, and some new networking APIs. The biggest thing (IMHO) with this release is the huge, huge memory improvements. Kevin showed the slide at MAX but it’s worth mentioning again. Without any code you’ll see significant improvements in memory with Flash Player 10.1.
The AIR team has been kicking all kinds of ass and I think AIR 2 is going to be a great release. One of the things we heard over and over again after AIR 1.0 was that people wanted more access to the native APIs of the operating system. AIR 2 brings a lot of that. Now you can open up a file with its default application as well as invoke native commands with the new NativeProcess API. We’ve also added the ability to create a socket server inside an AIR application and monitor changes to mounted drives. Plus a lot more. And you get all of the performance enhancements (and more) from Flash Player 10.1 so it should be a lean, mean AIR experience for end users as well.
We won’t have a new Flex SDK for these runtimes yet so it’ll take a tiny bit of manual work to add support for the developer tools and the new runtime. Nick Kwiatkowski has a great screencast up for using the AIR 2 SDK in Flash Builder. It basically involves creating a copy of the Flex 4 SDK and then manually copying over the AIR SDK so it overwrites the AIR 1.5 SDK that ships with Flex 4. On the Flash Player side you’ll have to grab the playerglobal.swc and replace it in your Flex SDK.
I’m pretty excited about this particular set of runtimes. Talking to developers it seems like AIR 2 hits the mark and helps them accomplish more. Seeing the foundation put in on Flash Player 10.1 to create really great mobile experiences is also exciting. As always make sure to provide any feedback or any issues you run into over on the forums.
At the Adobe MAX developer conference last month we unveiled the next release of Adobe Flash Player that delivers on the promise of the Open Screen Project - a consistent, cross-OS runtime across desktop and mobile devices. Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the first public developer prerelease of Flash Player 10.1 on Adobe Labs. While this initial prerelease is for desktop operating systems, we will be updating the prelease between now and general availability in the first half of 2010 to add more features (e.g., global error handler), performance improvements, new tooling options and support for mobile platforms.
Developers can test their existing SWF content and start working with some of the exciting new capabilities that result from bringing the full Flash Player to mobile devices. For example, as users increasingly interact with devices using their fingers, developers can now create entirely new types of applications that use multi-touch points and gestures on touch screen devices, including those running Windows 7. And because AIR 2, also available today as a prerelease, is a superset of Flash Player 10.1, those same capabilities can be used outside the browser.
Consumers are welcome to try the beta to preview hardware acceleration of H.264 video on supported Windows PCs and x86-based netbooks. The release notes provide details on supported graphics cards and drivers that support video hardware acceleration.
To get started with Flash Player 10.1, check out the information on Adobe Labs, download the prerelease, read the release notes, file bugs, provide feedback on the user forums, get tips on optimizing the performance of graphic and video content and prepare for mobile!
- The Flash Player team
Today our Open Screen Project partner RIM kicked off their annual Blackberry Developer Conference in San Francisco. This year we’re seeing a central theme from the conference and that’s Blackberry as a web platform, and announced more details around the support that you can expect for the Blackberry platform within the upcoming tools in Creative Suite 5.
This year Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen was there to talk about our upcoming support in Creative Suite 5 for the Blackberry platform. This builds on the vision for our joint collaboration in the Open Screen Project and the work we’re doing to get Flash Player 10.1 running in the Blackberry browser.
Today RIM & Adobe also announced that we’ll be optimizing Adobe AIR and the Flex Mobile Framework for the Blackberry platform , making RIM the first OEM to announce support for Adobe AIR and Flex Mobile.
From developers the most obvious integration point will be in Adobe Device Central CS5, which enables the easy development and testing of content for Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Fireworks CS5. These new tools aim to enable the production of content for use in Blackberry’s Java Plug-in for Eclipse, BlackBerryWidgets, and the BlackBerry Theme Studio tools. In fact the new Theme Studio supports Flash and Photoshop files through its handy import mechanism, so you can easily create themes alongside SVG support in Illustrator.
Additionally, for consumers we’re also going to enable use of our Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.com products for sharing and editing videos and photos taken on Blackberry phones.
(The BlackBerry Bold runs a 624Mhz Marvell CPU)
So let’s have a look at Blackberry in more detail to give us an idea of where the opportunities are. Recently we’ve seen the launch of Blackberry App World back in April, the addition of a new Widgets SDK, the Blackberry Theme Studio tools and of course the continued work on their Java platform for applications. These strides toward a more open web platform have enabled users to access rich Internet content like never before, and as you’ll see below; they love content.
From an addressable market view, Blackberry devices are sold in vast numbers in the US market. So let’s look at some key stats from Comscore on their behavior there, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised:
So on average a Blackberry user earns, spends, travels and browses the Internet about 3x more than users of other platforms. This makes them a high value target in your development of applications and services, and important customers for niche and business oriented content. With the Blackberry App World growing steadily (200,000 developers) in partnership with Verizon I can see a clear opportunity there with their joint customers, and one really nice feature is the $2.99 minimum price for a paid application!
