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Adobe Flash 11 and its future

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In a few weeks Adobe will be releasing both the Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air to the market. Adobe has been advertising the new products as being significantly more powerful than previous versions, even going so far as describing it as a game console for the web. Adobe claims that the increase in graphics is almost 1,000 times faster than the previous version of Flash Player and Adobe Air.

But Adobe, as any tech savvy person knows, is also caught in a fight for its survival. Even though Flash Player and Adobe Air are quite commonly installed in PCs, Apple has removed Flash from the iOS platform and also on Macs. And another sign that does not bode well for Adobe is the recent announcement by Microsoft that the new version of Internet Explorer that will be included with the forthcoming Windows 8 Metro environment will not be supporting browser plugins – the entry point for Flash in a browser.

With slowly shrinking support and the threat being posed by HTML 5, will Adobe’s Flash still have a future especially in a post-PC age?
If Adobe will be asked, the company thinks that Flash still has a bright future for it. It has already called Flash Player 11 and also Air 3 the “next generation for the web”. This is quite a lofty claim. [Read more…]

Adobe Demos AIR on DROID, Announces Flash 10.1 Support Soon

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Here we have Adobe’s contribution to the ongoing Mobile World Congress.  And what contribution it is as Adobe demoes something that might possibly give the Android platform an edge over Apple’s iPhone OS – Adobe AIR running on Droid.  Since the demo looks quite well,  it follows that other Android devices including Google Nexus One will be to run Adobe AIR apps as well. Likewise, Adobe also announced that Flash 10.1 will soon be available for Android devices as well as iPhone.

With Adobe AIR, developers will have access to a feature-rich environment when developing their rich applications outside the mobile browser of Android devices and on multiple operating systems via individual marketplaces and applications stores. Adobe AIR  will bring about mobile apps that are optimized for high performance on mobile screens and takes advantage of the capabilities of native devices.

Adobe AIR will also allow developers to include multi-touch, accelerometer, geolocation, and other functionality offered by existing mobile OS into their own mobile AIR apps. It also let developers to create contextual apps with different display screens, device-speficif interaction techniques, mobile platform specific functionality and network access and bandwidth differences.

In addition, Adobe also announced that Flash 10.1 will soon be available on Android devices such as DROID and Nexus One as well as other mobile platforms including the BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile. Interestingly, while the iPhone was not mentioned as part of those mobile platforms that will support, Windows Mobile was included in the list despite the fact that Microsoft may not be supporting it on Windows Mobile 7.

Or perhaps this is just a miscommnication?