As we noted earlier today, Google has wasted little time getting their Cr-48 Chrome notebook machines in users’ hands. Less than two days after Google unveiled the device, there are a ton of reports of users getting them. Humorously, some people who thought they signed up for Chrome stickers are also receiving them — quite a bonus! But the Cr-48 hasn’t been a totally pleasant surprise.
A number of reports have come in saying that trying to play Flash videos and apps on the device more or less sucks. The experience ranges from buggy to not working at all, apparently. This includes YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, CNN — basically all of major video sites on the web. → Read More
I used to think that Android fanboys worked themselves into the biggest tizzy when you suggest their favorite device of the week may not be the absolute bee’s knees. I was wrong. Flash fanboys are much worse. They’re worse not only because they go absolutely ape-shit if you disrespect their platform, but also because at the end of the day at least Android fans have a leg to stand on. At least their object of love is ultimately pretty good and has a bright future. Flash? Yeah…
Adobe’s CTO paints a rosy picture of the platform. But that’s his job. The reality is what many of us see with our own eyes: Flash is a massive pain point in our day to day computing. If it’s not crashing our browsers left and right, it’s causing our computers to cook our thighs (or worse). If it’s not draining our batteries 33 percent faster, it’s opening gaping security holes. → Read More
Adobe Flash is under attack again. And you know what that means. Time for more complaining.
Today, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch spoke with Fast Company about the most recent Flash controversy the company has had to deal with. Last week, a report revealed that the lack of Flash on the new MacBook Air may save as much as 2 hours of battery life on that machine. Several subsequent reports noticed the same or similar things. Lynch’s response? “It’s a false argument to make, of the power usage. When you’re displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content.” → Read More
Nearly a year ago, Microsoft pulled together a group of reporters for Bing Fall Release event. The highlight of the presentation was a demo showing off some nifty new features in Bing Maps. The problem? All of this stuff required Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in to work. I berated the company for once again pushing users towards a more proprietary web. So today it’s time to laud them, as they seem to be backing away from that strategy.
During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising. → Read More
As we noted a few days ago, the latest stable builds of Google Chrome now come with native Flash support built-in by default. The hope behind this is to get better performance and better security out of Adobe’s plug-in. To showcase how well it works, Google has created a Flash-based game on top of YouTube, Chrome Fastball. It’s pretty nifty.
If you go to this page you YouTube, you’ll find the game. Basically, it’s a combination of a YouTube video and a task-based game that you try to complete as quickly as possible. A video starts playing showing a Rube Goldberg-like contraption. As a ball travels through it, at certain points, challenges pop up that you must complete before the video continues. One challenge is to find the best route in Google Maps, one is to tweet something (from a generic Twitter account tied to the game), one is to look up artists on Last.fm, etc. → Read More
Babbel, the language learning site, has added “realtime” speech recognition to enhance its practical application and enable users to fine-tune their pronunciation skills. This pits the service up against more traditional players such as TellMeMore or Rosetta Stone, says the company.
The speech recognition functionality was built in-house – much of the team’s background is in audio technology – although it was realised with the latest 10.1 update to Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which enables developers to access audio data captured from the user on the client-side instead of streaming to a back-end server for analysis. For realtime feedback, local processing is preferable, says Babbel, and had Adobe not offered this option, the company would need to have built its own browser plug-in, which is hardly ideal. → Read More
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced that it has formed the Tablet Task Force, a group comprised of publishing and interactive industry executives, in order to “help create an infrastructure that would support a variety of rich new advertising opportunities for the emerging technologies of tablets and e-readers”.
In reality, it’s all about the iPad, as evidenced by the focus on Apple’s device in this industry report on ‘tabvertising’ (PDF).
Also noteworthy: the IAB actively tries to kill the “myth” that lack of Flash support on the iPad is going to be a problem for advertisers, saying it “incredibly intensive on any computer to run, burning through batteries faster”. → Read More
As we all know, the battle between Flash and HTML5 for the future of online video is raging. But what about that other plugin some sites use for video? You know, the one made by Microsoft — Silverlight? A new posting tonight may call that platform’s future in video into question as well. Because arguably their most important client is looking to jump on the HTML5 video bandwagon: Netflix.
A post tonight by Adrian Cockcroft (as noticed by the blog Hacking Netflix), Netflix’s Director of Web Engineering, indicates the company’s intention to embrace HTML5 going forward. The move is apparently spurred on by Netflix’s move to Amazon’s cloud, which will require a re-architecting of the codebase, Cockcroft notes. So what better time to start supporting the latest technologies? “One of these is HTML5, which is raising the bar for cross browser support for advanced user interface features, and is now supported by a large and rapidly growing percentage of the visitors to netflix.com. In addition many TV based devices now embed webkit, which is the HTML5 compatible technology that underpins the Safari and Chrome browsers,” Cockcroft writes. → Read More
Apple hates Flash. Adobe “loves” Apple. Apple hates Android. And now, yes, Android loves Flash.
It’s widely expected that Google will unveil the latest version of Android, 2.2 (codenamed “Froyo“), at Google I/O which starts on Wednesday. The update is promising big things including huge performance improvements, tethering, and the ability to create your own WiFi hotspots with your phone. Another huge feature is expected to be the integration of Flash 10.1, a version finally optimized to run on mobile devices. And Google is apparently going to be highlighting the feature the moment you update to 2.2. → Read More
Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages. Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser (see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages.
Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.” → Read More
Steve Jobs doesn’t blog often, but when he does, it’s always entertaining. Today, Apple’s CEO has taken the time to write a 1,700 word post about why Apple (or perhaps more precisely, he) doesn’t like Adobe Flash. And why Apple doesn’t support it in new products. And more importantly, why Apple won’t support it in new products.
The post is full of great quotes (whether you agree with them or not). Jobs both directly or indirectly rips Adobe at least two dozen times. It’s hard to imagine anyone at a company, let alone the CEO, doing that. Sure, Adobe has a few times over the past several months, but that’s only because they’ve had the rug swept out from under them. And those public responses are probably the exact reason we’re seeing this response from Jobs. Here are some of the choice quotes from Jobs’ piece and a rough translation of what Jobs likely really means (just in case it’s not clear enough). → Read More
Earlier today, there was a lot of hubbub over Facebook supposedly enabling HTML5 video playback on their website. This would, of course, allow Facebook videos to be played natively within the browser on the iPad and iPhone. More significantly, it would be another big blow to Adobe’s Flash format. The only problem? These Facebook videos aren’t using HTML5 at all.
Yes, videos on Facebook do play when clicked on from the iPad or iPhone, but only ReadWriteWeb noted that this was through an h264 player (which both the iPhone and iPad have always supported), and not actually any sort of HTML5 implimentation. We’ve since confirmed this with Facebook which says, “You are correct, this is not html 5. All new videos are encoded in h264 format, so we’re playing videos natively in the iPad since it supports h264-encoded videos.” → Read More
Earlier today, Adobe and Google announced a partnership that integrates Flash right into future builds of Chrome. At a time when Flash is under fire from both Apple and HTML5 advocates, this is a huge win for the technology. But one thing that wasn’t clear from Google’s post on the matter (and Adobe’s comment to us) is what this means for the upcoming Chrome OS. So I asked.
“We plan to bring these benefits to Chrome users across all platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Google Chrome OS,” a Google spokesperson tells me. In other words, yes, this deep Flash is coming to Chrome OS. → Read More
There’s a very interesting rumor circulating around out there right now. Apparently, Google is about to announce some sort of new partnership involving its Chrome browser and Adobe’s Flash platform, CNET reported earlier today as a rumor.
Google isn’t talking, but what we’re hearing is that this could be related to the Open Screen Project that Google signed up for late last year. The project, started by Adobe a year ago, aims to give web developers a unified platform for content across a range of devices. The reason Google cares about this is its Android mobile operating system, and undoubtedly its future foray into netbooks with Chrome OS later this year. → Read More
While Apple is being lamented here and there for not supporting Flash on its shiny new iPad – boy does Cupertino have a strong dislike for the platform – Adobe has already responded to the news on the official Flash Platform blog.
The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Adobe also published a post on its Adobe Flash Platform blog addressing the apparent lack of Flash support in the iPad. → Read More
It’s no secret that Apple doesn’t like Flash. It won’t allow Flash apps to run on the iPhone or iPod Touch despite all of Adobe’s cajoling and pleading, and despite the fact that it’s long been working in the labs. The iPhone’s lack of support for Flash is a major inconvenience for both consumers and developers, and is a gaping hole in the iPhone’s arsenal.
But all of that is about to change because Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple’s blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a “Packager for iPhone” apps which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate. → Read More
A mere week after Adobe Systems reported that it would be shedding nearly 700 employees or 9% of its total worldwide workforce, the company is releasing two highly anticipated new products that have been in the works for a while: Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.
Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.
People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience. → Read More
Adobe took the wraps off its latest and most versatile version of its Flash Player to date earlier today. The newly announced Flash 10.1 software will be available “for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices, allowing content created using the Adobe Flash Platform to reach users wherever they are.” It’s kind of a big deal. Version 10.1 represents the first Flash iteration that will work on just about any computing device floating around meatspace. More importantly (at least to us) is the freshly announced support for just about every mobile OS platform on the market, except you know whose (more on that below). → Read More
Adobe’s Flash product has obviously been an integral part of the web for many years now. But it still has a major weakness when it comes search engines and complexity. While Adobe and others have been working on solutions to make Flash-based website more Google-friendly, they’re still nowhere near as crawl-able as regular HTML-based pages. FluidHTML or “Fhtml” is a new server-side markup language that hopes to merge Flash-like functionality with the easier-to-use HTML language.
Obviously, trying to create what would essentially have to be a new web standard is no small task. But the group behind Fhtml thinks they have a shot to do it because Flash is so widely used by millions of sites on the web who want a better visual appearance than HTML can offer. Aside from just Flash, Fhtml is also going up against Silverlight another Adobe framework, Flex. But Fhtml claims to be not only simpler than both Flash and Silverlight, but more powerful than Flex. → Read More
So we just got word that HTC will be the first manufacturer to bring Adobe Flash to the Android platform with the release of its new Hero / Sense device. If you needed more proof that Android is here to stay and will not sit on the sidelines in the mobile operating systems game, this is it. If you think about it, the iPhone is now the only platform with substantial weight on the market that doesn’t boast support for Flash.
With the new Flash Player 10 just around the corner and HTC officially joining the Open Screen Project, Android, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, and Palm WebOS will be among the first platforms to support full web browsing and access to virtually all Flash-based Web content. → Read More
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