Download Squad originally told you about the Adobe Flash beta in May, and yesterday Adobe announced further updates to "Astro." So what do you have to look forward to?
From a viewer's standpoint, there are several new features of interest. Tops among them: advanced 3d effects - that's right, Flash now supports shaders. Web gamers rejoice, because this no doubt means a whole new era of addictive browser-based gaming.
Sound APIs have been refined as well, which should provide a boost not only for games, but also for streaming media applications. Also along these lines, Flash 10 support dynamic bitrate adjustments. Translation: it'll adapt to crappy network conditions automatically so that your video doesn't get all choppy.
Adobe has built a suite of online office applications to compliment Buzzword, the company's online word processor. We've covered Buzzword in the past. It's pretty, fast, and not really all that much more useful than similar products from Google or Zoho. Here's a rundown of the other applications you'll find at Acrobat.com:
ConnectNow: A web conferenceing tool that lets you share your desktop with others, chat, talk over a VoIP connection, or share files and mark up whiteboards.
Share: Selectively share files with other users. Adobe Share lets you send files to a list of contacts, and lets the recipients view PDF image, and video files online.
Create PDF: Seriously, do we need to tell you what this does?
My Files: Store and organize up to 5GB of files online.
You'll notice that Acrobat.com doesn't have a complete office suite. There are no spreadsheet or presentation applications. But that 5GB of free storage space is pretty attractive.
Adobe has also released Acrobat 9, an updated version of its desktop PDF reader. The biggest change in Acrobat 9 is support for embedded Flash, which means you might start finding PDF documents with embedded YouTube videos or other Flash content.
The Flash security flaw that we recently wrote about has been addressed by Adobe and a new version is being offered.
This security flaw was affecting PC and Mac users and allowed hackers to redirect you to nasty .SWF files which could then potentially execute malicious code on your machine.
You can feel secure (as well as warm and fuzzy) by downloading a Flash update with the fix here.
It's a pretty fast response to a pretty serious issue, so Adobe gets the pass this time.
Special thanks to commenter daniel free for the heads up!
It has come to our attention that there's an Adobe Flash player vulnerability in the wild that may affect your PC.
Simply by visiting a naughty website, the unsuspecting web visitor will be attacked with a piece of code that redirects you to an evil .SWF file that can then execute nasty code on their PC.
Adobe has blogged about the issue, but hasn't issued any releases, or patches to take care of the problem as of yet. Security firm Symantec says that 20,000 web pages may be affected by this style of attack.
Since there's no real way around getting hit with this one, you can either disable your flash player altogether, or get the No-Script add-on for your Firefox browser.
Adobe AIR apps are the new hotness. We're seeing more and more pop up every single day. It's looks like the AIR platform is turning into the Facebook Platform on steroids.
Why? Because it's cross platform, and what a brilliant move by Adobe on that. You can install an AIR app on Mac or PC in a blink. Not only that, but it runs lightweight as all heck.
The latest app that has everyone talking is a desktop compliment to the increasingly popular FriendFeed. Introducing Feedalizr.
With FriendFeed's pretty neat Remote Key system, you can allow apps to access your FriendFeed stream. So getting Feedalizr going once you have Adobe AIR installed is a snap.
Some of the things that Feedalizr lets you do from your desktop:
Filter updates by service, such as Flickr, Pownce, and Twitter
Post videos - which is rather seamless, and records right from your cam in the app
Drag and drop photos and upload right to Flickr
Get instant updates in that nice slick slidey fashion on the bottom right hand side of your desktop
FriendFeed has a public API and has no official apps, but this appears to be as close as you could possibly get to one. It's very slick, and gets the job done.
What's your favorite Adobe AIR app? Drop a link in the comments!
The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
At the conference call in March, we asked Adobe about their plans for integrating Photoshop Express with other web services and they assured us Flickr support was on the way. It's available now and we think it adds a lot of value to both services. Now you can download your Flickr photos directly into Photoshop Express for cropping, color correction, digital effects, etc. Photos edited with Photoshop Express can be immediately re-exported/uploaded to Flickr all in one seamless step.
