I intended to write this post last month. But because the last two months were so busy, in the end I could find neither the time nor the energy to write. So here I go with my first post in 2012 that partially talks about 2011.

Speaking of the previous year, I’d like to extend a big thank you to all my readers and followers. Knowing that people will read your posts and send feedback is like fuel for engines. Next, I’d like to say thank you and applaud all the community leaders who worked so hard to organize events. I know firsthand the hard work needed to put together an event. You guys did an amazing job in 2011. I feel both proud and lucky being able to be part of some of the events you organized around the world.

People asked me what the highlights of 2011 were for me. Many things come to mind, but once I boiled them down they distilled  down to only two:

1. Adobe AIR and Flex demonstrated that development for multiple mobile platforms can be both fun and efficient. Indeed, what started as a promise back in 2010 grew to an amazing platform in less than a year.
2. Adobe increased investment and effort in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The last part of 2011 only accelerated a process that started long ago and produces things like: CSS Regions and Exclusions, CSS Shaders, Dreamweaver support for jQuery and PhoneGap, contributions to WebKit and jQuery Mobile. The PhoneGap and Typekit acquisitions cemented these trends and set up a perfect scene for more things to come moving forward.

What about me (I know, I know it’s a bit too much :D)? Well, I couldn’t be happier to tell you the truth! I am still having the time of my life and enjoy every bit of my job :) I’ve been doing evangelism for almost four years and I’m looking forward to many more. However 2012 marks a change regarding what my focus will be: I will focus more and more on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. And I have to confess that I’m excited. First, because this is how I started to make money programming years ago (HTML/JavaScript/CSS and server-side technologies). And second, I think Adobe is extremely well positioned on moving forward the web standards and HTML authoring/services tools.

What about Flex, AIR, and Flash Player? Despite what some people are saying I think they will be doing great. The runtimes are pushed harder and harder because Adobe wants to make the Flash Platform the game console of the web. This means that even if you are not in the gaming industry your Flash apps will benefit. What about Flex? I think the Flex framework is mature, it has a great community around it, and it is used for big enterprise projects and consumer apps. Having said that I think that the Flex framework will be relevant as long as the community wants it to be. Because if the community doesn’t believe in it and stops using it then it doesn’t matter what Adobe does and who’s behind it. I will surely keep an eye on what you guys will be doing :).

I wish you a Happy New Year!

We just launched the Adobe Touch Apps part of the Adobe Cloud. You will find the six apps in the Android Market with one of them being available for iOS too (iOS versions will follow). Just as a quick reminder the six apps are: Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, Photoshop Touch, and Proto.

I think this is great because it was about time we had more apps for tablets that can be used to create digital content. So far developers and companies were extremely good at creating apps for consuming existing content on tablets. As I said many times it is a pity not to be able to create content on your tablet device. I think that with the Adobe Touch apps we are going in the right direction: you can start working on a prototype while you are commuting and all you have is your tablet. Once you get to your computer you can continue your work on the same file. And the synch process between your computer and tablets devices is transparent; it happens auto-magically.

You can read more about these apps here.

We just released Flash Player 11.2 Beta and Adobe AIR 3.2 Beta on Adobe Labs. The main features for this release are:

Multi-threaded video decoding (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) — The video decoding pipeline is now fully multi-threaded. This feature should improve the overall performance on all platforms. Note that this feature is a significant architecture change required for other future improvements.

Flash Player background updates (Windows) — New versions of the runtimes can now be delivered more effectively to the end user with this enhanced updating mechanism (Background update is only available in the release versions of Flash Player).

From the release notes some additional info on the multi-threaded video decoding feature:

Multi-threaded pipeline was written grounds up to support lower end devices and full hardware stacks where all the decoding and rendering isoffloaded to hardware. The benefits of the modernization of the pipeline would be visible from mobile devices, tvs, netbooks to high end desktops.In Flash Player 11.2, the new video pipeline is available for desktop platforms (including netbooks ) and brings enhancements with respect to:

• Eliminating jitter seen occasionally in some encoding and typically in live streams and real time interactive scenarios.
• Gains in frame rate by reducing dropped frames as much as 50% on certain platforms with high bit rate content.
• Seek frame accuracy.
• High resolution/bit rate content decoding would still keep the player UI responsive and any background ActionScript processing going,which earlier could have experienced brief halts because all the decoding and player UI/ActionScript resided on the main thread. For HTTP streaming, ActionScript is the control point of fetching the stream data and delivering to the video stack. On seek, earlier thestreaming would halt, while the frames up to the point of seek would be getting decoded. With multithreaded video decoding, not onlywould the seek be more responsive, but it would also start playback faster after seek.
• 50+ fixes as part of the modernization of the video pipeline architecture

Is this cool or what?

MAX 2011 was the sixth MAX for me and I have to admit it was by far the most interesting to attend. Judging by the discussions I was involved in or I overheard while being at MAX, I think that this is a feeling many share.

Fellow evangelists Ryan Stewart, Mark Doherty, Greg Wilson, and Michael Chaize already wrote about MAX so I won’t reiterate all of the news and announcements. However, I want to highlight some of the things I consider quite important.

Adobe Touch Apps

I’ve been arguing for a while that (1) tablets are not just bigger smartphones and (2) tablets could be used for more than just consuming digital content. So you can imagine how happy I was when I first heard about Adobe Touch Apps.

Adobe Touch Apps is a suite of applications that works on tablets and enables you to create and share content:

1. Adobe Photoshop Touch – the name says all, doesn’t it? But make sure you check the video because you’ll be surprised by how powerful this app is.
2. Adobe Ideas – a digital sketchbook for artists.
3. Adobe Collage – create moodboards with ease. You can search for images, bring them into the app, and modify.
4. Adobe Proto – this product has a good amount of magic. Using simple gestures you can create wireframes or interactive prototypes. In a matter of seconds you can add a header, a content area, a menu, pictures, and text
5. Adobe Kuler – Kuler has been around for some time (2007 to be precise). It is the little app that helps you find colors that work together. There is a large community who adds new swatches. Once you find a theme you can easily customize the colors.
6. Adobe Debut – helps you to share design/digital content created with Creative Suite anywhere right on your tablet.

You can find here a number of videos that show these apps in action.

