Filed under: Adobe

Adobe is starting to talk up the upcoming Air 2.5 for Android, which has added so many new features that the FlashMobileBlog says it's now at feature parity with the desktop version of the Flash Platform. What does that mean for users? Well, Air for Android can now use the camera and microphone, which means ...

... there's now a video chat app, similar to Skype or FaceTime, that's based on Air for Android. It's called FlashTime, and it's just being demo'd right now, with no working beta or source code available, but you can see it in action in a video on the FlashMobileBlog. It's a cool proof-of-concept that shows what Air will eventually be capable of on Android devices.

The next version of Flash, amidst growing competition from emerging 3D-in-the-browser technologies WebGL and O3D, will feature support for 3D graphics.

But don't get too excited just yet -- we'll probably have to wait until October and the Adobe MAX 2010 conference before we find out more. There, on October 27th, a Flash player engineer will give a talk about "the next-generation 3D API coming in a future version of Flash Player." How exciting is that?!

It's an interesting move, and I feel that it's just in time too. WebGL and O3D might be exciting propositions in themselves, but they don't enjoy almost-100% saturation -- not yet at least. Every existing Web game maker uses Flash -- and you can be guaranteed that they'd rather code 3D games and applications for a platform they already intimately know.

It sure looks like Adobe isn't going to give up on Flash without a fight. First peer-to-peer transfers with 10.1, and now proper 3D. Assuming the 3D performance is good enough, we could see some very interesting FPS and MMORPG Flash games next year.

There's no question that the iPad (and most newer iPhones and iPod touches) can run Flash. Just in case you wanted some "pics or it didn't happen"-style proof, the same dev who brought us the Spirit jailbreak decided to port the mobile Flash plug-in for Android to Apple's iOS.

The demo video looks pretty dang good, and @comex's latest is yet another reason why you might want to jailbreak your device. Unless, of course, you're a fan of the blue LEGO bricks.

[iSpazio via AppAdvice]

The much-anticipated test of Flash on a major mobile platform is about to begin! Flash 10.1 is finally ready for download on Android devices running Android 2.2 Froyo. Flash has also been sent to Adobe's other mobile partners, meaning it should be available for BlackBerry, Palm's WebOS, and WIndows Phone 7 in the near future. In fact, Adobe says Flash will even come pre-installed on some phones.

Mobile-optimized Flash sites are starting to pop up in preparation for widespread Flash adoption, but there are still questions about performance and battery life when it comes to Flash-heavy interactive sites. Fortunately, many Flash games are being redesigned to allow touchscreen controls, so Flash will be good for more than just mobile video. And really, won't it be nice not to see blue legos everywhere you go on your phone's browser?

There are still questions remaining, though: Will mobile device batteries stand up to Flash? Will Android users love it? WIll Steve Jobs have to eat his words about Flash not being ready for mobile hardware? We'll find out soon!

If you have an Android 2.2 device, including the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, DROID, Milestone or Samsung Galaxy S, you can get Flash 10.1 in the Android Market.

[That looks so uncomfortably like 'AIDS'...]

With iOS 4 in the wild, and with news that the iPhone 4 will begin its deliveries tomorrow, iAds are about to become part of the shiny white elitist experience. If you haven't heard of iAds, they're the equivalent of Google's AdMob service: it's the next-generation of smartphone advertising, basically. Instead of being popped out of your app and into a Web browser, you're shown full-screen video and interactive ads.

Just like every other advanced ad-serving system, iAds are also targeted. Play a golf game, and you'll get golf ads; search for local fast-food joints and you'll get food ads -- that kind of thing. The good news is, like Google and Yahoo, you can opt-out of the Apple iAd targeting by simply visiting http://oo.apple.com on your iOS 4 device. Ads will still be displayed of course -- they just won't be targeted. I'm still not sure whether I prefer my ads to be anonymous, or creepily well-targeted...

The targeting opt-out is great, but as All Things Digital points out, you can't opt out of the location tracking feature that's present in iOS 4. Now, I don't own an iOS 4 device, but surely you can turn off GPS? Surely the user has control over whether his location is exposed...?

Also, another thing: iAds claim to display 'full-screen video' and feature 'interactive ad content'. I'm not trolling here, but how does the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch do that without Flash? Ghetto QuickTime movies or something?

Apple and Adobe have been duking it out very publicly over Apple's anti-Flash stance, and the latest update to Apple's OS X, 10.6.4, just added fuel to the fire. The update comes with a version of Flash that Adobe says is outdated and insecure. Apple's release notes for 10.6.4 say that it fixes " multiple issues in the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, the the most serious of which may lead to unauthorised cross-domain requests."

