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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new browser called Rogue is being marketed by company called Gotgame. The browser allows gamers to have a transparent browser windows on top of the game while they are playing and waiting on something. The demo here shows you can invoke multiple windows from the game. The browser is available on PC. Check out FAQ here. ......continue reading

EE Times is reporting that Nokia is seeking partnership with Asian companies to build a new laptop.  Nokia allegedly is working on computers based on ARM’s processor architecture for netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and is considering 2011 launch. The device will use OS developed by Symbian. ......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