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

For those interested in learning differences between FL4 and FP10, Adobe recently has released documentation pertaining to FL4. Here’s a quick list: ......continue reading

We now have Flash Lite 4 port available on X86 running Linux Framebuffer. Why do you need port on X86 when Flash Lite 4 is meant for low end devices? Well- there are two reasons. ......continue reading

Did you know that Google engineers get to spend 20% of their time working on their ‘pet-projects‘? Pretty cool. One of such ‘pet-project’ done by Google engineers was creation of Quake II using HTML5 only. The game runs in browser and no plug-in is needed. The blog also shows a yotube video of the post, and claims that it can run at upto 60 fps. On the first glance, the news sounds really exciting and one would think that html5 is ready to take on Flash. Granted this game doesn’t use some of the advanced features available in Flash 10, but still makes on wander if they should reconsider using Flash… Not so fast…. wait till you get to ‘build instructions‘. ......continue reading

Flash Lite 4 is now available from Calsoft. Flash Lite 4 is intended to run on devices that don’t sport a powerful CPU necessary to run Flash Player 10. (Flash 10 requires the CPU of the order of a minimum of 600 MHz ARM11 class. Of course some people will argue that MIPS 4K series is better than ARM11, but that is left to the judges for the time being ......continue reading

Skyfire, a browser technology that essentially is an example of successful cloud computing, has purchased a company called Kolbysoft. Kolbysoft makes a Webkit browser that runs on Android. The motive? To bring similar cloud computing technology to Android. Which will mean that Flash 10 among other latest browser technologies will be available on Android. ......continue reading

Well- everyone is waiting for Flash 10.1 and Flash 4 on embedded devices that support Actionscript 3 among other things. The official date for the release for either is not set yet, but we (Calsoft) have put together a plan for the OEMs looking to upgrade from Flash Lite 3. The goal is to simplify the process of migrating to newer version based on your requirements. The upgrade plan will allow you to migrate your earlier port to newer version with minimum cost and effort, and will provide with a certified player. I will post more information on this in coming days. Feel free to email with any questions in the meantime. ......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

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

Via youtube blog- “Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.” Youtube is slowly trying to improve the quality of its content and already has XL (Extra Large) version. (Extra large version is meant for large screen and only has h.264 videos from what I’ve seen). A limited youtube content can be viewed outside of Flash, and I am sure h.264 is the preferred format for 1080P. Today, for mobile or embedded devices, one needs to develop a special player to support youtube if Flash Lite is not available. Flash 10.1, when available this playing field will be equal. May be devices with a tiny HD projectors will emerge then. ......continue reading

ARM announced today that Flash 10 has been optimized for ARM Cortex-A series of processors. This is great news. In our experience, Cortex-A handles Flash content very well and we have been able to obtain satisfactory experience on a VGA or even higher resolution monitors for video. I hope that the optimized version takes  advantage of the NEON instruction set freeing up CPU to do other tasks. There are however several unanswered questions: ......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

Well- John Dowdell from Adobe left a comment on my earlier post that these are just rumors and I agree with that. The original report does not confirm the source and ‘Boy Genius Report’ itself is not a very reputable news source. So unfortunately we’ll have to sit and wait till Blackberry comes out with Flash! ......continue reading