Adobe says the packaged version of Flash player, 10.0.45.2, is NOT the most secure, and that users are leaving themselves open to vulnerabilities if they don't upgrade to the latest version, 10.1.53.64. Flash Player 10.1 just recently came out of beta, so Apple was likely playing it safe by including a version of Flash that's known to function on Macs. The 10.1 beta was enormously buggy, in my experience, causing me to uninstall and downgrade to 10.0.

Adobe doesn't want to be held back and blamed for security holes when Mac users aren't given the latest version of its software, but Apple doesn't want to get blamed for a potentially poor user experience that isn't its fault. Time to weigh in, DLS readers. Whose side are you on?

[via ZDNET]

UPDATE: Adobe left a very informative comment on this post, explaining the timing on this situation and saying there's no bad blood between the two companies here, only an interest in the security of their mutual customers. They also said that even though it would have been impractical for Apple to update Flash in 10.6.4, Apple should have put something in its security bulletin letting users know they needed to upgrade to the latest Flash Player.

Our trusty sister site, Engadget, just hit on another effort to bring Flash to the iPad. We already told you about Smokescreen, which involves a complex process of converting Flash video image-by-image into an iOS-friendly format. It's still mostly only good for ads, and it's not interactive. That's why Artefact Group's new "Flash in a Pinch" for iPad could be a big deal.

Instead of transcoding the Flash files on your iPad, it sends them up to Artefact's servers, which work their magic remotely (the technical details are available on Artefact's site, for the curious) and send an iPad-readable result back down. Boom! Flash on your iPad, whether Steve Jobs likes it or not. Flash in a Pinch can even react to clicks, which means there's some hope for interactive Flash web apps on the iPad, not just videos.

The problem is that Flash in a Pinch is still wicked slow, because the data has to be uploaded and downloaded from Artefact's servers. Right now, there's not even sound in the proof-of-concept version. I wonder whether one of these Flash alternatives will actually become viable and run smoothly before everyone stops caring about Flash altogether, though.

Check out the video of Flash in a Pinch running Hulu after the jump, and see what you think.

Adobe just released the finished version of Adobe AIR 2, its cross-platform framework for apps. That means developers on Windows, Mac and Linux can deploy their AIR 2 apps today.

For users, this means new versions of the AIR apps you love are probably coming very soon... That's assuming that you love any AIR apps at all. AIR is notorious for its instability and memory-hogging, but AIR 2 should go a long way toward fixing that.

We've covered the features of AIR 2 before, but they're worth repeating here. AIR apps can now access files on external mass storage devices, and they support dragging-and-dropping files, multitouch gestures, microphones and more. On top of that, there are the all-important fixes for memory use (apps will use up to 30% less memory now!) that should lead to much better performance. Will they be as fast as native apps? Almost certainly not, but it should be faster than it was, and crash less often.

If you're a developer looking to get your hands on the AIR 2 SDK, it will be part of Adobe CS5 and also available as a standalone download on June 15th.

So, Flash is dying, eh? It's no longer a technology that is in "its spring."

Alright, sure, I can see why Jobs would say that. I have to say that, as a user, I really, really dislike Adobe. They make horrible software, if you ask me; I've had some awful experiences with CS3, and I'd take antiquated CorelDRAW 12 (not to mention the new X5) over InDesign any day. I won't even go into the super-steep prices and draconian licensing policies!

When HTML5 can do what CU3ER does, then you can tell me Flash is dying. This is one of the slicker looking slideshows that I've seen recently. It's just a simple cube with some nice transitions. It can rotate, and it can divide into vertical slices that rotate in sequence or zoom out, rotate, and zoom back in. In short, it can do all sorts of neat tricks, and everything is so smooth.

Oh, and did I mention that it's completely free, too? It's also under active development and has a new version coming soon (so they say, at least). If you're a Flash developer and know of another really nice, free Flash gallery that can do stuff you can't do with JavaScript and HTML5, do let me know in the comments.

Whether you're on Team Apple or Team Adobe in the whole Flash vs. HTML5 brouhaha, you really can't dispute just how nice some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features are, and while Microsoft was quick to throw a demo page up to tout IE9's capabilities, Apple for some reason waited until yesterday to post one for Safari.

...And they locked it down with user-agent detection to allow only people using Safari to view the demos. Anybody using something other than Safari to check the page out will be greeted with a box telling them to download Safari the moment they try to view one.

The ironic part is that Apple felt that people using, say, Chrome shouldn't be able to use any of the demos shown on the new HTML5 and Web Standards demo page, while any HTML5-capable browser can play with the demos on Apple's Safari Technology Demo, where all the same demos can be found, along with several others. Using both Chrome 5 and 6, I was able to use every demo except Video, VR, and Movie Trailers (which worked but couldn't load the actual trailer video). All three of those demos needed Safari to load the H.264 successfully.

