I am sure several of you saw a notice pop-up on your PC in the morning about the latest Flash update from Adobe ….. Yes, that’s right- Flash player 10.1 is now officially available. Adobe Flash player team’s blog lists all the enhancements in fairly detail. A look at comments also gives you a glimpse into joy and grievances of public. The thing about Flash is that it is so powerful that no matter how many enhancements you make to it, there will always be something else to do. Adobe’s team does deserve a big round of applause for releasing FP10.1 on schedule. ......continue reading

Flash Lite 3 (and now 4) can be customized to support h.264 video but the license for h.264 needs to be purchased separately by OEMs. We often get questions on how much additional costs this is going to incur so I researched and here’s what I found.  H.264 has a different licensing structure for devices and internet users. For non PC type devices, h.264 licenses is free upto 100K units and it costs $0.2 per unit upto 5 million units and $0.1 per unit after 5 million units. They cap the royalty at $5M for 2009-2010. (This information is picked from here). ......continue reading

Via youtube blog- Youtube has debuted a url shortner for videos. If you used http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs in the past, you can now replace that by http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs. As the link contains the ID of the video, developers can do interesting things such as bring up thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track video usage in real-time. Comments on the blog post range from “Cool” to “what? if you think that something like http://youtu.be/VRqVkuH7BRQ is a short url, than you don’t know what a short url is.” You be the judge and decide if this has any use in developing the applications. ......continue reading

Moonlight, an open source version of Silverlight is launched by Novell. Moonlight 2.0 is compatible with Silverlight 2.0 and includes some features of Silverlight 3, such as support for Bitmap APIs, file dialogs, pluggable media pipeline.  Moonlight 2.0 also offers better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user’s connections. Moonlight development now closely following Microsoft Silverlight release. Moonlight 3.0 alpha will be available in Q1/2010. ......continue reading

Smartphone really meant a cellphone with OS, a few applications and a keyboard. Remember the days of Palm Treo 270 and being happy about having one? Then Windows Mobile came, but the game totally changed when Apple jumped into the fray. iPhone almost instantly re-defined how ’smart’ phones could be. Smartphones of today have bigger screens, powerful CPUs, lots of RAM and storage. They come in all shapes and sizes, and one really has to review all the smartphone specs to find out whats the best match for them.  There are tonnes of applications running on different operating systems. All the different platforms (Blackberry, Windows, Palm, Android….) have their own pluses and minuses. The form factor, keyboard, hardware shortcuts…. the list goes on and on. ......continue reading

Flash Lite 3 for digital home, is now available for TI platform. The port is optimized for h.264 video and AAC audio using TI Codec engine. This allows you to play Flash video in 30 fps at D1 resolution. The port allows for streaming content using HTTP and RTMP protocols.   We have kept the design modular so that the customers can potentially get the development kits from us and integrate their own libraries if they choose to.The port is tested on TI DaVinci DM 6446 processor and runs on Linux. Of course the port is done on Linux framebuffer as most of the embedded devices require a thin blitting layer. Please email me at anand at joshimail dot net for additional information. ......continue reading

Some of you have must have seen the documents published by Adobe on devnet that talk about several details of the Flash Lite digital home platform. One of the powerful features of the Flash Lite for digital home is the ability to be able to extend Actionscript. You can create your own Actionscript commands, define them and implement corresponding logic in Flash Lite code. For example, you can have a command to change volume of TV, or channel or fetch updated data for an ad- etc. etc. This is a very powerful feature and is available for Flash Lite on digital home devices. ......continue reading

Very recently HD video sites have started popping all over and this seems to be a trend. Quite a few of them are using Flash as their front end. For example, I came accross a HD video site GreenvileHD.com. The site is specifically designed for Greenville SC area and has a collection of videos on different topics. I happen to click on ‘arts and entertainment’ and sure enough there was a video from local instructor on Salsa which was fun to watch. I was watching it on broadband and the video played just fine. The site has got quite a broad range of topics from jobs to entertainment to shopping to technology. ......continue reading

I came across this blog which describes how to play Youtube videos in Silverlight. Wow - Microsoft going after Flash bigtime? I mean Youtube and Flash is almost synonomous! This particular silverlight application plays h.264 video from youtube but not the Flash video. So Flash is still required if you want to play older videos, but newer videos are now available in h.264 and can be played using Silverlight. ......continue reading

Microsoft’s new device called Zune HD will have multi touchscreen and a web browser.The device will also have HD receiver.If the device is based on Windows Mobile, even Flash Lite may be there. ......continue reading

I came accross this a while ago. KDB Technologies, based in Cambridge, UK, has developed a tool called as EBoda. The tool allows you to run Flash Lite content on any phone that has support for J2ME.  The description on their web site is brief, but says that “EBoda is a lightweight yet powerful JAVA application for running Adobe Flash applications without the need for Flash Lite. Unlike Flash Light, EBoda is designed to run on low to mid-range phones. ......continue reading

Youtube has started serving video in Flash according to Symbian News. Earlier Youtube served content in 3gpp or other format that was playable in the browser for mobile device. But for the latest Nokia phones, as long as Flash Lite 3 installed, one can view Flash content from Youtube. ......continue reading

At Adobe MAX in Japan, Adobe anounced that till date there have been more than 100 million installations of AIR. More impressive than that is the fact that Flash 10 is already on 55 percent of worldwide PCs, and is expected to go to 80% in Q2/09. Some other interesting points are: ......continue reading

I have been reading about Silverlight being adopted on more and more web sites so I thought I’d do some research and see where things stand. Here are some of my observations: ......continue reading

Microsoft has announced that Internet Explorer mobile 6 will be available soon. So Microsoft is defitely gettign ready to compete with Opera. Opera launched a new version of Opera that has improved support for YouTube and allows for sharing of bookmarks between cellphones and PCs. From the post: ......continue reading