Category Archives: Flash Player

HTML5 Performance Tested Against Flash

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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.

Flash and Windows Phone 7

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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.

The Flash Mobile Advantage

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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.

HP’s Flash-enabled Tablet

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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.

New Flash Player Team Blog

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The Flash Player team has a new blog:

The team wanted to start this blog to share with you information about how things work in Flash Player, why they work the way they do, tips, tricks, and other interesting behind-the-scenes details.

I think the AIR team blog has been pretty good at showcasing customers and providing updates to the product. Glad the Flash Player team has a blog as well. And hoping to see some geeky stuff from Thibault, the newest Flash Player product manager, on the new blog as well.

Stepping On Toes

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Really?

There are other implications. By extending a hand to HTML5 Microsoft will move ahead adoption of the standard in a large way. The better HTML5 does, the worse Flash does, given their tendancy [sic] to step on each other’s toes at every turn.

By most accounts, I think HTML5 has never been better. Wider browser support, a lot of momentum. But the same can be said for Flash. Flash Player 10 was the most quickly adopted Flash Player version yet.

Maybe HTML5 and Flash aren’t stepping on each other’s toes as much as pushing everyone forward.

Flash Player 10.1 and Palm’s App Catalog

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Palm made a bunch of announcements today about new products, their development program, and an app catalog. Palm was an early supporter of the Flash Platform on devices and member of the Open Screen Project so I was glad to see this tidbit in their press release:

Palm also demonstrated Flash content in the browser on a Palm Pre and expects a free Adobe Flash Player 10.1 plug-in to be posted to the Palm App Catalog in the coming months. Palm expects webOS to be one of the first mobile platforms to support the full Flash Player in the web browser.

That should mean that it will run on the Palm Pre as well as the new devices announced. Adrian did a demo of Flash Player 10.1 in action on the Palm Pre recently and you can check out the embedded video below.

Google’s FLASH10.1y New Phone: Nexus

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Well the details are out on Google’s phone, the Nexus, and it sounds impressive:

The phone is 11.5 mm deep, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 12.3 mm. It is also slightly lighter than the iPhone 130 grams v. 135 grams)……..But most of your interaction with the phone will be through the gorgeous 3.7 inch 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touchscreen. This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display………This phone is also powered by the Snapdragon 1 GHz core processor, which is more than able to handle the Nexus One’s 3D graphics, multiple applications running in the background and heavy browser use simultaneously.

From the software to the hardware to the UI it sounds like this is going to be a very good phone. But it gets better. Back at MAX we announced that Google was joining the Open Screen Project. And we’ve been working closely with Google since that time to make sure that Flash Player 10.1 works well with Android devices. And we’re also working with content creators on optimizing their Flash content for the smaller screens.

So as part of the Nexus announcement Adobe got our hands on one of the phones and we’ve been testing Flash Player 10.1 on it. You can see Adrian Ludwig demo an early version of it on the Nexus. We’ve also got a video of Adrian demoing Flash Player 10.1 on the Motorola Droid.

Flash Player 10.1 is still expected to be available in the first half of 2010 so it won’t be too long before you’ll be able to get your hands on the best RIA mobile experience out there.

AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas now Available

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Tonight we’ve released the AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas on Adobe Labs (direct download links for Flash Player and AIR). This is the first time we’ve simultaneously released the desktop (AIR) and browser (Flash Player) runtimes for all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) at once, which is a great milestone for the Flash Platform. So what is this release and why should you care? One thing to note is that this is just the desktop runtimes, not any mobile runtimes. Those will be coming later. Luckily a lot of the work we did for mobile in terms of adding new APIs and optimizations are all in these releases so you’ll still get a lot of the benefits.

