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

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

The Flash hate from Steve Jobs has been extremely strong over the past year or so, with Jobs pointing to Flash as the reason for a majority of application crashes. All that may be set to change with the next point release of the Adobe’s Flash Player 10.2. This demonstration video from John Nack, in a very stylish Star Trek outfit, shows of 10.2 beta using around 1/10th the CPU when playing a 1080p video.

This is achieved by shifting a lot of the processing to the GPU to give the CPU a breather. It is important to note, this is done using 64-bit hardware, which means older 32-bit macs may be out of luck, or at best see lesser improvements.

In a show-off move, Nack even demonstrates 4k video playing back on a Macbook Air, a pretty amazing feat considering the relatively low-power specs. Multiple times throughout the demonstration the audience breaks into applause, so this is clearly something users have been waiting for.

Check out the video below.

More @ Macrumors

Update 2: Apparently the Skyfire app was pulled by the developers due to technical difficulties, not Apple. 

Update: It seems Apple has pulled the App from the Australian iTunes store. Yep, it pays to be quick on these things.

While Flash has many uses, one of the most common uses is a wrapper to embed video on websites, before now you had to jailbreak a iOS device to play any kind of flash content.

That just changed. Amazingly Apple approved a mobile browser called SkyFire which interprets flash video and allows you to tap and play that video in the native iPod app. Videos play in full screen and when your down close back to the page and place you were at.

It’s available now on the App Store for A$3.99 or $US2.99, apparently Apple still hasn’t got the memo about the currency being at parity.

Its not often that we get completely new experiences online, but today we have one. This music video clip – Professor Green – Coming To Get Me, is the first 360 degree video on YouTube. We’ve all seen 360 panoramas for house displays, motel rooms that sort of thing before, but they’ve all been stationary.

The video uses a camera (or multiple) to film all 360 degrees of action, presenting a unique challenge for the director. Not only is there action in front of the camera, but rather all around it. The sense of being able to control the camera and in turn your experience in the video clip is an amazingly unique offering.

It can be a little disorientating to get used to at first, but after a while your brain adjusts and you can enjoy it for the wonderful piece of technological art that it is. Strangely its built in Adobe’s flash, rather than the typical Quicktime VR used for 360 degree stills.

Definitely check it out @ http://www.youtube.com/doritosuk

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/

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