Macromedia Brings Flash to AIM
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Macromedia has updated Central 1.5, codenamed "Gemini", to link up with America Online's AOL Instant Messenger service through a free software development kit. Gemini is the lynchpin of Macromedia's strategy to integrate Flash content with the desktop.
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InfoWorld - Opera Software&#39;s plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction.
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A special version of Macromedia&#39;s Contribute Web publishing desktop application is designed to automate and simplify the creation and modification of EBay Stores.
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The company releases new applications aimed at amateur photographers and video shooters.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23 - Macromedia has introduced a new addition to the Flex product line, Flex Builder, a product designed to accelerate all aspects of rich Internet application development including interface
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Macromedia is offering a new version of its Contribute 3 software that will make it easier for eBay sellers to create custom eBay stores.
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Adobe Integrated Runtime paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR
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Your copy of the Flash player is likely to be buggy and dangerous. Update it now and be sure to remove the older versions first.
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InfoWorld - Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems on Thursday is launching CSS Advisor, a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions.
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Blog: Adobe Systems issues three critical security updates designed to address vulnerabilities in its Flash Player.
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A few days after Microsoft released its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in, Adobe Systems has begun to disclose new features in its upcoming Flash Media Server 3. Many observers see Silverlight as being positioned as a major competitor to Flash and Adobe&#39;s other media technologies.
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Capitalizing on the rapid adoption of its Flex presentation server, Macromedia Inc. is rolling out a new integrated development environment for the platform based on the popular Dreamweaver Web site tool.
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Company hopes to boost use of its Flash format for delivering streaming video with new development kit.
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(InfoWorld) - Adobe Systems' Flash video, the format that made Web video a hit, is coming to mobile phones. On Monday at theÂ 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe announced video will be included in Flash Lite 3, the next version of the Flash runtime environment for mobile phones. Licensees should be able to get the new software in the second quarter of this year, and Adobe hopes consumers will see it in action by year's end, said Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for mobile and devices at Adobe. Adding video to Flash Lite will simplify the process of creating and distributing mobile video, which now forces mobile operators to use a fragmented set of special tools, according to Adobe. "The same video tools they use for delivering Web content can be used for delivering mobile content as well," Murarka said. Although relatively few mobile users are watching video on their phones today in most countries, carriersÂ and entertainment companies are starting to bet bigger on the new medium. Last week, a division of Time Warner signed a deal with Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson for use of the company's technology to deliver news and cartoons, and U.S. operator Amp'd Mobile signed on Hollywood partners to create original mobile shows. The drive to put short video programs on tiny cell-phone screens follows the exploding popularity of short, relatively low-quality clips on Web sites such as Google's YouTube that use Flash video. With the upcoming version of Flash Lite, carriers and content companies will be able to use the same Flash server for mobile as for Web video as well as the same streaming protocol and the same encoding tools and processes, Murarka said. Videos probably would have to be resized for small handset screens but would not have to be completely re-encoded, he said. This will make it easier and faster to get shows onto handsets, he said. Flash Lite videos can be presented in a variety of forms, including streaming video, downloadable clips, and screen savers, and within Flash-based applications, according to Adobe. In addition, because the video capability is part of Flash Lite, it will be easier to integrate it with software for using video, such as channel selectors and play, reverse and fast-forward controls, he added. More than 200 million phones have been shipped with Flash, Adobe said Monday. That includes both Flash Lite and FlashCast, a client-server platform that lets carriers send content to phones in the background so subscribers can use it even outside the network's coverage area. About 120 million of those Flash phones shipped in 2006, and that was the first year when a majority of them -- about 70 percent -- were sold outside Japan, Murarka said. Japan's NTT DoCoMo was an early adopter of the technology, delivering a FlashCast news and information service called i-channel, which has more than 8 million subscribers, according to Adobe. