BlackBerry PlayBook browser performance
I am really excited about the BlackBerry PlayBook! I was able to play around with it at MAX a few weeks ago but sadly only for a little while. I loved the fact that it was incredibly light and yet seemed to be extremely powerful. RIM just posted a video of the BlackBerry PlayBook’s browser performance compared to Apple’s iPad. It’s amazing how fast it is… even when loading much richer content (it supports Flash!).
Oh… BTW… You can start developing applications for the PlayBook today! For more info, check out our Labs page about the BlackBerry Tablet OS and/or visit the BlackBerry developer website. The BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK just plugs right in to Flash Builder Burrito so you’ll be building PlayBook apps in no time!
Adobe User Group XL, November 17th, Amsterdam
If you’re in the Benelux and couldn’t make it to MAX then the Adobe User Group XL event is probably the next best thing. With international speakers from Pixar, BBC, North Kingdom, Achtung, Addikt, Adobe, and more this event is not to be missed.
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In the keynote I’ll be talking about and showing Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.5 running on multiple devices. Adobe Photoshop legend Russel Brown has something special prepared for the keynote as well. I’ll also be doing a session on Flash Builder Burrito and Flash Catalyst Panini and a session on personalized video on the web. If you’re interested in building mobile applications with the Flash Platform then I can highly recommend Mike Jones’ hands-on lab.
Last friday I heard that there are only a few tickets left so if you want to go then make sure you get yours today!
See you in Amsterdam on Wednesday!
1 code base, 5 hours, 5 devices. Powered by Flash!
Last week I had a bit of extra time to work on some demos and wanted to build something that could run on multiple devices. The Flash Platform is actually a very good choice to build multi-screen applications. A variety of devices already support Flash Player 10.1 in the browser and/or Adobe AIR and the list of devices is growing rapidly. I currently have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Desire HD, Logitech Revue with Google TV and a Broadcom AIR for TV set top box and wanted to build something that could run on all of these and in the browser on my desktop. Many of you know that I have a background in the broadcast industry so the choice for doing something with video was an easy one.
One of my good friends works at VT4. VT4 is part of the SBS Broadcasting Group and a very popular commercial TV station in Belgium. I knew they were playing around with some ideas and wanted to see if I could wow them ;-) As any broadcaster has these days they also have a bunch of video on their site. I started looking at how their video player was working and created a quick little proof of concept that would load an XML file with different videos. It took me about an hour to build the first working prototype that runs in the browser. I then asked them if they had an XML feed with the latest videos. I wanted to build something with real content and not something that I faked with local data and video.
Once I swapped the fake data and cleaned up the UI a bit the first device I wanted to test on was the Logitech Revue with Google TV. I just opened up the browser on the device and pointed it to the URL of the application on my server. The Logitech Revue comes with a keyboard remote control. The D-PAD on the keyboard sends out the same keycodes as the arrow keys on my laptop so the same application I was running on my laptop just worked exactly the same on the Logitech Revue. Device number 2 was done (number 1 being my laptop).
I also wanted to make an AIR for Android version that I could install on my HTC Desire HD and a Samsung Galaxy Tab. The only thing I had to change was the way the user interacts with the app. On a phone and a tablet the user uses his fingers instead of the keyboard input I was using on my laptop and the Google TV box. Again… This was the only thing I changed in the app before I compiled it as an APK and installed it on my phone and tablet. Number 3 and 4 worked perfectly.
The last device I wanted to try was the AIR for TV development box built by Broadcom. This is a prototype for a set top box that runs on AIR. At Adobe MAX we also had a Samsung Blu-ray player on display that can also run AIR applications. The set top box comes with a standard remote control. When the user presses a button on the remote control, a regular KeyboardEvent is fired off. It’s only a matter of getting the correct keycode and adding a function to it. Device number 5 was done.
It took me about 5 hours to build this application and do some minor tweaks to run it on these 5 devices. The only thing I changed was the input method. Everything else is exactly the same on all devices. I used Flash Builder Burrito to build it using the Flex framework. While it’s only a simple application I think this would take a lot longer if you had to build it with native code… And you wouldn’t be able to just reuse whatever you are using now in a Flash application in your browser. For instance, for a native application they would have to re-encode the video to a H.264. VT4 is currently using a mixture of the On2 VP6 codec and H.264 (not sure why but I’m sure they have a good reason for that).
I think this is a great example of the power of the Flash Platform!
Please note that I did not edit the video experience on the devices. In the video you’ll see the Samsung Galaxy Tab buffering the video for a second. I recorded the videos earlier this week and was experiencing some network issues. I did replace the audio with audio recorded on my laptop. I shot the video with my Canon 7D and the internal microphone is not really made for these kinds of videos.
Flash on!
Google improves SWF indexing
“What about search engine indexing?” is one of the most asked questions I get when I’m at events or customer meetings. Not many people know that Google actually already indexes SWF files.
Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.
Yesterday Google announced that they have now expanded their SWF indexing capabilities.
Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.
Read the full blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog.
Kevin Lynch on Flash Player optimizations and HTML5
NewTeeVee Live invited Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch for a fireside chat yesterday to talk about HTML5 and what Adobe is doing to support HTML5 development as well as talk about recent comments suggesting that Flash is a battery drainer.
“Playing rich content uses more battery than non-rich content whichever technology you use.”
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