Todd Bishop of the Seattle-PI (go Seattle!) is reporting that Microsoft and Eolas have settled their patent dispute (Techmeme discussion):

Flash users will recognize this as the cause of the annoying ‘click to activate’ problem in Internet Explorer that hit all Flash applications that used the embed tag. Geoff Stearns created SWFObject which got around using the embed tag and as a result doesn’t suffer from the Eolas problem, but not everyone knows about it so people still run into the “click” a lot.

I’m not sure if this changes anything, but I’d hope that Microsoft puts out a patch for IE that reverts it back to the old way of embedding. If I get any more information I’ll update the post.

[tags]Microsoft, Eolas, SWFObject[/tags]

Nicolas over at aboutnico.be just posted about an app he’s been working on that brings Google Analytics functionality into Adobe AIR. The screenshots are sick and while Nico isn’t affiliated with Google, he’s using the APIs from Analytics to provide a rich desktop experience based on your data. He’s planning to release a beta later in September and you can sign up on this blog post.

The application supports administration and management of multiple supports. You’ll be able to track all the metrics that you can track with Google Analytics now. It also features a site overlay which lets you look at the site you’re analyzing as well as the ability to export a report as PDF, Excel or XML. It’s a really cool use of AIR and I think anyone who spends a lot of time in their Google stats will get a lot out of the desktop experience.

[tags]Google, Adobe AIR, Analytics[/tags]

Another Sunday, another semi-pointless meme, and I was going to leave it be except for a post by Richard MacManus and a comment there by Rick Curran. The gist is this: Mark Cuban says that the web has “stabilized as a platform” and as a result, innovation has stagnated, things are boring and we’re no longer creating “explosively exciting ideas”.

I think he has a bit of a point and he ties it back to the lack of advancement in true broadband speed as part of the culprit. He’s not saying the internet is dead, he’s just saying that it’s becoming a commodity or a utility. It’s tough to be innovative with something like electricity or water. That’s part of the reason I think this is a great time for rich internet applications. Web applications aren’t cutting it. We need more broadband and we need more touch points. We need better experiences. RIA technologies enable a lot of rich media content, something which people can build innovative, creative solutions on top of. RIAs can help bring the worlds of desktop, web, and mobile together and that’s going to bring about all kinds of new use cases for applications as well as new business models and modes of communication.

Now that the internet is boring we’ve got a stable delivery platform. Let’s think about rich media, better user experiences and closer integration with devices and innovate in that space. That’s where rich internet applications shine.

This week we got to find out about the H.264 announcement. That was awesome and it was really fun (and frustrating) to know that ahead of time and then see the reaction. But stuff at MAX is going to make that announcement seem like a local story about a firefighter saving a cat from a tree.

I’ve been hearing a ton of cool things that we’re doing at MAX and I think everyone in our community as well as the wider world of Web 2.0/business/enterprise will be blown away by some of the things we’re going to announce. You should register now.

Today’s Penny Arcade comic made me laugh (and Nack hadn’t blogged it yet). We should work with Red Octane to create that game. Then we can do an entire line. Flex Hero? Flash Hero? PDF Hero? The sky’s the limits here.

It’s our day off on the bus tour so I’m going to be trying to catch up on the backlog of email. Posting will be light the rest of this week.

One of the reasons I was excited to join Adobe was by far the team. Kevin, Danny, and Mike are all much smarter than I am and I get to learn something new every single day. Now our team is even better because Andrew Shorten, who worked for Adobe Europe before joining Microsoft is coming back to become a platform evangelist with us.

I’ve talked to Andrew a couple of times at various conferences and he gets RIAs and he’s going to make a huge difference inside of Adobe. He’s based in the UK so that means you’ll be seeing a lot of him at the European events. It looks like he’s already planning a bunch of cool appearances.

This is really good news for the platform.

[tags]Andrew Shorten, Adobe, Evangelists[/tags]

I’ve seen a couple of comments in places that seem to indicate that the full news hasn’t gotten out about our support of H.264 in the Flash Player so I’m going to quote a couple of items from the FAQ that we’re releasing:
Does the addition of H.264 mean Flash Player will support HD?
Yes, Flash Player supports 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264. Performance will vary depending on the capabilities and configuration of your machine. In general a 2.0 GHz Mac or a 3GHz PC, with one or more processors, will deliver an optimum experience.

Will Flash Player 9 Update 3 support non-FLV files?
Yes, with this update, Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/HE-AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2.

So basically you can play full, hardware accelerated 1080p Quicktime videos inside of the updated Flash Player. Welcome to the next generation of web video.

My ZDNet coverage here. Aral has the full FAQ.

I just saw that we’ve released the Flash CS3 extension that supports packaging up .AIR files. I’ve been doing the keynotes in some of the on AIR tour stops and I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Flash CS3 support for AIR so now I can finally tell people where to download it.

I’m excited about what this means for Flash developers. I think most of you were just using the command line, but this will hopefully lower the barrier to entry for a lot of Flash developers. I can’t wait to see what you do with AIR now that it’s silly simple in Flash.

[tags]Flash, Adobe AIR[/tags]