Well, I have been lazy of late when it comes to blogging. There is lot of interesting stuff happening, but haven’t really had a chance to blog due to work and other commitments. But I thought I’d write a quick note about the FITC Mobile event coming up in Toronto. Our friends at the FITC have generously offered me a giveaway ticket to the Festival ($199 value). If you are interested, please contact me. The event is taking place on September 16-18 and focuses on all the cool stuff- Flash, Android, iPhone. ......continue reading

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

Google’s Android kernel will no longer be part of Linux kernel tree. What this means is that updates from Android will not be intergrated into Linux kernel and vice versa. Linux kernel is an open community and the developers are often posting fixes for security, new device drivers and utilities. The decision seems to have come from Linux community. Linux developer blog suggest that problem seems is with Android’s security model, and framebuffer driver infrastructure. This prevents several Android drivers and platform code from merging into the main kernel tree. The blogger also points that ‘no one seems to care about the Android tree’. ......continue reading

Adobe does a great job of maintaining a list of Flash enabled mobile/wireless devices, but there isn’t any such list for consumer devices. Originally I started keeping track of CE devices with Flash for my other blog flashliteonline.com where I was hoping to write about Flash Lite applications. But the CE market has been slow to evolve so there has been little to report on Flash Lite applications on such devices. With the addition of Flash Lite for Digital Home, I am hopeful that new devices will start emerging soon and I think this blog is a good place to maintain such list. The list is available on ‘Flash Enabled CE devices‘ page. If you know of any other devices that should be on the list, please comment or drop me a line at anand at joshimail dot net. I will update the list from time to time. ......continue reading

Lightblueoptics, a start-up company that makes a interactive display that converts any surface into touch screen is using Flash Lite for UI. Take a look at press releases from Elecronics Weekly and Geeksmack. They show pictures of of keyboard being projected onto any surface. The display works as any other keyboard and responds to touch as needed. The keyboard is projected using Flash Lite, an IR sensor senses the movement of your finger and the projection technology is based on holograph. The gadget is being demonstrated at CES. ......continue reading

Flash Lite 3 running on Marvell Inc. Kirkwood platform is now available. Marvell as you know, acquired XScale line of processors from Intel a while ago, and Kirkwood SoC has a 1.2 GHz XScale core.  (Xscale is basically ARM9 capable of ARM V5 instruction set.) Target market for Kirkwood is Set-top boxes, home gateway, home media servers, point of sale computers and plug-computers. ......continue reading

When RIM acquired Torch Mobile, it got access to Torch Mobiles IRIS browser technology that ran on Win CE. While it is left to our imagination what Blackberry plans on doing with IRIS, speculation is that they’ll use the technolog to develop their own Webkit based browser for Blackberry. I don’t know how Blackberry OS compares to Linux or WinCE, and how much effort is required to port Webkit engine to Blackberry but RIM certainly had eyes on Webkit browser (and possible Flash port that Torch Mobile offered). ......continue reading

I came accross this on Crunchgear. Sharp’s PC 71, Sharp’s new mini laptop, runs Ubuntu and supports Flash Lite 3.1. PC-Z1 has a tiny 5 inch screen and support XGA (1024 x 600) resolution. PC-Z1 apparatenly has performance similar to a PC and is designed for ‘cloud computing’. The device sports Thunderbird, Firefox and Flash Lite 3.1 among other applications. ......continue reading

Flash Lite has been popular among mobile users for wallpaper applications. Wallpapers are good for generating an ‘impression’ on the user. I don’t think anybody has figured out a way to monetize it successfully yet, but this one company I came accross who creates Custom Twitter Backgrounds may have something. These guys are trying to create a custom wallpaper for twitter that can be your business logo, message- whatever. What if everything was wallpapered? Twitter, Facebook, myspace- and if you were to use that on your every personal device such as cellphones, PC, laptop? Twitter is already being used by several businesses to market their product successfully. Add a wallpapered logo to that and make it portable accross devices, you now have a branding strategy in place! ......continue reading

I don’t know if this is just a rumor or if there is any truth to this. I came accross a report on Endgadget that talked about Blackberry adding ‘full’ flash support (I guess that means they’ll have Flash 10) to their browser.  The source they sight is ‘Boy Genius Report’ and I located the source here. It looks as though the actual devices touting Flash player will be available sometimes next year. ......continue reading

MIPS has joined the ever increasing list of chipsets supporting Android. MIPS makes CPU architectures and licenses it to different silicon vendors. Whereas ARM is strong in cellular and mobile market, MIPS is strong in digital home market. So this would mean that Android is starting to make its way into verticals outside of mobile. RMI, a licensee of MIPS is already demoing the Android port on its chipsets. ......continue reading

I found this quote from Shantanu on Information Week- “We are bringing Flash Player 10 to smartphone class devices to enable the latest web browsing experience. Multiple partners have already received early versions of this release and we expect to release a beta version for developers at our MAX Conference in October. Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, and the New Palm Web OS will be among the first devices to support web browsing with the newest Flash player” ......continue reading

Endgadget is reporting that Flash 10 beta is scheduled to be released in October of this year. This was presented at MAX conference in one of the earning slides. The slide is below. It was not clear what platform will be supported and what features if any will be eliminated to support smartphones. ......continue reading

Microsoft is working on a new engine that allows users to create a rich user interface and thus allows them to hide the underlying OS. Its codenamed as ‘Alchemy’. Alchemy is what will bringer richer UI scenarios such as smooth transitions, 3D animations, etc. that Silverlight enables. Alchemy also will allow developers to use Silverlight technologies on devices without requiring them to run in a browser- in other words it will provide users with a standalone Silverlight version. ......continue reading

Well- I am sure you’ve seen news of 1 GHz ARM coming to market soon. Freescale is planning on introducing MX51 which will have ARM Cortex A8. TI already has OMAP running at 600 MHz. OMAP Beagleboard already has a Linux distribution that runs XWindows, and one can easily build Netbook around it. ARM Coretex A8, which has ARMv7 instruction set is a powerful CPU capable of running XWindows at performance comparable to Atom. It is widely believed that ARM will be biggest competition to Intel in Netbook market, and having seen a few demo I believe that is very much possible. ......continue reading