Additionally, Adobe has added a new "Save As" feature so that you can save multiple versions of a photo in addition to the original image. Adobe has also introduced a new embeddable media player for photo slideshows that can be used with Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites.
Flashforward2008 is going to be in San Francisco this August. This annual conference is directed at Flash designers and developers and those who aspire to be called a designer or developer. Every year Flashforward features a Film Festival with open nominations of the best Flash content out there. In 2008 the categories have changed to the following:
Application
Cartoon/Story/Narrative
Code
Experimental/Art
Game
Motion Graphics
Navigation/Experience
Sound
Typography
Video
Anyone can submit links to Flash based works in all categories that are 'innovative and compelling.' Previous winners include Paper Vision 3d, the MoMA Contemporary Voice exhibition, and the amazing Tokyo Plastic. If you do submit a nomination to Flashforward2008 via the official film festival page, please let us know in the comments below with a link. The deadline for nominations is Father's Day, June 15, 2008.
Adobe's Flash player already powers YouTube, Hulu, and roughly 99% of all the video you see on the web. But apparently that isn't good enough for Adobe, because the company has launched the Open Screen Project, with the goal of creating a Flash standard that will work equally well on a variety of devices, including computers, cellphones, and set top boxes.
Adobe will be removing restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV formats, will publish device porting information for the Flash Player, and will remove licensing fees for the next releases of Adobe AIR and the Adobe Flash Player for devices. Currently you can get the computer versions for free, but you have to pay for the mobile versions.
In other words, Adobe is opening up its proprietary formats, releasing technical information, and generally making it a lot easier for developers to write Flash content that will play seamlessly on any device.
Adobe has released a public alpha of Adobe AIR for Linux, which means you can now run applications built using the Adobe Integrated Runtime on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. Adobe AIR is an environment that lets user run online applications offline. For example, here are a few of our favorite AIR applications:
Adobe is also joining the Linux Foundation today, joining other companies including HP, Google, and Nokia. The group encourages Linux development, and the addition of Adobe AIR could really step things up a bit, since developers can now create applications for a single platform and have them run on Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes.
Digital photography has become a way of life for lots and lots of web users and there is no shortage of services out there to host your digital pictures (Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, Windows Live Spaces, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace). As more and more day-to-day computing tasks move to the cloud, the market really needs a solid, web-based editing suite. With Adobe Photoshop Express, which launched its beta today, we get just that.
We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for photos that we have ever used. Although services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing capabilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a completely different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your online photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.
What a time for 1.0. Hot on the heels of Adobe's official release of AIR version 1.0 comes the 1.0 version of eBay Desktop. The two releases are so close you would think the makers of eBay Desktop planned it (which of course they did).
eBay Desktop 1.0 provides a desktop alternative to the eBay website - you can use it to search, browse, bid, keep track of your auctions, and more. And because it uses Adobe AIR, it runs on both Windows (XP and Vista) and Max OS X (10.4 and 10.5).
The eBay Desktop installer weighs in around 7 MB (the AIR installer is included if you don't have it installed on your system already). Install was quick and easy, though getting the program to run was a little more work: on our test Mac, the program kept crashing until we went to the Applications folder and opened the program manually.
When you first start the program, you'll be met with a nifty little video introduction to the eBay desktop. The eBay desktop home page allows you to track all your bidding and watching activity, and there are separate tabs for finding items, tracking and paying for your winning bids, and a feeds tab.
eBay has put a lot of work into this desktop application, and it shows. The interface is clean and very intuitive. The one major drawback is the lack of features for sellers. You can't track the items you're selling or your past sales. At this time, eBay desktop is definitely a buyer's tool.
The time between Christmas and New Year's is what folks in the biz typically like to call a slow news period. But in the fast-paced world of technology (cue the Quantum Leap-them song styled synth pop), the news never stops. Here are some of the stories you might have missed if you were spending too much quality time with the family this week.