As I said at the beginning of this section I’m glad to see apps for tablets that help people to create content on the go. However there is another thing that this suite is trying to address: device fragmentation. But first, let me present you the high-level vision. We announced a new initiative called Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe Touch Apps is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud along with other services (such as Adobe Digital Publishing, Business Catalyst, and Typekit) and products (such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Edge).

And one of the many benefits of these offerings is the seamless cross device synchronization. In other words you can take a picture with your phone or tablet and then open up your desktop or laptop and you will find the picture there. The bits are moving magically from one device to another (well you do need a Internet connection for this :D).

Stay tuned and early November you will find Adobe Creative Cloud prices.

HTML and Adobe

We talked a lot about HTML at Adobe this year. I bet you couldn’t believe the acquisition announcements of Nitobi/PhoneGap and Typekit :) However this is only one part of what we are doing at Adobe for the HTML world. These add to work around jQuery Mobile (last year we announced that we will contribute to jQuery Mobile), tooling for HTML5 (the Edge project and Wallaby are just two examples of new initiatives that complete Dreamweaver CS5.5 support for HTML5/CSS3).

So as you can see the work Adobe is doing around HTML5 is pretty significant and has reached the point where people from outside Adobe or Adobe’s community recognize this.

One aspect that is fast growing is the work Adobe does in moving web standards forward. Let me step back and tell you a short story. Back in 2007, Adobe AIR (called Apollo back then) saw the lights for the first time. And from the beginning we wanted to build a new runtime that would appeal to all web developers. What technology did developers use for building amazing websites and applications? JavaScript and ActionScript. Thus Adobe AIR brought support for both technologies. And the JavaScript/HTML/CSS support was made possible by including the WebKit engine in the AIR runtime.

Of course, we had to extend the WebKit engine in order to have the same APIs/capabilities as we had in ActionScript. For example to have access to the hard disk, to write/read encrypted data, SQLite support, camera and microphone access, and so forth (does this sound familiar? :D).

By doing this, our engineers became experts in WebKit. Fast forward to 2010 and we announced the CSS Regions proposal. Our engineers provided an implementation for this feature for WebKit. And this year we have two Adobe engineers who obtained the WebKit committer status. This is something great and I am proud to say I’m a friend of these two guys. I hope to see them getting the WebKit reviewer status :).

As the work with CSS Regions was moving on nicely, Adobe engineers didn’t stop here. At MAX 2011 we showed a new CSS feature that we are working on called CSS Shaders. Working with Apple and Opera we already submitted this proposal to W3C. Go here and watch the videos.

I have to admit that first time Alex showed me this (he’s one of the two Adobe WebKit committers) in action I was sure it was just some Flash application. When he told me that it is, actually, a modified WebKit and some CSS and JavaScript I was speechless.

So yeah, I think it is safe to say that Adobe “gets” HTML and we have lots of proof for this. And I know more things will come in the near future so stay tuned.

Flash Platform

Despite what others might think, my personal belief is that the Flash platform had an amazing year in 2011. With AIR 3, I think we have one of the best solutions for building mobile apps across devices and operating systems. The Native Extension feature makes it possible to extend the runtime and have access to all the other APIs available on the device right from your ActionScript code. The upcoming version of Flex, 4.6, will extend the support for mobile components and improve the performance.

With Stage Video and Stage 3D (Stage 3D is available only on desktops for now) you can build amazing applications that can handle video, sound, and complex 3D content. So playing Unreal Tournament in a browser through Flash Player became a reality.

What about new stuff? Well, take a look at these two sessions about the future of Flash Player from MAX: Flash Platform roadmap and What’s new in the Flex SDK. Workers (concurrency), a new Flex compiler, better tooling support (Flash Builder), and an amazing telemetry tool for profiling the release SWFs (Monocle) are things we are working on.

HTML and Flash

Last week I had an interesting discussion with two community leaders in the airport (hey guys, I hope your trip back home was fine :) ). And they were asking me about the future of Flash and what Adobe will do (they are first and foremost Flash guys). The main reason for all these questions was how the keynotes were perceived.

Since then, I thought more on this and watched again the keynotes. My personal belief is that all the effort Adobe puts in both HTML and Flash will actually serve developers and designers independently of what their first choice is. Joseph Labrecque has a good post on MAX 2011 and what some felt right there when everything was still hot.

Let me explain why. First, Adobe will be able to provide the best tools and frameworks for both technologies. If you are a developer or a business owner who uses Adobe technologies you’ll find easier to pitch your solutions. Clients would not see you as someone who only cares and knows only HTML or Flash. You’ll be able to propose the best technology for each project/client need. Definitely, this makes our life as Adobe evangelists much easier. Instead of being pushed into a defensive stance or fighting to be credible now we can just focus on the two sides of the stories.

Second, if you take a look at the history of Flash and how Flash relates to HTML it has already been about Flash doing stuff that wasn’t possible just with HTML. And the relation between these two was “AND” and not “OR”. “OR” implies that there can be only one choice. “And” means that they will co-exist. Some people after watching the keynotes they left with an “OR” in their hearts.

Third, if you are a guy who’s been building interactive content with the Flash platform then you are incredibly well positioned. Because you already know how to design and choreograph great content and apps. Without these skills all the JavaScript and HTML5 knowledge in the world can’t do much.

In reality for the foreseeable future the Flash platform will still be able to do things that are either impossible or more expensive with HTML. Certainly amazing 3D capabilities seems to be the main Flash usage. But let’s not forget about all the other goodies (improved Flex framework and Flash Builder, concurrency, and a faster compiler). These are things that will help developers who build interactive applications for desktop or mobile to be more efficient while building better apps than today.

Conclusions

I think 2012 will be an even more interesting year. Personally, I can’t wait. I’m so looking forward to see what people will build using AIR 3 and Native Extensions. I can’t wait for Stage 3D on mobile.

Second, yes you will be seeing us talking more and more about HTML and the things we are doing here at Adobe. Fellow evangelist Ryan Stewart already started working with PhoneGap. I’m doing the same. Actually, I hope to port one of my mobile apps to PhoneGap this month to better understand this platform.

At the same time, we are still working on the Flash side as hard as ever. Right now, I’m working with Ryan on the content for a European tour about Flex mobile development. We will hit about 9 different locations all over Europe. Once we have set up everything we will post all the details (by the way a big thank you to all the people from the community who are making this tour possible). So stay tuned and try to attend if you happen to be around of one of the locations.