I'll be the first to admit that Safari's been way ahead of the curve HTML5-wise (it's been able to do just about everything in these demos since last year, including video), but I think it's a bit on the daft side for their marketing team to block Chrome users from trying the demos on the page that's labeled HTML5 and Web Standards. A simple disclaimer saying that Safari may do a bit better would have probably sufficed, and now everyone is going to call them out on it -- like this.

The Microsoft Windows team has just responded to the recent news that Google has banned Windows from its corporate offices. The response vocalizes what many IT specialists already know: Windows 7, combined with IE8 or another modern browser, is more secure than anything Mac brings to the table.

Brandon LeBlanc, the Windows Communication Manager, goes on to mention an InfoWorld article detailing the recent spate of malware attacks on Mac OS X. He also cites the Mashable story about Yale University canceling its migration to Gmail and Google Apps due to security and privacy concerns.

Even infamous hacker Marc Maiffret applauded Microsoft's security earlier this year, while at the same time denouncing Apple's feeble offerings. The Windows Blog post goes on to mention a bunch of reasons why Windows 7 is a secure platform -- read it, if you're interested!

Basically, everyone -- except the Apple zealots, of course, because they always knew that Google would one day see the LIGHT -- is a bit miffed by Google's new internal IT policy. Why Google decided to change platforms rather than merely upgrade to Windows 7 and Chrome is beyond me. It doesn't sound like Google made the switch because Mac is more secure: rather, it simply played with antiquated Windows installations and got burnt.

How that is a secure, sensible policy, I have no idea. My money is still on some kind of political, aggressive opening salvo aimed at Microsoft: they are opening a vein in Redmond with the eventual aim of bleeding Microsoft dry.

The ingenious engineers at Adobe are obviously hard at work on CS6, and this script is likely an early example of what we can expect in the next iteration of the Creative Suite. John Nack, commenting on his blog, says that they've wanted to include such functionality for a while, but "it's just that other things have taken priority".

Another commenter mentions cloud synchronization: wouldn't it be neat if you could sync your workspace, brushes and tool presets into the cloud with CS Live? John Nack says he's been pushing it for years. Considering he's Principal Product Manager for Photoshop, plus the world's current engrossment and engorgement with cloud services, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see a slew of cloud-based features in Photoshop CS6.

Wired Magazine's official iPad app was an early casualty of Apple's war on Flash. Working with Wired publisher Conde Nast, Adobe built the app in Flash, but then they had to rewrite using Apple-approved Objective C. Adobe completed the new app and just got it approved for sale in the App Store. The app is a proof of concept for building a magazine app with the same tools Wired uses to make the magazine itself. It costs 5 bucks in the App Store, about the same price as a print magazine.

In that respect, Wired and Adobe succeeded: the magazine looks great, and (although it takes up half a gig) it can be viewed entirely offline. That includes video clips and other rich media. This is good news for owners of the non-3G iPad, who can take the magazine with them even where there's no Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, Apple's no-Flash policy means Adobe failed to make an app that will run on every platform. Whether that's a knock against Flash or against Apple is a matter of perspective.

[via All Things D]

Following on from a New Scientist article that was written a few days ago, I ended up on the website of Taeg Sang Cho -- a graduate student at MIT. He's been working on a bunch of advanced imaging algorithms -- with gifts and grants from big names like Microsoft, Adobe and Google.

His recent work -- three research papers -- is all about content-aware manipulation of photos. I'm struggling to pick one because they're all awesome, so I'll just give you the highlights:

• A probabilistic jigsaw puzzle solver -- this is the technology featured in the New Scientist article, so there's lots of dumbed-down details if you don't want to read the paper itself. In essence, it does exactly what a human does: matches edges, but it does it quickly and very accurately. Similar technology could be used in photo manipulation (and may indeed already be used by Adobe's Content-Aware Fill) -- the biggest give-away when you manipulate images are edges. This technology could magic away those edges!
• A content-aware image prior -- this is a funky way of saying 'image restoration', and I wouldn't be surprised if this is a sneak-peek at the technology you'll see in Photoshop CS6! Look at the sample photo -- the results speak for themselves.
• Motion blur removal with orthogonal parabolic exposures -- (phew, just typing that gave me a bit of a hard-on) -- in layman's terms, this is blur removal by taking two photos from slightly different viewpoints and then... performing some magic. Again, look at the sample images for some fantastic proof. I wouldn't expect to see moving lenses in still cameras any time soon though...

It's all very exciting stuff that we'll likely begin to see in consumer software in the next year or two. I just wish there was a video of the jigsaw puzzle solving!