Adobe focusing on HTML5, ending mobile Flash Player dev
Posted Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 7:20 am by Jason Cartwright
Adobe announced overnight a major shift in direction for their mobile division.
Danny Winokur, Vice President & General Manager, Interactive Development at Adobe says:
Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.
However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
I find the timing of this change to be quite puzzling. Our mobile devices are now more powerful than ever, with dual core processors. This change seems more like a cost cutting method, rather than one built on solid technical grounds.
Given that there’s not a 1 to 1 replacement of features from Flash Mobile to HTML5, the decision is bizarre. While the majority of mobile Flash Player usage may have been as a video wrapper, which is solved by HTML5’s <video> tag, there’s a lot that isn’t. Developers will now need to develop Adobe AIR or compile to native apps for each platform. It seems premature in my mind, what do you think ?
The comments on the post have now been closed, it seems this decision is fairly controversial.
More @ Adobe
Flash Player 11.2 will do background updates, like Chrome.
Posted Monday, October 31, 2011 at 11:08 am by Jason Cartwright
If you’re constantly annoyed at update messages from Adobe’s Flash Player, there’s an end in sight. Flash Player 11.2 beta includes a new feature.. background updates. This means (if you choose) that Adobe will simply update Flash in the background, meaning your always up to date and avoid any of those pesky security flaws.
This background updating and hassle-free experience has been one of Google Chrome’s greatest features. Now if only Sun Microsystems would implement this with Java, we could all avoid the nearly daily updates from them.
This is clearly a new direction more and more software will move to. Users aren’t interested in maintaining a system, most just want it to work. Microsoft also use essentially the same model with automatic Windows Updates, avoiding user-interruptions. The downside of an automated system is the potential for a bad update to break the application or in this case plugin. While there’s always small issues in software, most large-scale companies use extensive testing to avoid this from occurring.
Overall I think it’s a great change in direction for Adobe and the benefits of simplicity and security, far outweigh any potential risks.
More @ Adobe Labs
64-bit Adobe Flash Player “Square” now available
Posted Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 5:12 am by Jason Cartwright
For many, many years there’s been a 64-bit version of Internet Explorer available to users. The problem is that there was no 64-bit version of Flash Player, this meant your experience online was so broken that nobody really used it. This all changes today with Adobe’s release of a new 64-bit Flash player preview dubbed "Square”.
As well as being 64-bit, Square also has enhanced support for Microsoft’s latest announcement – IE9 beta.
Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support — Enhanced support for Internet Explorer 9 Beta. It takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9 Beta, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.
The need for a 64-bit browser would currently be a pretty narrow use case, but as we move to more and more complex applications arriving in the browser, this may become very useful going forward. As many people know 64-bit OS’s great advantage is to take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM.
A number of service providers are now offering online spreadsheets, these include Google Docs and Office Live to name a few. Transforming large and complex calculations are currently something reserved for the desktop, but its entirely possible to see a future where online spreadsheets become just as capable as their local counterparts. This scenario would lend itself to being able to access further hardware acceleration via a 64-bit enabled browser.
Video editing online isn’t yet a serious option, but many suspect its just a matter of time. The image editing available via web apps of today, seemed impossible even 12 months ago. So what if there was a video editing application in the browser that could tap into local hardware resources. What would more interesting is if the load could be shared between server-side and local processing.
With the ‘need’ for a 64-bit browser is really a couple of years away, its important we get started on development now, so the browser and plugins aren’t the limiting factor in web / software development. The Square preview is available for all platforms – PC, Mac and Linux.
More @ http://labs.adobe.com/
Adobe CS5 now available
Posted Friday, April 30, 2010 at 3:03 pm by Jason Cartwright
The latest suite of multimedia development applications are now available from Adobe. Including upgraded versions of the popular Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, Flash and many, many more you can choose to buy straight up or grab the trial versions for 30 days.
Be careful with the trial, there were issues with CS4 trials not being able to roll back to CS3, hopefully these have been resolved, but best to avoid using trials on a production machine.
Adobe CS5 upgrade pricing is essentially the same as it was from CS3 to CS4 Master Collection, A$1,503 inc GST, with the full version costing a massive A$4,344 inc GST. For that you do get Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CS5, InDesign CS5, Acrobat 9 Pro, Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder 4, Dreamweaver CS5, Fireworks CS5, Contribute CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (with Adobe OnLocation™ CS5 and Encore CS5), After Effects CS5, Soundbooth CS5.
A new requirement this time round is for a 64-bit Operating System. As we know the main benefit of running 64-bit is to access more RAM, the Adobe products will use all the resources you have to perform tasks faster, so if you weren’t already, it’s time to go 64-bit.