Finally, I want to add that with each year I enjoy Adobe MAX more and more. It has to do with the feeling of family/community. There are thousands of people over there and from all over the world. And still you bump into someone who built something you knew or who read something your wrote or used/extended your code. This year I met people from South America, North America, and Europe. Actually there were lots of Europeans. To all of you, thank you for your time, and the friendly and insightful discussions. Looking forward to meeting you next year :)

Later this week Adobe MAX 2011 will be officially opened. Last week I blogged about some of the sessions and labs that will be focusing on mobile development. This week I wanted to highlight some sessions that are built around specific devices.

Adobe AIR and TVs (Samsung and LG)

Televisions are getting smarter and smarter. This means that you (individual developer or company/agency) have a great opportunity to build the killer apps people will want to buy or use on their latest generation TVs. If you want to find out more about what you can do and how, bookmark these sessions:

• Creating Apps in 2D or 3D for the LG Cinema 3D and Smart TV Platform – Learn how you can unlock opportunities in the multibillion-dollar TV market by discovering how to create 2D and 3D apps for the largest screen in the home. Be the first to see a 3D app created for LG’s Cinema 3D Smart TV platform using Adobe AIR, and learn how the LG Smart TV developer program can allow you to capitalize on this rapidly growing market segment.
• Developing the Samsung Smart TV Application with Adobe AIR for TV – Join the Samsung team for an introduction to the Samsung Smart TV platform. Hear about how to make AIR for TV applications for Samsung Smart TV and how to deploy to Samsung Smart TV. Adobe AIR for TV 2.5 is available to developers on 2011 Samsung Smart TV models, and the Samsung TV application software development kit (SDK) integrates support for Adobe AIR for TV 2.5.

Sony Android Tablets

Sony announced this summer two Android based tablets that will be shipped later on this year. This was a surprise for many as this marks the first time that Sony has built a tablet that uses Android. At MAX you can attend these two sessions:

• Adobe AIR App Demo Showcase for Sony Tablet Devices – Watch live demos of innovative applications built by your peers that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the new Android Sony Tablet devices. Hear the developers talk about their experience using Adobe AIR to develop their apps for a single-screen and a dual-screen Sony Tablet. Learn more about Sony Tablet features and how you can win up to US$130,000 for your breakthrough app by entering the Adobe AIR App Challenge, sponsored by Sony (www.airappchallenge.com).
• Optimizing your Adobe AIR app for Sony Android tablets – See live demos exploring the unique features in the new Sony Tablets and demonstrating how to develop your Adobe AIR app to display on both single- and dual-screen devices. Find out about exciting opportunities on Sony’s Android tablets, including the Adobe AIR App Challenge, sponsored by Sony (www.airappchallenge.com), which offers developers US$200,000 in cash prizes, premium promotion on Sony Tablet, prerelease tablet access, and more.

BlackBerry PlayBook

To date, the PlayBook is one of my favorite tablets that money can buy. And one of the things that make this tablet special is that you have multiple ways to create your application, from HTML to ActionScript/Flex. Here are some related sessions:

• BlackBerry Webworks SDK for Tablet OS – Transform your existing web content into a fully featured standalone application for the BlackBerry PlayBook using the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS. You’ll discover how to leverage supported technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and Adobe Flash to produce visually stunning, highly functional applications for PlayBook that can integrate with the underlying Tablet OS. Take away the skills and resources needed to create PlayBook applications using the WebWorks SDK.
• Creating Amazing Video Experiences on the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet – Learn how BlackBerry Tablet OS developers can leverage the rich multimedia capabilities of the BlackBerry platform to create compelling video experiences that attract users. Presenters will discuss video encoding strategies, streaming options, DRM support, output control, and media events. Topics covered include a video API overview, BlackBerry Tablet OS multimedia architecture, and video application demonstrations.

NOOK Color

NOOk Color from Barnes & Noble is one of the hot devices on the market – the content, distribution, Android OS, and demographics all make this device special. Well, if you live here in Europe not so much :D. At MAX you can learn more about this ecosystem:

• The App Opportunity with Barnes & Noble – Bring your rich content to the leading monetization platform for Android — NOOK Apps by Barnes & Noble. This session will focus on the business opportunity, market demographics, and advantages of publishing Adobe Flash and AIR based apps for NOOK Color. Make sure to stop by the NOOK developer booth to attend one of our 50-minute workshops on development of NOOK apps and for a chance to win a NOOK Color.

Motorola

If you ever developed a mobile application you know that building the app is just one of a long list of the check points you have to complete. And arguably it is the easiest to check too (thanks to Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash Builder I’d say). One question I heard at many mobile events is related to application discoverability. At MAX you can learn about making your app more visible in Android Market and on Motorola smartphones and tablets:

• Get Your App Discovered: Android Market and Beyond – Join Randy Ksar, Motorola Mobility Community Manager for MOTODEV, on best practices to get your app discovered in the marketplace. Randy will cover how to optimize your Android Market listing, utilize social media as a marketing and customer feedback tool, leverage testing to improve your customer ratings, and introduce new marketing opportunities to get your app featured on Motorola Mobility smartphones and tablets.

Today Adobe announced that the next version of our runtimes, Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, will be released in early October. This is great news for all developers who rely on the Flash Platform for building desktop and mobile applications.

Just a reminder about some of the coolest new features coming with these releases:

• Stage 3D – a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering that delivers 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10. This will enable developers to create immersive experiences whether is about a first person 3D game or some 3D or 2D scenes.
• Full native 64-bit support for Flash Player on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
• Captive runtime for AIR. Developers will be able to package their AIR applications together with a specific version of the AIR runtime. This means that users won’t have to install the AIR runtime when installing your AIR application or you can protect “freeze” your application to a specific version of the runtime so you don’t have to worry about testing your app when a new runtime is out.
• Native extensions for AIR on Android, iOS, and desktop. This feature enables developers to take advantage of existing native code libraries as well as deep native hardware and OS capabilities. Using this feature you can create extensions that give access to notifications or the contact address book for example.

Gaming

If you’ve ever played games like Machinarium or Tanki Online you know that Flash Player is one of the best options out there for developers and companies who want to build online games. To help you getting the most out of the Flash Platform we created a gaming center: Adobe Gaming Solutions.

