ReadWriteWeb distills some results from a Streaming Media post about performance between Flash Player 10 and 10.1 and HTML5.

In analyzing the results of the tests, Ozer determined that the key to better Flash performance was dependent upon whether or not it could access hardware acceleration. This feature, launched in Flash 10.1, allows the plugin to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on some computers to decode video. Depending on the video card and drivers, (NVIDIA, AMD/ATI and Intel offer products that support this), the video decoding process in Flash 10.1 can now work for all video playback, not just full-screen playback as was available in Flash 10.0.

The streaming media post has some good information about the method used to collect data and it seems like a pretty robust test. He used different machines and collected 29 data points for each test. So this isn’t some isolated test case.

But what I was most happy with was the performance of 10.1 across the board. The Flash Player team has been working their butts off to make Flash Player 10.1 scream and it looks like it’s paying off. The results show huge drops on Windows and good incremental improvements on the Mac. Mac isn’t on par with Windows but that’s because our engineers don’t have access to the same APIs that they do on Windows to get that boost from hardware acceleration.

I think Flash Player 10.1 is going to be a great release and I’m excited to see a leaner, meaner Flash Player get penetration.

From Mike Chambers:

There has been a lot of buzz in the mobile space lately, and I suspect there will be even more around Windows Phone 7 at next week’s Microsoft Mix conference. One thing I wanted to clarify as it may have been lost in some of the other news is that Adobe and Microsoft are working together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series.

So if you’re on Windows mobile, you’re not forgotten and you’ll be getting a Flash Player 10.1 on your sweet new phone.

Very good perspective on Flash and standards.

Both the standards community and the Flash community are extremely good at sharing knowledge and supporting the people within their respective groups. The relationship across communities, however, isn’t nearly as cordial. Two things are happening: either the people within each camp stay to themselves, or one ignorantly hurls insults at the other.

I love that angle. Both camps have very passionate communities but the problem is that there’s not enough cross-pollination between groups. Part of that is that (I don’t think) Flash has done a good job of playing well with HTML. It has been and still is largely a black box. So at a technical level the two technologies don’t work as well as they should have. That carries over into the communities. As a company that makes tools for both HTML and Flash, it behooves us to be involved in both sides of the debate. My hope is that as Flash opens up more and hopefully works better with HTML, the people on both sides will start to work more closely as well.

A post up about Jeff Smith from Smule and why he won’t ever target Android.

Smith is part of a small but vocal chorus of app developers who say they don’t want to move to Android, even though it is growing quickly. His complaints: He doesn’t like the way the store merchandises its wares, and he doesn’t want to have to create different apps for each handset Android supports.

To me, that helps show the value proposition of Flash on mobile devices. You’re going to have to create custom Flash mobile content for each device. It’s not going to be write once, run everywhere. But you’re not going to have to rewrite an app from scratch and you’ll be able to use the same technologies and tools across multiple platforms which means you can crank out applications faster and make sure they’re higher quality.

As developers get more sophisticated, just like agencies have their own frameworks to give them a head start on the apps they build, you’ll see frameworks that decrease the time to market of mobile applications for different sized screens and different functionality. But the key is being able to use the same tools, the same language, and the same platform so that you can easily tweak and write those applications for multiple platforms.

Some very cool video of Flash Player and AIR running on HP’s Slate tablet computer.

It’s great to see Flash Player running on a tablet. One of the nice things about the tablet versus the mobile device is that because of the larger screen size, more content will work out of the box. Flash on mobile devices performs really well but the screen size is going to require some UI changes for sites that will be visited heavily by mobile devices. Tablets provide a more big-screen experience.

A fascinating experiment and follow-up by Ars Techinca on ad blockers.

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website.

I was recently on a roadshow with some folks from EyeWonder, a company that provides a framework to build and place a lot of the ads on the Internet. Some are very clever, others would fall into the annoying category. During the trip I talked to a lot of the creatives at big agencies who are working with sites to place these ads for their brands and the adblocker concern was a big topic. If their brands aren’t getting the views on the ad, they’re not going to want to pony up, and sites lose money.

What’s worse, is that it becomes a downward spiral where the ads being served become more intrusive in order to get the attention of a fading audience. Ultimately, one of the best conversations I had was with someone who used to be the creative “gate” for agencies on a major network of sites. Agencies came to her with their ad ideas and she was the person who gave thumbs up or thumbs down on the ad depending on whether or not it was too obnoxious or wouldn’t jive with what the network’s users expect.

To me, that’s the key. Flash may be synonymous with advertising now, but the same obnoxious ads are going to be created with HTML5 when it becomes prevalent, so the people creating ads have to build them so that they’re targeted and interesting. I don’t think they have to be static, or can’t take up the whole page, but they should follow some basic guidelines (auto-playing sound being a terrible, terrible scourge) and leave the user in control. Close buttons should be obvious, mouse out events should minimize the ad, and it should be difficult to accidentally trigger it. And making sure ads are optimized so they aren’t causing Flash to spin up the CPUs is key to a good user experience.

The web is an interactive place and there is a lot of very interesting work going on in the interactive advertising space. That work directly funnels money back to your favorite sites and pays a lot of bills.

I thought the new Techmeme share icon was a bit strange but after reading Gabe’s comment, I discovered that there’s a bit of a dust-up over what icon people are using to indicate sharing.

But what I didn’t realize until now is that part of the Open Icon set includes a Geotag Icon, which I will now be using extensively.

Interesting writeup over on PHPArchitect.

That is the most important thing that Flex brings to Flash: professional grade tooling. The Flex framework, which Adobe has open sourced, makes application development quick and painless for programmers familiar with event driven programming.

One of the things that fascinates me about the Flash Platform is the number of different types of web professionals it attracts. Those web professionals have very different goals so we largely try to stay out of the way and let them create what they want. But to make them productive we create tools and sell them. But trying to have one tool that does everything isn’t practical. Flex was always intended to be a developer-centric way to create Flash applications and I think Flash Builder 4 is going to show that off better than the previous versions.

Mihai is doing a webinar on debugging Flex and PHP.

Join Mihai Corlan while he goes through the basics of debugging a Flex and PHP application.See how to work with:

• Flash Builder 4
• Xdebug
• Eclipse PDT

to ensure a bug free project. The presentation will take about 45 minutes, leaving 15 minutes to answer any questions you might have on this subject.

Xdebug looks like a cool project and I know Mihai has been finding it very useful as part of the client-server debugging workflow.

HTML and Flash working together to find each other.

Geolocation is a good example. HTML5 is going to get a geolocation API that works just beautifully even on devices with no GPS. Flash based applications will (currently) only get access to geolocation APIs when targeting the AIR runtime on mobile. Some browsers (I only know of Firefox 3.5 on Mac and the WebKit browser on the Nexus One) already support the HTML5 geolocation API… So why not use that to get geo information into your Flash based application?

There are few things I love more than geography and by extension, geolocation. It’s the digital overlay of the world. How can that not be cool? And this particular example is nice because it’s an area where HTML5 is ahead of Flash Player. Just like HTML can use Flash to implement ideas it hasn’t nailed down yet, Flash can use HTML to implement ideas that it hasn’t got yet. Bliss.