Flash
World's shortest laser pulse to shed new light on quantum mechanics
Since first invented, the effort to make lasers that can produce shorter and more powerful pulses of light has been a very active one. One driving force is that if you want to take a picture of something occurring very rapidly, you need a very short pulse of light to prevent the image from blurring. The first ruby laser produced microsecond pulses of light, but more recently femtosecond optical pulses a billion times shorter have become common. Still shorter pulses belong to the attosecond regime - the regime wherein a University of Central Florida research team is creating optical pulses sufficiently brief to stop quantum mechanics in its tracks. Read More
The first Borderlands game was released on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC in 2009 and its cel-shaded visuals and heady mix of RPG and shooter elements resulted in a positive critical reception. A sequel, unsurprisingly titled Borderlands 2, is due to be released on Sept. 18 and the developer, Gearbox Software, is putting the publicity drive in gear. The latest push to gain attention is the release of a 16-bit version of Borderlands playable in a (Flash enabled) web browser. Titled The Border Lands, (like Facebook, it dropped the "the"), it offers some simple "old-skool" fun for gamers while they wait for the main event. Read More
At the Adobe MAX 2011 conference in Los Angeles this week, Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney demonstrated the Unreal Engine 3 running in fully inside Flash as part of his keynote address. The live technical demonstration saw a version of Unreal Tournament 3 running in Adobe Flash Player 11, which was also released this week. Adobe says the development could lead to console-quality 3D graphics in games running directly in the browser, such as Facebook social games. Read More
In April 2010, Steve Jobs’ outlined why Flash would not be permitted on iOS devices in his “Thoughts on Flash” open letter. While Jobs made some valid points in terms of Flash’s proprietary nature, security concerns, and the fact it drains the batteries of mobile devices, the popularity of the Skyfire 2.0 mobile web browser and standalone VideoQ Flash video player showed that there were still plenty of iOS users keen to Flash video on their mobile devices. Now Adobe has finally come to the party with its own solution that will allow Flash video content to be viewed directly within Safari on iOS devices. Because Adobe will use a similar technique to that of Skyfire, users of Android and Playbook mobile devices will also benefit in terms of battery life. Read More
While a lot of online video has made the move to HTML 5, there are still plenty of Flash videos floating around that leave iDevice users with a “Please Upgrade Flash” message on their displays. With Apple seemingly unlikely to ever support Flash on its iOS devices, Skyfire came to the rescue last year with its Skyfire browser that allows Flash video to be viewed on said devices. Realizing that, despite its lack of Flash support, most people are generally quite happy using Safari, Skyfire has now released a standalone Flash player for iOS devices called VideoQ. Read More
Looks like the legions of iPhone users are pretty keen to get Flash video on their device with news that Skyfire 2.0 mobile web browser has effectively “sold out.” Within five hours of being released on iTunes, the Skyfire Flash video solution shot to the head of the top grossing app list and third highest paid app overall and overloaded the Skyfire servers, leaving potential buyers staring at the “Please Upgrade Flash” message while the folks at Skyfire Labs scramble to increase capacity. Read More
Apple relaxes development tool restrictions for iOS: Flash is back
Apple has caused a lot of confusion for iPhone app developers by banning them from creating apps using any compiler not created by Apple, but then approving apps that break this rule – even going so far as to promote them in the App Store. Finally it looks like Apple has seen the light (and presumably the benefits) and announced that it has relaxed restrictions on its iOS developer license, opening the doors to native Flash and AdMob applications – as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. Read More
When we took a look at Adobe Creative Suite 5 before its launch, the new features and improvements to InDesign definitely made us sit up and take notice. Adobe really only made a big thing of its improvements to interactivity and the fact it’s now able to export directly to SWF format for playback in the Adobe Flash Player. However, when we started digging deeper and played with the less publicized additions, we realized what a gem this upgrade really is. Read More
In what would have to be one of the craftiest marketing ploys seen in recent times, UK company X2 Computing has announced the release of its new tablet PC named – you guessed it - the iTablet. Aiming to give the Apple iPad a run for its money, it features a 1.6GHz Intel processor, 250GB of memory and a 1.3MP webcam, the conveniently named tablet also offers support for Flash and the choice of Windows 7 and Linux operating systems. Read More
