Tag 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.

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.

Sonoflash – Easily Add Sound To Your Flash Apps

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I’m a huge fan of using sound in RIAs. I think that having audio cues is just as important as visual cues and that a click sound, or a subtle noise when you interact with an application makes for a much more usable experience. Unfortunately it can be kind of a pain to add those kinds of sounds to Flash applications. In general you have to go hunt down royalty free sounds and use MP3 files in your application which can add a bit more size to an application than some people want. We made some changes to the sound APIs in Flash Player 10 that let you generate sounds and while I was in Singapore I talked to the guys from Sonoflash who have a really great solution.

You can download a series of libraries from them which are all different soundscapes and have different themes. Add one or more of those SWC files to your application and then you can just call the sounds with some simple ActionScript code. All of the sounds are generated by AS3 an so take up a lot less weight than having to deal with MP3s. It also means you can tweak the sounds on the fly and use the APIs to modify the pitch, frequency, or other variables when you call it. I did a video with them in which they show off some examples and how to use it.

Sonoflash; from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.

Flash Player 10 Penetration at 86.7%

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flash_platform_blog

In case you missed it, the brand new Flash Platform Blog announced some new penetration numbers for Flash Player 10.

For our inaugural Flash Platform blog posting I want to begin with some important news. The Flash Player penetration statistics have just recently been updated and Flash Player 10 is now installed on 86.7% of Internet-connected desktop computers in mature markets, which is the fastest the Web has ever adopted new innovation.

It’s great to see the adoption speed and know that so many people can take advantage of Flash Player 10′s features. For those who want other datapoints you can see that MochiAds Zeitgeist is showing a similar percentage and RIAStats has penetration trending upwards but lagging about 10% behind our (and MochiAds’) studies.

It’s also a great inaugural post for the Flash Platform blog! The marketing team at Adobe has put a ton of work into this and I’m really happy with the content. I highly suggest you subscribe as this will be the place where you’ll see a lot of breaking news and general Flash Player momentum content. They’ve got a number of different authors so the entire range of the Flash Platform is covered. Plus the feed includes content from many of the evangelists.