We are also announcing the Starling framework: a lightweight framework for 2D graphics and animation that combines the simplicity of Flash with the power of the Stage 3D API. It is an open source ActionScript library. Watch this particle effect with Starling and Flash Player 11:

Adobe will also soon make a 3D framework technology preview called Proscenium. This will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype apps focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections.

Mobile Apps Support

The Native Extensions feature is aimed at mobile developers. I believe that this feature was the “missing link” that stopped some people who otherwise would have chosen the Flash Platform.

Indeed being able to write native code to expose native hardware and OS features and APIs means that you can basically extend the AIR runtime from now on. So, instead of asking Adobe for support for notifications or the contact list API you can create or buy/reuse a native extension that does this.

I know many people are already working on a number of native extensions many of them taking care of some of the most popular developer requests. I hope we will have some kind of a market so people who want to build native extensions and those who want to consume them will be able to meet.

Finally, the Stage 3D API will come to mobile devices too. So this means it will be possible run even more incredible content on these devices.

What about Flex and Flash Builder

With the new version of the runtimes almost out it is only natural to ask this question: what about Flex and Flash Builder? Well, don’t worry because Flex 4.6 and Flash Builder 4.6 are coming this year too (and if you are a Flash Builder 4.5 customer you’ll get this version for free).

Flex 4.6 extends the mobile support introduced by Flex 4.5 by adding new components and better performance. Here are some of them:

SplitViewNavigator

CallOutButton

SpinnerList

DateSpinner

Toggle Switch

The other big news is the improved support for text input across devices. Flex will be using the native text input control on every platform. What does this mean for developers? It means you can customize the keyboard (having access to all supported keyboards; e.g. numeric keyboard or email keboard) and you have access to features like spell checking or cut/copy/paste.

In terms of performance, simply repackaging with Flash Builder and Flex 4.6 can boost your application performance up to 50%.

These releases will provide support for the latest operating systems like iOS 5 and the upcoming Android OS.

Also Flash Builder 4.6 will have support for monitoring network traffic and unit testing for mobile projects.

Download

You can download the release candidates from Adobe Labs.

If you do the math, you’ll see that it has been almost three months from the previous updates of the runtimes, Flex, and Flash Builder. This is not much time, and yet the teams were able to add lots of new features. So I think they deserve a big round of applause! Well done guys!

The Flash Platform as a compelling mobile solution across devices is enjoying an excellent momentum. I’m getting and seeing more and more Flash powered mobile apps. While this is interesting and cool this not what I want to focus on in this post.

Most people think about the Flash Platform for mobile as something that enables developers to build mobile apps for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS. What it is not so evident is it’s versatility: you can build almost whatever you want. And when I say this I mean it. You can build sophisticated games (and soon you will be able to build cool 3D games thanks to Stage3D), you can build beautiful apps for enterprise or consumer brands, you can build high performance apps for consumers, and the list can go on and on.

The last big thing that was a show stopper for some projects is about to be removed by the Native Extensions feature. This feature (it will be available in the soon-to-be-released next version of Adobe AIR) will enable developers to extend the runtime and achieve deeper integration with the device by accessing device/OS capabilities or other applications.

Let me give you just one example. Three applications that are quite different in what needs they solve while working and looking just great.

Cassandra Stand is a companion application for Android, iOS, and PlayBook devices. It picks  your location automatically and displays time/date, temperature, and news. While this app is a simple one it works and looks great. Congratulations to Leonardo Risuleo and the team.

Web Reader is probably one of the best PlayBook apps for those who use RSS readers. It is fast and intuitive and it works great with Google Reader. I’d love to see these guys writing an article about how they built their app. As with the previous two apps I installed the app on my tablet and played with it. My RSS list is pretty big and I was curious about how they will display all the categories and how easy would be to navigate between the various items. All I can say is that they did a good job :)

Hungry Cho-Cho is a funny little game for iOS. Tomer Reiss of KWAZI shown me this app during my visit to Israel earlier this year. It worked just great on my iPod Touch (at that time they were using AIR 2.5; I’m curious how it would feel with AIR 2.7 as this release brought more speed and performance especially for iOS devices). They released their application and he wrote a blog post about some of the things he learned while developing the game.

If you created some cool mobile apps using the Flash Platform, you know how you can get in touch with me. I’m out!

Andrew Shorten (group product manager for Flex and developer tools at Adobe) just posted an interesting write-up about the future of Flex. If you are a Flex developer I’m sure you’ll find this worth reading. I know I did.

I won’t spoil the surprise but I have to say that I think this is good news!

If you have comments, please leave a message here! I will make sure it reaches Andrew’s inbox!

I’m really curious to find out what your favorite iOS or Android apps are. If you don’t mind sharing your preferences with me and spending a couple of minutes on writing them down, please drop a comment. You’ll get my eternal gratitude!

PS. You can name as many as you want as long as you consider them killer (or favorite apps).

If you are a developer fragmentation is part of your life. Everywhere you look you find it:

• device fragmentation (devices running on different OSes, with different screens and capabilities – smartphones, personal computer, tablets, televisions, and so on),
• browsers fragmentation (you have desktop browsers and mobile browsers, as well as embedded device browsers like those found in televisions or other devices).

Judging fragmentation in terms of good or bad is counter productive. It is what it is, right? In the end it gives us more work which is not that bad :)

There is fragmentation and fragmentation

However, there is another type of fragmentation that is becoming more and more visible. And this version is quite annoying. It is about having all these devices like islands in a big ocean. And all these islands are not aware of each other and they don’t even know they are islands.

What am I talking about? Let’s take a look at a typical household. You’ll find devices like:

• router
• personal computers
• smartphones
• tablets
• console or media center
• television with Internet connectivity (like GoogleTV for example or Samsung SmartTV)
• air conditioning units
• car(s)
• automation devices (video cameras, remote controls for the main door or garage door)

And the simple truth is that all these devices are not aware of each other. Or in other words, if I have a smartphone and I’m home enjoying some TV time on the latest television set I don’t get any extra functionality on either device.

All together now

So what could we do to improve this simple scenario (a smart TV and a smartphone/tablet)? Well think of the “ultimate” remote control”. In a perfect world, when I want to find something interesting to watch at TV, I’d pull out my tablet (or smartphone) and open up the remote control app. This app will connect to television or set-top box and retrieve all the programs that are available.

