Video: Brightcove about Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I bumped in to Cameron Church from Brightcove. We talked about the Brightcove Mobile Experience and Cameron explains how Flash Player 10.1 expands Brightcove’s reach to smart phone users.
For more info about Brightcove, check out brightcove.com.
Blog theme update
“Hey Serge, what happened to that blog design contest winner? When is that theme going up?”. Aaah yes… I got that question a couple of times in the last few weeks. Sadly Marten (the winner) mailed me with the message that he would not be able to finish the actual WordPress theme… Since that was a part of the contest, I could not just ask someone else to transform the PSD in to an actual theme. I couldn’t really cut the prize in half and so I decided to keep it for a future contest.
Around the same time, I came across Canvas by WooThemes and decided to build something on top of this framework theme. February has been really busy so I didn’t get around to building it yet. But… Tonight I noticed that someone/something inserted a link to a malware site (If you’re on Windows, please double check if the malware link didn’t install anything on your machine. I apologize if it did.). From the first investigation, I noticed some weirdness going on in the theme files and thus decided to expedite the theme switch. It’s now using a default Canvas theme but hopefully the code injecting security hole is now gone.
If you still see something weird, it would be greatly appreciated if you could let me know. Thanks!
Flash Player 10.1 and battery life on mobile devices
It’s great to see all the excitement about Flash Player 10.1 coming to mobile devices! Though some people need to learn to get their facts straight before jumping to conclusions.
One of the biggest improvements in Flash Player 10.1 is the memory and CPU consumption which obviously also has a big impact on the battery life. Battery life on mobile devices is very important and thus always top of mind for the engineering team!
There was a lot of commotion around the video that my colleague Michael Chaize published. He showcased a number of Flash based apps to show off the performance of FP10.1. Some of the applications he showed are CPU intensive and thus also potential battery drainers.
Mark Doherty posted a great follow up post with some background information on how we test battery consumption and performance internally. He also recorded a 17 minute YouTube video which resulted in a 6% battery drain. That results to being able to watch over 4 hours worth of YouTube video over WiFi using Flash Player. I can’t even do that on my brand new MacBook Pro (which is supposed to be able to give me 8 hours of battery life)… I’m not even sure I can do that on my Apple phone using their native YouTube app…
Today, Michael posted a follow up video where he plays a 26 minute video and plays a Flash based game for 12 minutes.
He noted a 10% battery drain after the playing the video which calculates down to 4.3 hours of video. Playing the Flash based game for 12 minutes resulted in a 4% drain which boils down to 5 hours of continuous gaming in the browser using Flash Player 10.1.
Those numbers are pretty impressive to me! Especially when you consider that this is still a pre-release version of the Flash Player running on a pre-release version of Android.
Kudos to the Flash Player team! Flash on!
Happy 2nd birthday, Adobe AIR!
Aaah… They grow up so fast… Adobe AIR is 2 years old today. With AIR 2 now coming to mobile devices like Android devices and Apple’s phones it’s clear that AIR has a bright future ahead.
The AIR 2 release is just around the corner but you can already start building and testing your apps with the public beta available on Adobe Labs.
If you’re interested in learning about the new features AIR 2 has to offer, check out my presentation slides from FITC and the demo files that go with it. Also check out Tour De Flex for more code samples.
I can’t wait to see what you guys are going to build with AIR 2 and its new capabilities!
Photo by Lee Turner.
“What’s new in FP10.1 and AIR2″ slides and source files
Earlier this week I did a presentation on all things new in Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 at FITC in Amsterdam. While it’s impossible to cover everything in an hour, it should give you a good idea on some of the new features.
You can download the sources as well. I’ve included both the Flex project files (.FXP) as well as the mxml files for those of you that are not yet on Flash Builder 4. Remember that you must have the AIR 2 SDK installed to use these examples.
Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 was released earlier this week. Make sure you download the latest beta and test your content!
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