The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took advantage of the early rays of the new rising sun to record. It must have been fun to watch the caffeine kick in, but the show was half over before I arrived. I’d been up late mourning the death of Flash, which finally received an auto-update from reality it couldn’t refuse.
Next for a wake-up call is… → Read More
Adobe Flash is to the smartphone as an unwanted cousin is to your wedding: necessary, yet painstaking. Apple CEO Steve Jobs seems to hate the software, neglecting to support it on all four models of the iPhone. Google’s done a better job of incorporating Flash support into the Android operating system, but still, most of the time Flash ends up being a battery killer, a security risk, not to… → Read More
The news from NBC/Universal/Comcast is that the cable giant has finally made deals with both ABC and Fox to carry selected shows on their on-demand service. This is big news for the iPad set, because all four major broadcast networks are now available in a single service, on the iPad, without Flash.
Across town we hear talk of hardware acceleration linking up with Android to make Flash finally… → Read More
I still don’t particularly like the fact that Google decided to bundle Adobe Flash with their Chrome web browser about a year ago. Apple preference aside, the last thing I want is the buggy, often insecure, and performance killing plug-in shoved in my face. More importantly, I think it’s a maneuver that will only serve to slow the transition to HTML5. But Google has their reasons. And today, we… → Read More
Earlier today, Adobe Labs released Wallaby, a way to convert simple Flash games and animations into HTML so that it is readable on “devices that do not support the Flash runtimes.” Those would be iPhones and iPads. In other words, Wallaby is Adobe’s way of bowing down to HTML5 and, by extension, to Steve Jobs who has always insisted that there is no need for Flash because HTML5 will take… → Read More
I read an interesting article this morning that suggested Apple would change its mind and put Adobe’s Flash technology on its iOS devices within a year. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
In an open letter to users, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave several reasons why he didn’t want Flash on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. They are: Flash isn’t open; the full web; reliability, security and… → Read More
Bad news for those of you who were looking forward to the release of the Motorola Xoom, the world’s first Honeycomb-based tablet. It seems that the tablet will not ship with Adobe Flash at launch, and that you’ll have to wait to sometime this spring to see proper Flash support. That’s a shame. → Read More
Adobe released version 10.2 of its Flash Player yesterday, but this bit of news may have flown under the radar. It seems that Adobe worked with AMD in order to bring hardware acceleration to Flash video—provided you’re using recent AMD hardware, of course. What could be better than hardware accelerated YouTube videos? → Read More
Earlier this week, Google wrote a very short post on their relatively small Chromium blog to announce a big change: they were dropping support for the H.264 codec in Chrome. While they may have tried to whisper it, the post resulted in a shitstorm that reached high into the heavens. It seems as if just about everyone weighed in on the decision (including us, twice).
As a result of the fallout… → Read More
Do you smell that? Just wait a second. You will.
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
The bolding is mine, but that’s Google’s actual statement as to why they’re dropping support for the H.264 video codec from the Chromium open source… → Read More
In the world of online video, there is a battle brewing over the next dominant standard for online video, especially on HTML5 Web pages. Today, Google took the gloves off and declared that it will soon stop supporting the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser. Instead, it will only support open-source technologies such as its own WebM initiative (with its VP8 codec) and the open-source Theora… → Read More
One of the big issues with Flash is that it introduces all sorts of security vulnerabilities, especially if you don’t have the latest security patches and updates. Google has chosen to embrace Flash both in its Chrome browser and Android OS (as opposed to that other company which won’t let Flash anywhere near its iPhones and iPads). But it wants to minimize the security risks posed by Flash. … → Read More
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