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Opera Software's plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction. At present, Web developers have no consistent way to deliver media-rich content to the unlimited variety of platforms and browsers used by surfers worldwide. Using client- and server-side scripting, Web developers can divine which browser and operating system a user is running, but that's of little help. Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and the rest all require plug-ins, also known as Browser Helper Objects, to present content that's richer than W3C standards demand. Media player plug-ins, with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime leading the category, are not consistently implemented across platforms. Each has its own style for wiring into browsers, its own terribly annoying traits, and its own set of proprietary formats that the others can't play, and yet each wants to take control of in-browser media playback when it's installed. And while all of these players have the ability to mix text, video, audio, scripting, and GUI interaction, these features are hardly ever used. Media players are used to play video and audio, and user interaction and scripting are handled in the browser with decidedly mixed results. Only Adobe Flash Player touches all the bases: vector graphics, scalable text, animation, audio, video, and scripting, and it rolls all of these types into a single document that's played by one widely accepted plug-in. Flash Player is smooth and responsive enough to handle interactive games, and encoding video for Flash allows developers to embed a unique GUI into the video. Windows Media, RealPlayer, and QuickTime don't hit that "one for all" sweet spot. But Flash is still a plug-in, large and highly demanding of computer resources, and while its platform coverage is broader than others, it's far from ubiquitous. Flash Player's girth leaves it notably absent from mobile devices, and that's where a common solution for rich, interactive multimedia documents is most needed. Flash Player is well distributed, but the superlative Opera platform-native full browser solution is everywhere: Windows, Solaris, QNX, OS X, OS/2, Linux (SPARC, PowerPC, and x86), FreeBSD, and BeOS, as well as the three most popular feature/smartphone platforms, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and UIQ. Opera offers consumer electronics vendors a browser for embedded and set-top use as well. Opera is ubiquitous, but even it can't control what happens when a user clicks a link to a media file. Opera Software has decided to attack this issue head-on, promising to implement Flash-like rich, scripted multimedia document functionality directly in its browsers. That's a bold and potentially market-changing move. If Web developers can count on one browser consistently implementing rich multimedia playback, they might steer users toward that browser rather than pointing them to various required plug-ins. Of course, that's precisely what Opera Software is hoping for; Opera is commercial software, and hooking sites on its built-in Flash-like player would drive sales. But that's par for the course: Flash Player, like Apple, Microsoft, and Real plug-ins, is distributed free of charge to pull sites, users, and content creators into tools and premium services, and in Microsoft's case, to Windows. With Adobe open-sourcing its ActionScript JavaScript interpreter, and various open source projects aiming to clone or rival the functionality of Flash Player, Opera Software won't be the only game in town on desktops. But Opera has a shot at locking up the mobile market, freeing users from the proprietary, format-locked players that wireless operators burn into mobile phone firmware and hook to their browsers. One place where Adobe, Opera Software, and open source multimedia players can't go is the one place they're needed most: Apple's iPhone. Apple's decision to keep iPhone closed to third-party applications, despite its OS X underpinnings, means that iPhone is all about writing Web sites that target the Safari browser and play files encoded for QuickTime media formats. Apple's decision to lock developers inside Safari might be more tolerable if Apple were to broaden Safari along the lines that Opera Software intends for its browser. With Safari extending its reach to Windows, embedding Flash-like functionality in Safari would open the door to a great many possibilities for the sort of rich, interactive on-line (and off-line â Flash is competent for a limited range of desktop applications) content that would otherwise require the use of native code. In time, inclusive, cross-platform Flash or Flash-like rich multimedia document player technology will spread to cover all popular desktop, mobile, and consumer electronics platforms. It will happen because mobile and consumer electronics are green fields for a one-for-all rich multimedia document technology. It's a matter of who gets there first and who snags the greatest mind share. Vendors that decide to stay proprietary, who don't start developing or partnering toward the goal of a cross-platform Flash-style player, will find themselves behind the pack among users who want to take their video, audio, games, and lightweight applications on the road without being limited to a vendor or wireless operator's chosen player.
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At least someone likes Eclipseâ¦ Interview Along with Scott Guthrie, Mark Anders was one of the fathers of ASP.NET. Then he led the Flex Builder team at Macromedia. Now at Adobe, heâs in charge of making Flash a development platform for rich Internet applications.â¦
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Adobe announced Monday that Adobe Flash Lite 3, scheduled for release in the first half of 2007, will include the capability to watch videos, bringing all the features of Adobe Flash Player to mobile devices equipped with the software.