Flash

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 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

Digital artists will no doubt be excited to hear that the online art community deviantART has just released Muro, a free, web-based drawing tool. And as an added bonus, Muro is built with HTML5 (read, 'No flash') which means you can use your iPad as a drawing tablet. 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

With the development of the ZMS-08 system on a chip, ZiiLabs is aiming to bring high performance media processing to low power devices. As well as allowing full Blu-ray quality 1080p video playback, the chip supports simultaneous HD encode and decode, 3D and 2D image processing and advanced audio. Read More

If you buy Kingston Flash memory in the near future you might just get a little more than a way to store your digital media. Paramount Digital Entertainment has teamed up with Kingston to offer full-length movies on Flash memory cards. Read More