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

Calsoftlabs has ported Flash Lite 4 to TI OMAP running on Beagleboard. The port runs on Rev 3 of the board running Linux Framebuffer. An evaluation package is being put together and available to OEMs upon request. ......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

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

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

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

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

QNX (owned by Harman International now) has a port of Flash Lite available alongwith the OS distribution. QNX is based on Unix and their Car platform comes with Flash Lite. The company provides users with a reference implementation to Flash Lite for selected platforms such as Freescale. To facilitate the adaption, QNX has put together a fairly large consortium consisting of hardware, software and OEMs. The company also has a portal where application developers can post their applications which would then be downloaded by car drivers. ......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

I came across this blog on Cultofmac.com. Here the author sites some unknown source from Reddit and says that Flash in its present form consumed significant battery on iPhone and was one of the reasons why Apple rejected it. The post has quite a bit of information on why Flash was rejected by Apple. Again I don’t know how much truth is to the story but you can read the post here. ......continue reading