Then it will present them in a useful way. Today, we think in terms of channels. You have x channels and you zip through them. Instead of this, this Remote Control app would display the available programs sorted on categories: SF movies, nature, cooking, news, fashion, sports, and so on. So with a quick flip through movie sections I could find easily an interesting movie. Or if I love football or tennis I can find what’s available right now.

Next, suppose that I select a tennis match (the US Open is coming by the way). While I’m watching the match I could choose the social section of the Remote Control app and I can check to see if my buddies are online. I could ping them to watch the match together and chat using text messages, VOIP, or video calls directly from the tablet device.

While enjoying the match together with my friends, my wife is on the way home. She has a smartphone as well and because of that I can get a notification on my smartphone or tablet that she is quite close to home. So I can go to the kitchen and start preparing the dinner. She could have left for me instructions for me (using her smartphone or personal computer) and I could check them on my device or using the fridge integrated tablet (did I mention the fridge has an integrated tablet?).

While cooking some delicious dishes somebody rings the doorbell. My tablet pop ups a notification and with one tap I can see who’s outside and decide to open the door or to ask him what he wants.

My wife wants a new couch and I start browsing for options using my laptop. Once I found something that looks great I choose to display the web site on my TV so we can see what it looks like. While the images are displayed on the TV I use my laptop to navigate, rotate, or zoom the images.

The next morning, as we are getting ready to leave the house I could check the car status on my phone: fuel level, service notifications, outside temperature. As I arrive at the office I realize that I forgot to program the air conditioning unit. I just fix this using my mobile phone.

Present or the land of opportunities

Now back to reality. Most of what I have described here is already possible. Of course there is no off- the-shelf solution but a smart developer can create software that makes different devices work together. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and also I’ve been talking to others smarter than me (fellow evangelist Mark Doherty has lots of idea about this cross device experience).

And the reason we don’t have off-the-shelf solutions (or solutions that do exist are very expensive) is that we don’t have a standard that is implemented by all the manufacturers who build smart devices. Manufacturers will have to expose some of the core functionality of their devices to third parties as well if we want to build software like my “Remote Control” example. Today it is pretty hard to come in as a third party developer/company and try to build in some interoperability.

How is this post related to what I’m usually talking about on my blog? Well, you can do many things with the Flash Platform since you can use it to build stuff for so many devices (personal computers, embedded devices, mobile devices, Arduino and Phidgets). Maybe we can start building cool prototypes and go after the big consumer electronics manufacturers and show them what is possible to do. This is one way to turn around this issue.

I don’t have enough insight into the consumer industry so what I’m about to say could be horribly wrong. I have the impression that many of the big players (companies who build TVs, cars, broadcasters and content providers) are just missing this. There is no doubt in my mind that one way or another we will end up talking about this type of fragmentation using the past tense. Until then, I wish you an amazing weekend and don’t forget to post a comment if you have something to share!

PS 1. Almost two years ago I wrote a post on a somehow related matter (augmented reality + always connected/synced). Back then I was pretty sure that in about two years we would have something like that available.

PS 2. There are some companies who are working in this direction (use your mobile device with your television, making home automation more accessible) but these examples are far too few.

Lately, it is quite impossible to attend a software conference and not see sessions dedicated to mobile development. This is the hot topic of the day and rightly so, I believe. However, I have the impression that many people think that tablets and smartphones are almost the same thing. This is something that I do not believe is true. Furthermore, I think that because of this belief held by others many tablet applications end up being just a scaled up version of smartphone apps. If a tablet is just a phone with a bigger screen then a tablet app is just a bigger resolution smartphone app, right?

Let’s see why do I think that a tablet it is not just a bigger phone.

Tablets are more powerful than smartphones

This seems to be just a truism. Well, it is and yet most applications that run on tablets and smartphones tend to offer the same set of features and experience.

This is  suboptimal because on a tablet you have more storage space, a more powerful processor, and a bigger screen. And, if the battery doesn’t last for a full day it is not a tragedy. Is not like you end up in the middle of nowhere with a dead phone :)

All these differences should be exploited to create tablet applications that help people to do more than what they are able to do on a smartphone. If you take into account only the bigger screen you have something that enables people to read for hours without getting teary eyed. When more storage space is available , for example, why not let the user decide how many GB your application can use and offer him a true offline experience for things like email, news, RSS feeds, videos, and so on.

Tablets are shared smartphones are personal

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the feeling that, at least in the case of home users, a tablet is shared. This is not the case with your smartphone. You don’t say “hey mate, here is my phone. Just return it  in four hours.”

And if this is true, why are so many tablets apps built with a single user in mind? How can you have a tablet shared when you have to logout from your social or email accounts in order to let the other user do something?

Again, this feels to me like a big opportunity that it is missed. Why not enable multiusers for them and support on all the apps for which it makes sense? Remember, you do have plenty of storage space…

The Missed Opportunity

I think that this tablet shortsightedness is part of the reason for what we are seeing today: there a far fewer apps for tablets than for phones. And this is true for all the application stores.

I think that developers have a real opportunity here, and that for now it is just being missed. Once we fully understand that tablets and smartphones are different and people want and should use them differently, we will see much more innovation.

Today, July 20th, join Adobe & Sony for a webinar on Sony Tablet devices and the Adobe AIR App Challenge. Fellow evangelists, Ryan Stewart and Mark Doherty, will present the two webinars:

• 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM US/Pacific Time – Mark Doherty
• 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM US/Pacific Time – Ryan Stewart

You can register here.

Yes, you heard me right! Sony has just announced not one but two tablets based on the Android 3.x (Honeycomb) operating system. As you can see in the picture above they look pretty impressive. What’s more, one of them has a two screen design. I really look forward to seeing what creative Flash/Flex developers can put together for such a device.

And what better way of getting you mobilized and working on your AIR app for the Sony tablets than entering in the Adobe AIR App Challenge for  Sony tablet.

The big prize is nothing short of $100,00 and there are many more (in fact there are another 7 prizes ranging from $10,000 to $20,000).

All you have to do is write your app optimized for these tablets, make sure you upload the final app to http://www.airappchallenge.com/, and publish it to the Android Market before November 11th. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

All the finalists (top 80) will receive a prototype of these two tablets so they can test and fine tune their apps before the final round.

If you want to get a shot at the MAX Showcase App prizes you have to finish your app by September 16th.