Flipping the Linux Switch: The GNOME Desktop Environment So there's this operating system called Linux. You may have heard of it. It's kind of like Windows or OS X, but it's highly customizable, stable, and runs on all kinds of machines. Linux has come a long way since the days when you had to understand and love the command line in order to use it at all. But unlike Windows or OS X, Linux presents users with a choice of graphical user interfaces. Our resident Linux guru Kristin Shoemaker will help you decide which desktop environment is right for you. In part one, she looks at GNOME. Stay tuned for part two, an in-depth look at KDE coming soon.
The world ends on January 19, 2038: Thank Unix! Remember how the world ended in Y2K? You know, power went out around the world, airplanes fell from the sky and all the nuclear warheads stored in government bunkers just up and exploded. Oh right, yeah, that never happened. But if you're looking for another potential disaster to worry about, look no further than 2038. That's when Linux machines will start to party like it's 1901. Of course, there's about 30 years to fix this problem, so you might not need to invest in a bomb shelter just yet.
Ever download an eBook on your work computer only to realize that you can't read it on your PDA or even your PC at home? Thank DRM. But it looks like some relief is on the way, at least if you can blame Adobe for your DRM restrictions.
In what we assume is a response to complaints from everyone who has ever tried downloading a DRM restricted eBook, Adobe has finallyannounced that the next version of its Digital Editions eBook reader will make it easier to transfer copy protected documents from one machine to another.
Right now, Digital Editions and Acrobat use an "easy activation" scheme, which basically just lets you read a document on the machine you initially used to download it. Digital Editions 1.5 will use "named activation," which means you can read documents on any machine as long as you're running the proper software with your Adobe ID.
Digital Editions 1.5 will even examine your existing library and convert eBooks you've previously downloaded from easy to named activation, freeing you up to take your eBooks on the go. You'll only be able to convert the activation types on the same machine you used to download the document, so if you were planning on buying a new computer, Adobe recommends hanging onto your old PC until Digital Editions 1.5 comes out. Whenever that is.
Adobe Flex Builder is an application for developing rich internet applications using the Flex framework. With this, developers can build intuitive interactive apps quickly. Why would Adobe be doing this? To try and gain some interest from new developers of course. Taking the lead from some fast food joints out there, hit them while at University and get them addicted, especially since some schools will begin offering Flex based training.
With retail prices sitting at $499, why not pick up a free copy for yourself if you are a student or faculty member and test your luck at application development. And hey, grab a copy for your non university friends too, it can sure make a great gift!
After quietly launching SearchMash as a test ground for all things search late last year, Google is making the site a bit more Flashy.
SearchMash is a playground of sorts for Google to experiment with interaction and the display of search results. Now they have taken their simple search philosophy to the limits and added in a Flash interface for a more interactive look at results.
The new interface uses Snap previews of websites before they are visited and tabs that seamlessly switch between web, image and video searches. Keyboard shortcuts and mouse scroll wheel interactions have also been put into place for quicker navigation. A list of recent searches is conveniently hidden on the left side, with a portion of a window slightly sticking out. When moused over, a tray slides out and display the keywords. Not the best placement and surely not something that the average user would know where to mouse over. Then again, we have to pinch ourselves because this is after all just a test search interface for Google to play around with. Of course the HTML version of the site is still available if you aren't inclined to search with Flash.
What do you think of this little Google experiment. Would Flash interfaces fly for search efforts in the real world?
Download Squad originally told you about the Adobe Flash beta in May, and yesterday Adobe announced further updates to "Astro." So what do you have to look forward to?
The Flash security flaw that we 
It has come to our attention that there's an 
The 
Flashforward2008
The time between Christmas and New Year's is what folks in the biz typically like to call a slow news period. But in the fast-paced world of technology (cue the Quantum Leap-them song styled synth pop), the news never stops. Here are some of the stories you might have missed if you were spending too much quality time with the family this week.
