The conference has two full days of presentations with three tracks of presentations, plus one optional day of pre-conference workshops covering iPhone/iPad, Android, Flash 10.1, Windows Mobile, HTML5. If you are looking help with the business aspect of mobile development, the conference also features tracks on marketing, usability, funding and other relevant business topics. It has over 30 presentations and panels- enough to keep your brain cooking for three days!

Please email me via contact page if you are interested.

Of course this comes with a tradeoff that ‘high-end’ features of Flash 10 will not work in FL4. Gradients, filters, effects will not work in FL4. But then when your CPU is not powerful enough, you don’t want these features anyway. If you plan on using Flash Lite 4 as a plug-in, our estimate is that it will still play about 90% or more sites without any difficulties and this includes all the popular sites such as youtube, CNN etc.

If your goal is to develop a standalone player for UI or applications, FL4 is the way to go. Not only you can turn on and off features per your requirements, you can also add custom features. For plug-in, FP10 is an option but again if you have CPU/memory limitations, FL4 is a good choice if you are CPU/RAM limited.

My thoughts precisely! A while ago I blogged that I see no threat to Flash player from HTML5 in the short to medium term, and now I am willing to predict that the medium could even be medium long term. I mean admit it- Youtube and Flash is synonymous. Flash technology available from several years ago allowed Youtube to offer a wide range of features that made it popular. Youtube, alongwith the top 50 sites, almost all seem to use Flash. The visibility generated by all these sites allows Flash to dominate the market. They all prefer Flash not because there is no other option but because what the technology allows them to do, it is seamless and always works. Youtube preferred Flash then, it prefers Flash now and hints that it’ll prefer Flash for the foreseeable future while HTML 5 improves and video codec royalty issues are sorted out.  It is unlikely that all these issues will get sorted cleanly because of the commercial aspect of various parties involved. Even if they do, by then, Flash would offer something new that’ll make it attractive to Youtube and others. So we are restarting the game at the same place!

Only time will tell who will win but for the time being its advantage Flash!

For several embedded platforms, we’ll (Calsoft) also start shipping Flash player 10.1 soon. In fact, there will be some announcements coming from us in the near future. Flash 10.1 and Flash Lite 4 on ARM will be available first on different chip sets followed by others. Availability of acceleration (OpenGL for FP10, OpenVG for FL4, H.264 video for both) makes the FP10 and FL4 stand out from previous Flash players (not to mention the features). Besides a lot more chipsets are now available that offer these features in hardware enabling a better user experience. With the availability of Flash 10.1, both embedded and desktop devices are on the common ground in that they’ll be able to play all the latest content available on the web.

1. Flash Lite 4 overview: Provides details about Flash Lite 4 and its feature set.

2. Introduction to Flash Lite 4 Actionscript : This contains details of the actionscript classes that are partially supported and completely unsupported.

1. There is still lot of curiosity out there in terms of the features and compatibility of FL4 with FP10. A port running on X86 will be extremely useful to understand these limitations. The port will also enable you to run a pre-written application if there is one running on FP10. This is particularly important for AS3 content as Flash Lite 4 has limited support for some of the high end gradients and filters

2. There is lot of expertise in Linux world on X86 and someone prudent will be able to restrict CPU/RAM for Flash Lite and figure out how the content behaves given limited horsepower. Of course, this performance will differ on actual device if the CPU is different, but one can use this to determine how good it looks and if so what it takes to make it work on target devices in terms of modification and optimization.

With Atom based CPUs gaining market traction, this port could also be useful for community considering running Linux framebuffer on target device. Feel free to contact me via contact page on this blog if you need any additional information.

Flash Lite 4, as you know, is intended for lower end CPUs that can not run Flash player 10.  We are providing a standalone player. (Flash 10 is only available as a plug-in).

Email me for additional information via contact page.

To get this to work, one need to install Ogg Vorbis alongwith Java and Lame. Now Java is the most common on every machine and is likely to be found on an average user’s computer, but not Ogg Vorbis (for video) and Lame (for mp3). How many average users know about Ogg Vorbis and Lame? And how many would be willing to install it o run a particular application? This is precisely why Flash will continue to dominate for the time being.

But who knows? Browsers of tomorrow may start shipping with Ogg Vorbis and Lame and then Flash could be in serious trouble. (Although that is unlikely as browsers traditionally have not included any video decoders).

This conclusion is based on the following facts.

- HTML5 is way behind Flash as far as technology is concerned. HTML5 is offering features now that were being offered by Flash several years ago. Flash will always be ahead of HTML5 at any given point in time as long as Adobe keeps on innovating. Anyone looking to do ‘cool’ stuff on the web, will have to use Flash.

- Video support on HTML5 is open to user preference. HTML5 as such does not define any web video format, so different people will use different video formats that suites them best. Unless the PC platform has support for all these codecs, one will not be able to achieve ubiquitous experience with HTML5. It is possible that some codecs will evolve as popular in the medium term but royalty payments and other issues associated with video codecs will make it interesting challenge to overcome.

- All the browsers will not have uniform support for HTML5. Some browsers will support every tag and others will have limited support. It is yet unknown if this will have major impact on browsability but this will work against HTML5 if your favorite sites don’t work in your favorite browser. Flash provides a uniform browsing and viewing experience no matter what browser you use and has been very successful at doing so.

Flash has existed alongside of HTML for several years and I am sure it will continue to exist alongside of HTML5. Will the 98% penetration of Flash will change in the future? Unlikely. Will developers start using HTML5 in place of Flash? May be. Will they abondon Flash alltogether? Unlikely based on reasons above. ( And I am not saying this because I am involved with Flash This is reality

Flash Lite 4 is available as both standalone and plug-in. Flash 10 is only available as a plug-in and therefore is not suited for applications and user interface development. Adobe’s intent is to enable the uniform browsing experience with Flash 10 and Flash 10 will not support any device specific features no matter which platform you run it on. FL4 on the other hand is customizable and can be customized for different applications.

Flash Lite 4 supports ActionScript 3 and the VM is optimized for memory usage. Similar to FL3, FL4 ignores several ‘high-end’ features of Flash such as gradient and filters. Flash Lite can also be customized to play hardware accelerated h.264 video.

Feel free to email me for additional information.