Now get started because the contest just started today :). You can read more here.

PS. In case you’re wondering how you’ll be able to create your app for the Sony Tablet S2 (code name for the one with two screens) then here is the answer: you’ll be able to use one of the coolest features of AIR 3 (the upcoming version of AIR) called Native Extensions. Using this feature you can expose Android APIs to your ActionScript code and use them in your AIR app.

It is my great pleasure to make some noise for a workshop on ActionScript put together by Fernando Colaco. I first met Fernando at the 2010 gotoAndSki() conference. His passion for beautiful and highly functional UIs and his passion to share and teach others are behind his work on organizing the gotoAndSki() Swiss conference, “Coding for Curious” workshop, and other events.

While “Coding for curious” event is not a free event, I encourage you to take a look at the event page. In his words it is all about:

[...]attendees will build a simple game from scratch in this ONE DAY INTENSIVE WORKSHOP, and will learn several advanced concepts and useful tricks along the way. No previous coding (or even Flash) knowledge needed at all. No scary technical jargon will be used to make things sound complex, because they are not.

ACTIONSCRIPT 3 is the ideal language to learn how to program, specially thanks to how easy it is to use and manipulate images and graphic elements, and adding interactivity. The approach will be in the most accessible way, actually without computers in the first hour, using attendees on stage to explain in a practical way how a program works and “enact” concepts like variables, objects, functions, loops and conditions. Then, it’s hands-on and the pace will progressively get more and more interesting.

Well done Fernando and hope to see you soon :)

Last month, João Saleiro of WebFuel.pt sent me an email about his latest project: Airgile. I logged in using the demo account and looked around. After 10 or 15 minutes of trying various workflows I replied to his email congratulating him and his team for a great job.

So what is Airgile? It is professional online tool for project management. You can:

• Manage tasks and projects
• Track and plan projects
• Collaborate with your team
• Communicate with your clients
• Share documents
• Work remotely

In terms of price and deployment options it offers anything you want: free accounts (it offers a good balance between the features), paid accounts, and deployment on your servers if you want to have complete control over the information.

What about what is under the hood? I talked to João and here are some details if you are curious about how the product works:

• Backend. They use PHP and MySQL. For client communication they are using Flex remoting with AMFPHP. They use PHPUnit for testing. Also they are able to update the product with a new version without stopping/restarting the machines.
• Frontend. They used Flex framework 4.5, Swiz, and a home baked framework for data management.
• What’s next? They are working on integration between Airgile and Eclipse/Flash Builder using Mylyn, SCRUM and Spring planning support, and a mobile version.

Great job João!

If you live in Bucharest or close enough and you do stuff with HBase or Hadoop you shouldn’t miss this event. On May 31 we will host a meeting and you’ll have a chance to meet, talk, and listen Lars George of Cloudera (Cloudera Solution Architect for Europe).

Here’s the agenda:

• HBase intro – Lars George
• Big Data with HBase and Hadoop at Adobe
• Talk 3 – TBD
• Lightning talks (10m each)
• HBase status and roadmap – Lars George
• Q&A/Open discussion
• Beer at Rock’n Pasta or downtown

If you want to speak at this event drop a comment here and if you want to register go here. You have to hurry up because there are only 29 seats left.

PS. In case you didn’t know we are doing lots of stuff with HBase/Hadoop at Adobe and some of this is happening in the Bucharest office. So you’ll have a chance to meet our engineers and talk to them about real life use cases.

Greg Wilson seems to have a habit of coding while sleeping. Of course he won’t admit it (he says that one night he wasn’t able to sleep and …). It really doesn’t matter how he did it, what matters is that if you want to follow all Adobe Evangelists (and I mean all of them)  you can use this link: http://adobeevangelists.com/superblog/ (it has an RSS feed too).

Now you don’t have any excuse for missing our posts :)

Next month, between June 20 and 24 we will host 17 webinars. The topics range from building desktop applications to mobile, from using PHP with Flex to Java and Flex. Here is the complete list of webinars:

1. Introduction to Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5
2. What’s new in Flex 4.5
3. New Features in Flash Builder 4.5
4. Flex and PHP Integrated Development with Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP
5. Build Your First Mobile Application With Flex 4.5
6. Architecting Flex Applications For Re-Use Across Web, Desktop and Mobile
7. Multi-Density and Multi-Platform Authoring for Smart Phones and Tablets With Flex 4.5 SDK
8. Migrating from Flex 3 to Flex 4.5: Understanding Changes from Halo to Spark
9. Creating Expressive Applications with Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst
10. Building Mobile Applications for BlackBerry Playbook
11. Coding Productivity Features in Flash Builder 4.5
12. Next Generation Application Development for the Enterprise
13. Building Data Driven Flex and Java Applications
14. Flex and BlazeDS Integration with Spring
15. Maximizing Flex Application Performance (Mobile and Desktop)
16. Creating Performant Skins and Item Renderers for Mobile Applications
17. Anatomy of an Enterprise Mobile Application Built with Flex 4.5

If you are interested in any of these topics, go ahead and register yourself here.

As I promised, here are the slides from the two sessions I had at Flash Camp Milan – WHYMCA. And from here you can download a tutorial and five projects to help you get started with Flex Mobile development for Android, iOS, and PlayBook.

Thank you guys!

It is always exciting to see how our partners build on top of our ecosystem. This time the excitement is about SourceMate 3.0, which was released recently. This release targets Flash Builder 4.5, and once it’s installed the hardcore developer side of your personality will be delighted with:

• Code generation (organize imports, generate AsDoc comments, etc)
• Smart refactoring (change method signature, extract interface/method/constant/variable/parameter/class/superclass, disable all trace statements)
• Swiz framework support (Swiz project creation wizard, new instance wizard, beans view, bean autocomplete, new bean wizard, events view, event handler autocomplete)
• Localization support (externalize strings, resource bundle editor, automatic translation, etc).
• Miscellaneous (todo/fixme/XXX task markers, generate Ant build.xml from project settings, medata tag validation, E4X expression console, etc)

Now go and download the product (you have a 30-day trial ) or see the screencasts to better understand what it’s all about.

We just released Flash Player 10.3 for desktop and mobile devices (including support for Android 3.1). You can download the desktop player from here, and for Android devices, just go to Android Market on your device.

