Archive for category Devices
Flash Player 10.1 – Hardware Acceleration Ahoy!
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Devices, Flash Player, Industry News on October 5, 2009
Some key announcements around our work with Qualcomm and NVIDIA with Flash Player 10.1, the version number for our new desktop and mobile runtime. Some would argue (and I’m sure some did) that if .1 means only incremental changes then we should have called it Flash 11! The work that has gone into this runtime, we have doubled the number of supported platforms including Symbian, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
It’s a huge investment made possible by the incredible talent that is Adobe’s Flash Engineering team. Let’s see the Silverlight team rock something like that out!
One of the biggest challenges has been performance for constrained devices. GPU acceleration and optimizations by ARM, Intel and our OEM partners have enabled us to create a better player, one that uses less RAM, less battery and renders faster on constrained devices.
Don’t you just love the Open Screen Project??
A big round of applause for our engineering teams!
Google joins the Open Screen Project
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Android, Devices, Flash Player, Industry News on October 5, 2009
Recently you probably noticed that I’ve been working on Android a little, and for good reason of course. Though it would be easy to focus this post on Android, let’s just look at some of the places where Google use Flash today.
- Youtube
- Google Maps
- Site Search
- Web Search
- Chrome / OS
So you see Flash is everywhere at Google and we’ve been working together for years to build upon this relationship. Google joining the Open Screen Project may seem like a matter of course given our demo’s last year and given their investments in the Flash Platform.
In the past few months we’ve seen stellar device launches from HTC and Motorola using Android. Those of you with beady eyes will also have spotted others from Sony Ericsson and “others” coming down the pipe soon.
I want ALL of them, but might stick to the Hero for now.
Oh, in case they’re watching. Dear HTC, please fix the SSL certificates for Exchange email eh?
RIM joins the Open Screen Project
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Devices, Flash Player, Industry News on October 5, 2009
At Adobe MAX 2009 RIM has become the 19th of the top 20 OEMs to begin work on integrating the Flash Player on their mobile platform. This is a landmark collaboration announcement in our drive to bring the full Internet to mobile phones and devices.
Over the past few years we have seen RIM devices expand out of the business user category to become a consumer platform. Many of my friends now use the Curve for Facebook, messaging and surfing the web and they really love their phones.
That’s my guage on success:
- Do my friends own them?
- Does my mum know what a Blackberry is?
For developers the Blackberry platform currently provides a Java API and framework for easy application development. There’s no arguing that the Java runtime has enabled some great applications, and as the App World expands we’ve seen some nice content start to come in.
Our OEM engagements seem much more rounded with RIM joining, a more complete story if you will.
What can you build with Flash on Mobile Devices?
Posted by Mark Doherty in Devices, Flash Lite, Mobile Content on October 1, 2009
Dale has done a stunning job of rounding up the possibilities for Flash applications and content on devices. In summary he covers the Standalone, Browser and Personalization use cases providing examples of various applications. Rather embarrassingly I think I’ve only seen about 30% of these, so hopefully you’ll be able to get inspired by some of this great work..
Here are some samples.. and note the ridiculous hassle to build a video like this. You can see the video series here.
Contextual Applications
Posted by Mark Doherty in Adobe MAX, Devices, Flash Player on September 30, 2009
Following on from my Flash on the Beach session on Contextual App development you can hear some of the ideas and values for products that run everywhere. I thought I would skim over the first principles of Contextual Apps, which is a term you’ll hear coming out of MAX this year.
So last year we coined the term “multi-screen”, it was used to describe applications that ran on desktop-mobile-TV and the web. What we learnt is that this is confusing, and for some it alluded to write-once run anywhere. Over the past months we’ve started to fine tune this idea and build a picture of how applications are experienced, and therefore designed to run on different platforms. It turns out that screen resolution or by platform design isn’t enough because users have different intentions for each, so “Contextual apps” describes a model where the user, the platform and their location, time etc all play a part in the development of a product.
Context isn’t just about Flash, after all most Flash experiences are within the browser which is a context. Above you can see the varying interfaces and interaction models used by the New York Times company across platforms, everything from the desktop to mobile, paper to wap and passive to interactive contexts. Each of these applications is built using the same back-end services and content, but with varying business models. It’s important to recognize when Advertising is a better business model than subscription, after all, payments are contextual too.
Fanbase is an example that you are probably all familiar with by now from Atlantic Records and AgencyNet. The desktop application is a fully fledged experience including notifications, chat, audio, video and pictures. Yet in the mobile and TV versions some of these features were removed because they aren’t relevant for those contexts. In the Digital Home you are probably more interested in listening to music and watching video, it’s about understanding the passive nature of the big screen. In fact Fanbase on the desktop also has a button to change the interface into a widgetized view, reflecting the use case where a user wants to work/browse whilst connecting with their favourite artist and fans.
Even the installation is contextual, reflecting not only the application served for installation, but the HTML page used to reach to that consumer.
Here’s a sneak from our Open Screen Project Funded apps from unknown vector. uvlayer is an application that allows a user to manage their favourite content in the cloud. As a user you can store your photos, favourite videos on youtube and share your content across social media sites. The mobile version takes the context of the hardware into account, you see mobile phones are about reactive browsing and messaging. Increasingly however they are about taking photos and videos and using Nokia’s Platform Services this application is capable of uploading images and videos taken on your mobile phone.
Using Flash 10, AIR and Flash Lite 3.1 the team at uvlayer have successfully implemented an incredibly rich experience that runs across platforms, whilst really holding to the context of the application and the user.
You can see some new videos from the Open Screen Project funded contextual applications over at the new Youtube channel.
As always feel free to drop any questions in the comments box..