Personally, I’ll check out the trials before laying down the cash for the upgrade, but based on what I’ve seen there’s a good chance I’ll be making the move. The decision to upgrade is a very personal one, with the list of new features studied intently and weighed up using a cost benefits analysis in most businesses. It’s important to remember Adobe runs on a release cycle of around 18 months between versions, so holding off for a year will reduce the time you have to benefit from this version.
Individuals should look towards the Elements versions of the products. These are much more affordable for the home user, however functionality is reduced. These also run on a different release schedule than the CS5 suite, so you may have to wait a few months for new features.
More @ Adobe
Adobe shows off Flash/AIR on the HP slate
Posted Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 7:14 am by Jason Cartwright
The last time we seen the HP slate was during Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech at CES. Information has been so scarce that many were starting to call it vapourware. With no confirmed ship date, specs or price, it’s easy to understand why, especially with it’s greatest competitor – the Apple iPad only a month away from shipping.
Adobe shows off the HP slate running Flash in the browser, based on 10.1, it makes use of GPU acceleration to reduce CPU cycles. Also showcased in the video is the ability to run Adobe AIR apps in Windows 7 on the slate. These are out of browser apps that make use of the Windows 7 on-screen keyboard for input. Those familiar with the on-screen keyboard would know this is resizable so as to adjust to your hand size.
Update
There’s now an embeddable version on YouTube.
Watch the video @ Adobe
Adobe CS4 details released
Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 6:13 pm by Jason Cartwright
New format support – Finally AVCHD will be supported, along with P2, XDCAM EX/HD. All these will see native support, a long overdue feature that should have really been included in CS3. Some (like myself) have had to resort to work arounds, like expensive 3rd party AVCHD plugins, these will now be rendered redundant with CS4.
The current Adobe Flash Encoder has been expanded to become the Adobe Media Encoder. This should be great for podcasters and video producers in general that provide their content in multiple formats. A set and forget (likely overnight) background task will batch render jobs. Ideally this would be complimented by allowing FTP uploads on completion for the ultimate unattended render job.
Searchable Audio
If you’ve ever tried to find a specific section of the audio during the editing process, you’ve likely spent a long time srubbing through the audio, assuming this feature works as advertised, you’ll now be able to search for a word and the location(s) in the audio track will be identified. Effectively reducing editing time. Any improvements in this area are most welcome.
If you like to apply the same effect to multiple clips, let’s say a dissolve at the start and end of each clip, this has been a very manual task of dragging the effect to the top and tail of each clip. Something very time consuming when u have elements numbering in the hundreds. CS4 ads the ability to apply a default transition to multiple selected clip with a single command, another great time-saving addition.
Multi-track editing
This provides the ability to work on multiple tracks separately, so if your working with vocals, music, etc and want to apply effects and adjustments, these can now be done per layer in CS4. While SoundBooth is the baby brother of Adobe Audition, one of the key features that was left out of SoundBooth was multi-track editing, CS4 remedies this.
Adobe have created a new file format to support the new multi-layer / multi-track audio format. Adobe Sound Document or ASND for short.
This works as outlined above in Premiere CS4.
Audio editing and especially exporting the final product is very much a trial and error process. CS4 allows users to preview how the MP3 compression will sound before exporting, saving time.. I’m detecting a common theme among these improvements – saving time.
New to CS4 is support to paint 3D objects directly inside Photoshop. While details on format support is currently lacking, it’s listed as ‘common 3D formats’. Take from that what you will.
This actually fairly impressive technology that lets you stretch images without distorting important elements in the photo. The example shown is people on a beach, the sand and sea are stretched to widen the image, yet the people are not. This lets the image scale, perhaps to fit a specific area, without visibly distorting the people (which would be very noticeable).
Objects can now be rotated in the 3rd dimension. A natural evolution to being able to create and animate objects in the X and Y co-ordinates, Adobe Flash CS4 ads the Z axis. I’m assuming this can also be accessed via ActionScript. While much of the functionality of Director has been replaced by Flash, the single point of difference has been Flash’s lack of 3D tools, could this spell the end for Director completely ?
Inverse Kinetics (or kinematics) relates to the intelligent connection of joints on 2 or more objects. A simply example would be the limbs of the human body. Elbows and Knee joints for example can’t rotate past a certain point, to bend the arm or leg further, rotation of another joint needs to occur. IK respects this and applies motion based on these restrictions. A great addition for those animating people or equipment.
Another efficiency-focused feature, Motion presets allows commonly created animations to be applied to objects quickly, currently this requires creating the same effect each time from scratch. Created motion presets can also be shared with others.
