Some of you may have noticed a lack of posts recently, that’s because I’ve been busy with my latest project – Flash User Group UK.
That’s right, it’s finally set up and ready to go with the first meeting planned for mid April, I hope to see some of you guys there the ones who can’t make it we will be throwing the footage of the event onto the groups website. As any new group we need as much support as you can so can you e-mail, tweet and shout about it as much as possible.
[Hit the Flash User Group UK's Website for more details]
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Flash has received some well deserved criticism over the last year in regards to its performance. I have found that its image in the web design community has become damaged for many reasons that are not relevant to today’s player. Adobe and developers of the platform have made some mass yet unappreciated improvements to the player over the last few.
Search Engine Optimization today is not such of an issue if you build the site well and also deep link it. Even accessibility isn’t a huge issue with great tools available to make your content text to speech friendly. But what Flash is really getting criticized for is performance.
Fortunately Adobe was quick on the ball to resolve the problems, but in turn they expect device manufactures to play ball and work with them in the process. Google have recently brought out the Nexus One which is a Flash Player 10.1 capable phone. Google worked closely with Adobe to ensure that the player ran great on the system and from what I have seen so far it looks awesome. Flash Player 10.1 brings huge advancements in performance especially on the mobile platform and in delivering HD content, such a huge progress should warrant it its very own version number ‘Flash Player 11′. Adobe has proved time and time again since Adobe Max 2009 that Flash is ready for the mobile platform and have added Flash support to many awesome powerful phones supporting full Flash Player with accelerometer and multi-touch support. This I call progress.
So why no Flash love for the iPhone?
Apple are greedy, and they want revenue, if you could jump onto hulu to watch a video why would you buy video from iTunes. I agree this is just business sense but with the iPad people really thought that they can’t use the same old excuse again that it runs too slowly, but Jobs pulled out that card again. The people want Flash and Apple have received some serious bad press from the lack of it.
People say that Flash Player is inaccessible, but I ask you which is more inaccessible the 99.9% of internet enabled computers with Flash Player or the percent of people with HTML5 capable browsers.
Flash isn’t the processer hungry application it used to be, both Adobe and developers of the Flash platform are learning that keeping their code optimized will go a long way into keeping the platform alive.
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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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You might not get the picture above if your not British, but hey I am and this is my blog! Anyway getting to the point Karl Freeman has created this pretty handy AIR app to make our lives a little easier to share your files by utilizing the drop.io service. Just drop and drag your files to the interface and it uploads! Simples!
[Video After The Break]
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With the upcoming release of 1080p video on YouTube I couldn’t be happier to have a new GPU accelerated Flash Player! Flash Player 10.1 gives some significant improvement upon the previous builds. No mobile release as of yet but you can rock HD on your even on your Nvidia ION. If you kitted out for it you even now have native-multi-touch support! Although the player is in pre-release I would still highly recommend it as I have found it to be nothing but stable. Besides in this day in age of Web 2.0 doesn’t everything have a BETA label on it? Get it here!
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This is a awesome look at a couple of the new things we will be seeing in Photoshop CS5, it look promising! Although the narrator scares me a little! They demo two new technologies, dynamic 3D bendable brush’s and you can now warp pictures with control in certain area.
Enjoy!
[via NetTuts]
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I’m a self-proclaimed geek, so when I saw this video (even after the third time) I was crying with laughter. Well worth a watch!
“Let’s ask a ninja!”
P.S- Can’t wait for CS5!
[via TechRadar]
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Airapplications are becoming more popular every day, and is a brilliant platform to develop for. Today I’d like to show you my 5 favorite Air apps.
New York Times
This has been by far biggest and most successful of Air applications with millions of downloads. The reader is adaptable to it’s window size and has tons of features such as daily crosswords. It [...]
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At Adobe Max, Adobe announced that full fat flash will be on all smart phone platforms by the end of the year, with the release of flash player 10.1, this was with the exception of the iPhone. This news broke my heart as the iPhone is such an awesome platform and a huge amount of [...]
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