There is no doubt some awesome stuff come out of Microsoft’s Research and Development department but when it comes to handling data and organisation Microsoft falls short against Google and Apple. But as we can see from the video below their new data organisation engine looks like it could be a real game changer. This sort of technology is great at finding what information you want and cross referencing it with other information, I can see this being a real game changer for Wikipedia. This sort of application is very dynamic and could be incorporated as a web app allowing live information to be accessed anywhere in the world with automatic cross referencing. You can download the application today on Windows here.
[Hit The More Link For The TED Talk]
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With the upcoming release of CS5 what can we expect to see in the following year? Here are some of my insights and predictions for the following year -
The Multi-Touch Era
I’ve featured Multi-Touch on a few occasions and I think that CS5’s jump to natively build Multi-Touch applications will help push the Multi-Touch community to create some awesome applications. Though on the desktop platform it’s a niece market it will hopefully Flash will be the tool everyone had waited for to really push technology to support it. Regardless of this transition I’m going to be using it for interactive installation projects and will be much more effective, accurate and easier to use. When you look at Multi-Touch from the mobile platform you can put your bottom dollar on its success. The mobile platform is so perfect for Multi-Touch development and with an array of powerful devices now sporting capacitive touch screens Flash will be the best platform to build native and Flash applications designed to work across an array of devices.
Mobile Development
Why is Flash going to be successful on the mobile platform? Well this is an easy one… Say I’m developing a game in which I have an accelerometer controlled ball, it’s a 2D platform game and uses nothing more than multi-touch and the accelerometer sound familiar? Well I don’t want to spend my time learning and building these games in several different languages and with several different tools. Instead I can jump into Flash CS5, create an application which determines the screen resolution and places movie clips on the stage via AS3. By doing this I am accommodating for multiple devices following these basic rules I can publish to all the smart phone platforms as a swf and publish to the iPhone as a native app. This way I’m saving time, money and making it easier to debug by having a single version across all platforms. It just gets better though, this allows me to develop for a larger audience and sell or distribute your application faster and more successfully.
Web Development
Flash websites are nothing new to my readers so how can Flash websites reinvent themselves in 2010. I’ll tell you how, through 3D and acceptance in the business industry. 3D is getting better within Flash constantly and with Flash Player 10.1 improved hardware acceleration we might just get some decent 3D content. But what good is this unless people are willing to pay us for our work. I’ve found more business are willing to take a leap of faith into Flash websites now that they are a little more search engine friendly and that they can get better noticed from having some innovative website.
HD
It’s time for the UK’s Internet Network to crumble, long overdue for an upgrade. HD is on it’s way and there is no stopping it with YouTube already sporting a collection of 1080p videos and they just about stream thanks to Google super servers that far surpass anybody’s expectations. Again this is courtesy of the new Flash Player 10.1 with its improved video handling and better hardware acceleration.
Flash+
Well it’s not Flash but here at Flash+ I’m going to be dedicating more time to the blog and hopefully find someone to co-auther with me on it, but expect not just more news but up to date, relevent, interesting and fast to press news from here on out! Remember Flash+ is an ad-free blog I do this because I love it! So if anyone can spare some hosting that would be great, I’m looking at you Media Temple!
Let me know what you guys think of these ideas and share your own in the comments!
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Adobes CS5 continues to impress me with a new feature called Smart Paste. Smart Paste effectively takes raw data that has yet to be encoded and puts it onto a HTML5 canvas. So what does this mean for us developers? Well it means if we create vector artwork we are going to be looking at smaller file sizes in which the images will be scalable and adaptive. But the best thing about the technology is it’s ability to adapt to live and static data such as SQL or XML. This means that Smart Paste is not just for developers but also designers allowing them to easily create dynamic graphical elements into web pages.
Now I didn’t just say that it’s vectors, Flash CS5 animations can be ported over to HTML5 Canvas’s as well allowing users without Flash Player to view animations this could be very impractical because more people have Flash Player than people who have HTML5 compatible browsers but with use of browser detection this could be awesome and could even bring Flash like animation to the iPhone. More of this technology soon.
[Video After The Break]
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OnLive is a cloud gaming service that is currently in development, it aims to port games over to your TV, Mac, PC and iPhone. The way this will work is by the game rendering server-side, and any inputs being sent to the server. I first heard of this technology about a year ago and in terms of pure speed through optimization it has come a long way.
The best thing I’ve seen about the technology is how games can be played on multiple devices in real time. Although I don’t understand all the jargon about how they have optimized the network structure, I can’t help to be hugely impressed. The 48 minute video after the break is long, detailed but so worth it. All I can do now is hope the technology arrives here across the pond in the UK. However for you guys you can rock the beta here.
[Video After The Break]
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With the exciting upcoming release of Flash CS5 Beta, I’m sure many of you just can wait to get some some iPhone Developing Mult-touch goodness. Well just to give you the heads up you need a developer account to get your .p12 certificate required for developing apps. A developer account is £60 or $100 for a standard and takes up to (and probably will) 24 hrs to register possibly longer for businesses. Because of this I belive there is an element of human verification in the process. If that’s the case when the beta comes out and tons of people all register at once there is going to be a holdup. So grab yours today at http://developer.apple.com.
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