You can watch the Keynote recording here, and yes it’s done with Silverlight for some reason 
Why not drop on over to www.adobe.com/go/blackberry to learn more and see some videos previewing the upcoming tooling integration announced today.
Further to the announcement of the alliance between Research In Motion and Adobe, this video illustrates the creation of graphical assets optimized for BlackBerry smartphones using Adobe Creative Suite. (6:17)
Further to the announcement of the alliance between Research In Motion and Adobe, this video illustrates the creation of a BlackBerry Widget using Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-leading web content authoring tool. (2:38)
The web’s success has been partially due to the sandbox it provides users. Users do not generally have to entirely trust every website they visit because malicious web sites should be sandboxed from doing the user harm. One way that web sites are sandboxed is through a same-origin policy. By default any [...]
The web’s success has been partially due to the sandbox it provides users. Users do not generally have to entirely trust every website they visit because malicious web sites should be sandboxed from doing the user harm. One way that web sites are sandboxed is through a same-origin policy. By default any [...]
Rob Ford’s Tweet this morning caught my attention. “We need 1 day when the Flash player is disabled just to appreciate how it lights up the web“, he said. I completely agree… We’ve become so accustomed to Flash just being there that we no longer realize how much it is used and how it “lights [...]
With the official release of Microsoft Windows 7 today, we are pleased to report that the current release of Flash Player 10 (10.0.32) already supports the new operating system. See the Flash Player system requirements for further information.
Have you seen the October issue of the Edge newsletter? It's now live on Adobe.com. Produced by the Adobe Developer Relations team, the Edge has 1.7 million subscribers worldwide. It features video, articles and tutorials for developers and designers who create content and applications for the web.
In this month’s video, Edge Managing Editor Julie Campagna is on the scene at Adobe MAX 2009. See a snapshot of this year's lively event, including announcements, technology previews, and commentary from attendees.
Also included in the issue:
Sign up to receive the Edge via email. If you missed MAX, you can watch the sessions on AdobeTV.
Recently I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the performance and stability of the Flash Player and AIR runtimes. I got another one just this morning and thought it would be a good idea to write a quick blog post about this.
Let’s talk about Flash Player first. In all honesty, I also encounter the [...]
We receive literally millions of requests at our Adobe.com pages from iPhone OS users looking for a Flash Player download.
Given our support from the top 19/20 OEMs across multiple device platforms we thought it prudent to provide “more info” to those poor iPhone users that got stuck with a limited browsing experience.
Hope you like it
The news from Adobe MAX 2009 that probably generated the most buzz and discussion online was the announcement that Flash CS5 will have support for outputting applications for the iPhone. While I am really excited about the news, and the work we are doing around the iPhone, I am here to tell you that you [...]
So you heard it right, we have brought the Flash Platform to the iPhone OS for applications. In fact some of the applications are already on the Apple AppStore for you to download
We thought it was fun to put them up in secret and working with a very very small set of developers, and our engineering teams I think we’ve really proven that Flash can run effectively on the iPhone without changes.
The applications are:
Enabling the Flash Platform to run on the iPhone has been a really tough task, and one that results in some limitations. Though you have told us that this is a top priority for your mobile projects, and so we’ve worked for over a year to build this solution.
For developers the new tooling will be made available with the Flash Professional tool, which will also be in pre-release later this year. So today you can begin your work on mobile devices targeting Flash Player 10, or Adobe AIR 2.0 Apis in time.
One caveat of this Ahead of Time compilation method is that we can only use AS3 code. AOT compilation means that we have no interpreter on the device, as per Apple’s restriction. Without the interpreter you won’t be able to load SWFs unless they were packaged with your application, boo Apple
This new tool set and a subset of apis from Adobe AIR will have all manner of features enabled, along with the hardware acceleration, battery, memory and rendering performance increases that we have worked on in Flash Player 10.1.
These are:
• Photo selection from file system
• Contact selection from the address book
• Camera
• Cut/copy/paste
• Accessory support
• In app purchase support
• Peer to peer
• Maps
• iPod library access
• Compass
• Push notifications
• Audio recording
• Video recording
• Parental controls
Of course because of the huge amount of work involved, and lack of public API access from Apple we have to drop a few features too.
• Embedded HTML content
• RTMPE (this was our call)
• H.264 Video (you can use URLRequest)
• Dynamically loading SWFs (containing AS3 code)
• PixelBender
So what about Flex? Well here at Adobe MAX we’ll have a session specifically around Adobe Flex Mobile Framework, codename “Slider”. We expect that in time we’ll enable this version of the framework to run effectively on the iPhone. You’ll be using the same tools, Apis and core framework elements.
Although there would be nothing technically stopping you from using Flex, you would suffer huge performance penalties, and have to re-write the components for mobile and device interactions.
