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

There seems to be lot of curiosity around Flash Lite 4, especially since Adobe is not spending any marketing efforts to promote it. In our opinion, Flash Lite 4 is an excellent solution for embedded devices since Flash 10 will be too ‘heavy’ given the limitations of CPU and memory for embedded devices. Flash Lite 4 offers the same portability that Flash Lite/FLDH offered (i.e. can be ported to Linux Framebuffer for example),  H.264 acceleration is easier to implement and there are very restrictions on what can be done with FL4. (Flash 10 must be a plug-in in contrast). You could easily have an API based version of FL4 that suites your requirements and do fancy things with it. ......continue reading

Youtbube API blog posted by John Harding suggests that Youtube has no intention to switching to HTML5 to serve youtube videos. The blog post goes onto list several shortcomings of HTML5 that prevents Youtube from making a switch and suggests that youtube will stick with Flash for some time - especially now that Flash has announced that it will support VP8 codec in future Flash releases. DRM, streaming, microphone/camera support, video embedding- stuff that Youtube lives off- all seems to go in favor of Flash. ......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

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

Much is being debated about HTML5 replacing Flash and doomsday is coming for Flash so on. My take on this is that HTML5 does not stand a chance to replace Flash in the short and medium term. Long term? Who knows- that’ll depend on how fast HTML5 can overcome some of its deficiencies, how browsers evolve and how Silverlight and JavaFX plays out. ......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

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

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