Flash Player 10.1

Lots of new stuff in Flash Player 10.1 including the multi-touch APIs, the performance gains, and some new networking APIs. The biggest thing (IMHO) with this release is the huge, huge memory improvements. Kevin showed the slide at MAX but it’s worth mentioning again. Without any code changes you’ll see significant improvements in memory with Flash Player 10.1.

flash_player_mem_footprint

AIR 2

air_logo_cloudsThe AIR team has been kicking all kinds of ass and I think AIR 2 is going to be a great release. One of the things we heard over and over again after AIR 1.0 was that people wanted more access to the native APIs of the operating system. AIR 2 brings a lot of that. Now you can open up a file with its default application as well as invoke native commands with the new NativeProcess API. We’ve also added the ability to create a socket server inside an AIR application and monitor changes to mounted drives. Plus a lot more. And you get all of the performance enhancements (and more) from Flash Player 10.1 so it should be a lean, mean AIR experience for end users as well.

Developing with the new Runtimes

(Update Christian has a list of AIR 2 resources that will help.) We won’t have a new Flex SDK for these runtimes yet so it’ll take a tiny bit of manual work to add support for the developer tools and the new runtime. Nick Kwiatkowski has a great screencast up for using the AIR 2 SDK in Flash Builder. It basically involves creating a copy of the Flex 4 SDK and then manually copying over the AIR SDK so it overwrites the AIR 1.5 SDK that ships with Flex 4. On the Flash Player side you’ll have to grab the playerglobal.swc and replace it in your Flex SDK.

I’m pretty excited about this particular set of runtimes. Talking to developers it seems like AIR 2 hits the mark and helps them accomplish more. Seeing the foundation put in on Flash Player 10.1 to create really great mobile experiences is also exciting. As always make sure to provide any feedback or any issues you run into over on the forums.

Rundown of the MAX News

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The press releases just crossed the wire and we have a ton of news coming out of MAX. Plus more surprises in store for tomorrow. For those of you not here you can still check the keynotes out. I’m hosting the online side of the MAX keynotes and we’re doing some fun stuff before and after the keynotes to give you a sense of what’s going on at MAX. As you can tell from the rundown, there’s some fun stuff today.

Flash Platform Runtimes

We’ve been saying all year that Flash on mobile devices is a push this year and we’ve made a lot of progress. Today at the keynotes we’re going to be showing off Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones. This is the version of the Flash Player that we’ve been working on so hard this year. We’ve been working with some great partners including Nvidia and ARM to optimize the player for those devices and create a quality mobile experience.

Possibly more important is that the number of companies committed to the Open Screen Project continues to grow. Today we announced that RIM is joining the Open Screen Project, which means that Blackberry will be supporting Flash Player 10.1. Google is also on board. We’ll have public versions of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm, and Windows Mobile later this year with Google Android and Symbian following shortly. Developers will have mobile bits in their hands soon.

We also announced AIR 2.0, which is going to give Flash developers a lot more native hooks into the operating system. A lot of the developers I talked to wanted it and so that’s what the team did. Mike Chambers talked about some of these features at Flash on the Beach. Another cool feature of AIR 2.0 is the ability to record from the microphone without going to a server. getMicrophone can now be a reality

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Tools

We also have public betas of both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst that are available today. I’ve been really impressed with how far Flash Catalyst in particular has come from Beta 1 to Beta 2. It’s a lot more polished, has more functionality (including video) and feels a lot more fun to use. If you checked out Beta 1 and found it lacking, you should check out Beta 2. We’ve also made big progress on Flash Builder and I’ve been a very happy camper using the tool full-time.

Servers

Some very cool stuff is also happening on the server side. We’ve released ColdFusion 9, a spectacular release with some great features including the ability for you to consume ColdFusion as a service from inside of your Flex application without writing ColdFusion code. I’ve also been playing with the LiveCycle Data Services release and its modeler plug-in for Flash Builder. The team has focused on model-driven development making it easy to generate and create a model, and then link that model directly to your Flex application. It helps by generating all of the assemblers and you can directly modify the user interface just by changing the model.

Finally we’ve got some Flash Media Server news. We’re adding support for HTTP streaming, which will include support for content protection. We also have released the Collaboration side of Flash Platform Services and announced pricing so you can jump in and start adding collaboration to your application.

If you guys have any questions (sorry I don’t have more fleshed out info, it’s a lot of news), feel free to drop me an email – ryan@adobe.com and I’ll try and answer what I know.