What’s new in this version? Here are the main things:

• Acoustic Echo Cancellation – this is one of the coolest features, because you can now create high quality collaborative or chat apps that deliver excellent sound quality without a headset. Now, Flash Player 10.3 supports acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection, and automatic compensation for various mic input levels.
• Integration with browser privacy controls for managing local storage – Flash Player 10.3 integrates the controls for local storage with the browser’s privacy settings in Firefox 4, IE 8 or higher, and future release of Safari and Chrome.
• Native Control Panel – you can access the Flash Player privacy, security, and storage settings right from the Control Panel/System Preferences of your computer (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
• Media Measurement – this feature enables companies to understand how their videos are distributed and consumed and to collect this data in real-time. There is a new set of open APIs that can be used to implement video analytics.
• Auto-Update Notifications for Mac OS – support for automatic notifications of Flash Player updates on Mac OS.

This is not the only thing we launched today. If you go to the Adobe Labs you’ll find a new release of a preview version of Flash Player that has these features:

• Stage 3D (AKA “Molehill”) – 3D Hardware accelerated 3D API
• G.711 audio compression for telephony
• H.264/AVC SW Encode for camera encoding
• Support for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
• Socket Progress Events
• Pause/sleep/resume Events
• Secure random number generator
• TLS (Transport Layer Security) sockets
• TLS socket policy file

No go and install these and have lots of fun!

In today’s crowded consumer market many companies are looking for ways to differentiate their services and thus attract more customers while retaining the existing ones. The application I will talk about in this post is a great example of how you can enhance customer’s buying experience in a market that is highly competitive: the Telecom industry.

But first, watch this video:

The application was created by B-Reel (a Swedish company) for the 3 Telecom provider in Sweden. By using a custom hardware with a Flash application running on top of it, 3 Telecom operators can offer an experience that is very close to in-shop service for customers who are looking to buy a new terminal.

Now, if this is not cool… What do you think?

In case you haven’t heard of RIAForge.org I urge you to take a look. This project is maintained by Raymon Camdem and you will find open source projects built on top of Adobe technologies. Among the usual suspects, like AIR projects (about 95 for now), Flex (153 projects), or Flash (94 projects) you’ll find projects that build upon ColdFusion, Flash Builder, Dreamweaver, Photoshop just to name a few.

The second project I wanted to tell you about is a continuous integration system for Flex and ActionScript projects that uses Jerkins (formerly known as Hudson). This project was launched by the Slovakia Adobe User Group and it is maintained by Michal Gron. Bravo guys!

If you have open source ActionScript or Flex projects you can have them added to this service. So far you’ll find there AS3 Signals, AS3Corelib, Flixel, Mate framework, Parsley, PicasaFlash API, PushButton Engine, Robotlegs, and Swiz.

PS. Thanks to Juraj Michálek for pointing out these goodies :)

I know there are a lot of people from the Flash community who are working on applications for the PlayBook tablet. I’m one of them too :D. And there are many others who are curious about what we are building.

So here I go with a request:

• if you are in the process of building a PlayBook application, drop a comment saying this and maybe an update once you’ve published the app in the store
• if your application was already accepted in the store, drop a comment with a link to the app page and maybe some other comments/feedback

Thanks in advance!

Last night, we released the beta version of Flash Player 10.3 on Adobe Labs for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can grab the bits from here and yes, both debug and non-debug players versions are available.

So what’s new in this release? Well, actually, there’s a lot to talk about:

• Acoustic Echo Cancellation – this is one of the coolest features, because, you can create now high quality collaborative or chat apps that deliver excellent sound quality without a headset. Now, Flash Player 10.3 supports acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection, and automatic compensation for various mic input levels.
• Integration with browser privacy controls for managing local storage – Flash Player 10.3 integrates the controls for local storage with the browser’s privacy settings in Firefox 4, IE 8 or higher, and future release of Safari and Chrome.
• Native Control Panel – you can access the Flash Player privacy, security, and storage settings right from the Control Panel/System Preferences of your computer (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
• Media Measurement – this feature enables companies to understand how their videos are distributed and consumed and to collect this data in real-time. There is a new set of open APIs that can be used to implement video analytics.
• Auto-Update Notifications for Mac OS – support for automatic notifications of Flash Player updates on Mac OS.

I’m happy to tell you that the technology code named “Wallaby”, which was previewed at Adobe MAX last year for the first time, is now available on Adobe Labs. If you want to try it just go here and download it.

So what does “Wallaby” do? It takes a Flash FLA file as an input and converts it to HTML. And once you have the HTML files, you can edit and tweak them in an HTML editor. Here are some details about its inner workings:

• Flash Vector graphics are converted to SVG
• Bitmaps are converted to <img/> tags using JPEG format
• The text is converted to <p> tags or SVG text
• Flash timeline animations are converted to CSS animations

Two days ago (on February 27th) we introduced a new program called “Adobe AIR and Flash Player Incubator”. This happened at the same time as the launch of the “Molehill” 3D APIs for AIR and Flash Player public preview. And I think “Molehill” stole the thunder and not many of you paid attention to the announcement of the incubator program.

In short, this program offers a technology preview of the Flash Player and Adobe AIR runtimes. Anyone can access this program; there is no need to apply and wait to get accepted – this differs from how the prerelease programs are run.

It also means that if you get involved you can:

• test your applications early against these bleeding-edge capabilities to see if they break or perform well
• you can give us feedback, so together we can create better runtimes
• you can try out and play with the new APIs well ahead of the public release, so you are prepared to use them live in your applications right from day one

There is one thing I want to add to this: keep in mind that not all the features are guaranteed to make it into the final bits. However, now, more than ever, you can work with us to shape the future runtimes in terms of capabilities, APIs, and features.

So, if you make a living creating apps for Flash Player or Adobe AIR, go to the Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Incubator page, check for the new features (“Molehill” and Cubic Bezier Curves) and add this blog to your RSS reader to get notifications about new bits posted to the Incubator.

We’ve just released on Labs the first public preview of the “Molehill” APIs for 3D hardware acceleration in Flash Player/Adobe AIR. In case you missed it, we first demoed this technology last year at Adobe MAX 2010. Molehill relies on DirectX9 and OpenGL (depending on the OS platform); it has a software fallback in case the GPU rendering is not available, for example, when the GPU driver is incompatible. This API is accessible to developers from ActionSript 3 and you’ll be able to do things like: programmable vertex and fragment shaders.