Go and get started then today!
Some key announcements around our work with Qualcomm and NVIDIA with Flash Player 10.1, the version number for our new desktop and mobile runtime. Some would argue (and I’m sure some did) that if .1 means only incremental changes then we should have called it Flash 11! The work that has gone into this runtime, we have doubled the number of supported platforms including Symbian, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
It’s a huge investment made possible by the incredible talent that is Adobe’s Flash Engineering team. Let’s see the Silverlight team rock something like that out!
One of the biggest challenges has been performance for constrained devices. GPU acceleration and optimizations by ARM, Intel and our OEM partners have enabled us to create a better player, one that uses less RAM, less battery and renders faster on constrained devices.
Don’t you just love the Open Screen Project??
A big round of applause for our engineering teams!
At Adobe MAX 2009 RIM has become the 19th of the top 20 OEMs to begin work on integrating the Flash Player on their mobile platform. This is a landmark collaboration announcement in our drive to bring the full Internet to mobile phones and devices.
Over the past few years we have seen RIM devices expand out of the business user category to become a consumer platform. Many of my friends now use the Curve for Facebook, messaging and surfing the web and they really love their phones.
That’s my guage on success:
For developers the Blackberry platform currently provides a Java API and framework for easy application development. There’s no arguing that the Java runtime has enabled some great applications, and as the App World expands we’ve seen some nice content start to come in.
Our OEM engagements seem much more rounded with RIM joining, a more complete story if you will.
Recently you probably noticed that I’ve been working on Android a little, and for good reason of course. Though it would be easy to focus this post on Android, let’s just look at some of the places where Google use Flash today.
So you see Flash is everywhere at Google and we’ve been working together for years to build upon this relationship. Google joining the Open Screen Project may seem like a matter of course given our demo’s last year and given their investments in the Flash Platform.
In the past few months we’ve seen stellar device launches from HTC and Motorola using Android. Those of you with beady eyes will also have spotted others from Sony Ericsson and “others” coming down the pipe soon.
I want ALL of them, but might stick to the Hero for now.
Oh, in case they’re watching. Dear HTC, please fix the SSL certificates for Exchange email eh?
Today at Adobe MAX we previewed the next version of Adobe Flash Player, 10.1, that runs on mobile devices, netbooks and PCs. This is the full version of the Flash Player, with the same set of the features as the desktop based Flash Player. That same Flash Player was also shown running on a variety of netbooks as well. With the release of Flash Player 10.1, you'll be able to create contextual applications that provide a customized experience - applications that are aware of the device that they're being run on, and modify their UI accordingly. While it's not available in a public beta just yet, it will be available before the end of this year for Windows, Mac and Linux, along with Windows Mobile and Palm Web OS.
At MAX we also showed off a new feature of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 that allows designers and developers using ActionScript 3 to create applications for the Apple iPhone. Flash developers will soon be able to submit applications to the Apple App Store -- and there are already a bunch of applications available in the store now including: Red Hood, Chroma Circuit, Trading Stuff, Fickleblox, That Roach Game, and Just Letters. While, unfortunately, this isn't Flash Player for the iPhone, it's going to open up a lot of opportunities for developers to be able to build applications for the iPhone using Flash. There's more information about applications for the iPhone available on
We also announced the 2nd betas of Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Flash Catalyst and ColdFusion Builder beta 2. Available for download today, Flash Builder 4 adds refinements to many new features from beta 1, and will help you become more successful using the new Flex 4 framework, providing more clarity between the use of Flex 3 and Flex 4 throughout the IDE. The new data-centric development features have also evolved and expanded based on beta 1 user feedback, providing improved UI and workflow for common tasks.
(Note that the Flash Builder 4 beta 2 release expires after 60 days. See below on how to extend it.)
The easiest way to change the look and feel of those applications is to have your designer design the application using Adobe Flash Catalyst beta 2. It lets designers create rich user interfaces easily using designs from Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks and then lets developers open those projects up directly in Flash Builder 4 to add other code (things like database connections etc...). The new Flash Catalyst beta 2 adds support for video and enhanced interaction options.
Today and tomorrow's keynote will be streamed live at max.adobe.com. It will include demos of applications from many leading brands, showcasing how they're improving the user experience of their websites with the Adobe Flash Platform. We've also made 3 sessions per day from MAX available online. All the sessions from Adobe MAX will be available on the MAX website in the next few weeks.
** To extend Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 **
To continue using Flash Builder 4 beta 2 after 60 days you need to own a copy of Flex Builder 3 and use that serial number to get a serial number to remove the timeout in Flash Builder 4. If you don't yet own Flex Builder 3, you can buy it with maintenance, which will provide you with a free upgrade to Flash Builder 4 when its released. Yyou can purchase that by calling a Flex sales rep. Email Eardley Walker or phone 206-275-2831 for more details. Flex Builder 3 maintenance cannot be purchased through the online store.
