The future of Flash brighter than ever
Yesterday at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco Adobe launched the Adobe AIR and Flash Player Incubator program. The Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages.
One of those features is the Molehill API for 3D. Molehill is a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Flash Platform runtimes. Adobe worked closely with the most popular ActionScript 3D frameworks so that not only advanced 3D developers can take advantage of these new APIs. These 3D frameworks already have Molehill enabled versions available today:
But Molehill does not just offer high performance 3D APIs but can also be used for 2D graphics! Flash Player Product Manager Thibault Imbert has more information and an example on his blog.
Unity added the cherry on top of yesterday’s news. They announced that an upcoming version of Unity (the very popular game development tool) will allow developers to target Flash Player. I can’t wait to play around with it!
These are very exciting times for Flash developers! Check out Tinic Uro’s blog to see how you can start playing with Molehill today!
Flash on!
Android activations visualized
We all know that the device market is changing rapidly. We also know that Android is rapidly gaining market share but this video is still pretty amazing to see. It visualizes Android device activations from October 2008 until now.
(Hat tip AndroidCentral)
New Molehill demo video by Flare3D
Flash is great for social gaming. We all know that. But Flare3D is showing off the “next generation of social gaming” using the upcoming Molehill APIs. Molehill is going to bring Flash (and the web) to a whole new level!
Flash on!
(Hat tip @JosephLabrecque)
MWC wrap-up: my favorite devices
While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home from Mobile World Congress I thought it was a good idea to sum up some of my favorite MWC announcements. One thing that definitely stood out was Android. The little green robot was everywhere! Google provided all their partners with Android candy and a robot display. This was also the first time that Google had a booth at MWC and it was the talk of the town! It was one of the biggest booths on the show floor and was always crowded. I’m guessing the slide and the giveaways had something to do with that.
Google asked a bunch of developers and partners to showcase their Android app on their booth and I think that really worked. Adobe partner Condé Nast showed off Wired Magazine and The New Yorker on a Motorola Xoom on the Android booth. The electronic versions of Wired and The New Yorker are built with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.
MWC was full of tablets. The Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the LG OptimusPad all look very interesting. NVidia even showed the LG OptimusPad with Flash Player 10.2 on Honeycomb! My favorite was definitely the HTC Flyer. Well… That and the PlayBook.
I really like the HTC Sense UI and HTC seems to have done a fantastic job at building a tablet specific version of the Sense UI. Sadly they were only showing it behind glass so they probably still have a bit of work to do. The specs look great though and this is high on my wish list. I also like BlackBerry’s PlayBook. RIM made a balsy move by opting for a brand new OS instead of picking one that already exists. And you know what… It works… The PlayBook is incredibly fast and the UI brings a nice breath of fresh air to the soon to be crowded tablet market. It’s completely different from anything else on the market. I also like the touch enabled bezel on the PlayBook.
There were also plenty of new smartphones at MWC. The ones that really popped out were the Samsung Galaxy S2, the LG Optimus 2X and the HTC Incredible S. The Galaxy S2 is incredibly light. It’s so light that it felt like there was no battery inside. The LG Optimus 2X is also very light and it runs on NVidia’s Tegra 2 making it incredibly fast. My favorite was again an HTC device. The Incredible S looks more or less like what I have in my Desire HD except that it’s faster and has a front facing camera.
Oh… I should probably say that all of the devices mentioned in this post have Flash Player preinstalled and there were dozens of other devices that also come with Flash Player preinstalled. These are just my favorites. It’s been an amazing show and I already look forward to next year’s edition.
Digital magazines coming to Android built on AIR
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Wired, Martha Stewart, and New Yorker magazines on iPad, right? Those were created with a new suite of tools that we’ve been working on. The Digital Publishing Suite allows you to use your existing staff, skills, and Creative Suite publishing tools to design and deliver publisher-branded reading experiences to mobile devices.
Currently these magazines were only available on iOS devices but this week at MWC we announced that the Android viewer is now available. The application is actually built on AIR!
Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED magazine, showed off the magazine at MWC on the Motorola Xoom running Honeycomb. Check out the video below for more info (courtesy Seattle Times):
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