What does this all mean? Well, developers will be able to build games that run full screen in HD resolution at 60fps with 3D scenes, everything being GPU accelerated. Do you fancy some kick-*** 3D first person shooter or a car race :D? In terms of performance, using the existing features you’d be able to render thousands of  triangles at 30 Hz. With Molehill you can do hundreds of thousands, full HD, at 60 Hz.

Here are some videos demoing a number of games built using this technology: MAX Racer game, Frima Studio Demo, Underground Scene, Flare3D, and Away3D fractal tree demo.

While this preview is for desktops only, we are working to bring this technology to mobile devices too. Until then, you can download the bits from here and read Thibault’s blog post for more details about its inner workings.

Our teams did a great job: in less than a year from the initial support for Android 2.2 (AIR 2.5 last autumn) they released, today, AIR 2.6 for Android devices running 2.2, 2.3, and Honeycomb (3.0).

Here are some of the new features:

• Automatic soft keyboard support – this feature enables support for the soft keyboard even for applications that weren’t designed from the ground up for mobile (the keyboard raises and lowers automatically)
• Asynchronous bitmap decoding -  you can improve the bitmap loading/displaying by using this feature.
• USB debugging for Android – yeah baby, now I can debug while sitting in a plane:). As the name says, when you have your device connected through the USB cable you are able to deploy and debug the application without requiring a WiFi connection. You’ll find Android USB drivers for Windows in the AIR SDK.

If you have applications compiled for AIR 2.5, you don’t have to worry, they will run on AIR 2.6 without recompilation!

Thanks to Antony Chauviré our mini-book on Flex 4 (Flex 4 in a Day) was translated to French. So, if you want to learn Flex 4 and, at the same time, you prefer croissants over donuts, red wine over beer, and cafe latté over American coffee or 5 o’clock tea, now you can do it in your own language :)

Thanks Antony!

PS. Merci beacoup, Monsieur Michaël Chaize :)

Two days ago I stumbled upon a rather cool AIR application for managing ASDoc documentation offline and I thought it might help others too. Because sometimes I end up in a place without Wi-Fi, I needed a simple way to make ASDoc references, like the BlackBerry® Tablet OS SDK for Adobe® AIR® API Reference, available offline.

I was happy to find that one solution is an AIR application called DOC?. You can download it from here. You can add as many ASDoc sources you wish, the app will download and index them locally.

And then you can select the “book” you want and navigate to your heart’s content between the pages:

Of course it is not perfect (I wish I could use it for any type of documentation not only ASDoc) and occasionally you may hit a bug (it seems that a big documentat takes a lot of time to index). But for me, it is just perfect! Big kudos to Jeroen Beckers and Michiel Vancoillie, the creators of this nice little app. And, at the same time, this application illustrates perfectly the power of AIR and Flex. Well done Jeroen and Michiel.

Probably you remember last December’s public beta release of the Flash Player 10.2. Today, the final release is out! What’s new? Here is a list of the main new features:

• Stage Video
• Multiple display full screen support – you can have Flash Player full screen on one monitor and do some work on another one
• Custom native mouse support – a new API that enables you to use bitmaps as the source for native cursors – offloading this task from Flash Player to the OS
• Support for the GPU rendering technology in Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser.
• Enhance text readability through a new sub-pixel text rendering technology

The most important feature is Stage Video. This features accelerates enables the GPU to render the video directly on the display without the overhead incurred previously by reading back from the GPU and rendering with the CPU. This means that depending on your hardware configuration you should see big improvements when watching H.264 1080p, for example. Even on a Mac :). See my article on StageVideo for details on how to use it.

You can download Flash Player 10.2 from here (Windows/Macintosh/Linux including debug version).

2010 is almost finished and yet, when I look back I can’t believe how packed this year was for those earning a living using the Flash Platform. I mean just look at the extension of the Flash Platform on mobile devices, the changes and improvements we’ve made to Flex and Flash Builder, the new capabilities added to the platform. It’s amazing that I can use today Flex “Hero” to build desktop applications and mobile applications (for Android, BlackBerry Playbook; iOS support is coming in 2011).

What continues to amaze me is the community around the Flash Platform. I truly feel privileged because I travel around and get a chance to meet and talk to you. This is one of the best parts of my job for sure. So, I want to thank you for the events you’ve organized this year and I’m looking forward to seeing you again next year.

And finally, I want to thank all my readers. It is so much easier writing tutorials and blog posts when you know people will read them :).

To all of you, I wish you A Happy New Year! And don’t forget, 2011 is looking even better than 2010 – well I do work for Adobe so I have some inside information :).

If you saw bits of this year’s MAX conference, chances are you’ve heard of Stage Video. This is a new Flash API that uses the GPU for rendering the video on the screen. Thus, using this feature you get hardware acceleration for both decoding H264 videos and displaying them on the screen.

You can play with this new feature starting today (I wrote an article explaining this new API). The Flash Player 10.2 beta is available on Adobe Labs for desktop. In order to benefit from Stage Video you have to rewrite your existing applications to use this new API. On the other hand the previous video APIs are still there if you don’t want to use Stage Video. And this is good because sometimes you want to apply effects (e.g. rotate, skew, Pixel Bender effects) and with Stage Video you can’t. This is because the video renderer using Stage Video is out of the Flash Player display list – it is not a DisplayObject. At the same time even if the system supports Stage Video there is no guarantee that your application can use it – this is because only a limited number of videos can be played at the same time on system.

Other goodies you’ll love in this beta are:

• In Internet Explorer 9 Flash Player 10.2 supports hardware accelerated rendering support
• Native custom mouse cursors – offloading this tasks from Flash Player to the OS
• Support for full screen mode with multiple monitors – you can have Flash Player full-screen on a secondary monitor and work on another monitor

Go install this version, play with it, build apps against it and let us know what you think. So next year when we launch the release version everything will work just great!

Though it hasn’t been that long since we launched OSMF (Open Source Media Framework – a framework that helps people create video players) many people and companies are already using it. So we thought it deserved to have its own home in the form of OSMF Marketplace.

This should be your one stop for finding OSMF related materials, including tutorials, code samples, skins, and plug-ins. So what are you waiting for? Go to the OSMF Marketplace and earn some “good karma” by becoming a publisher or learn something new!