Aaah… This is a great day! The Flash Player and AIR teams have been working on this for months and we’ve also been talking about it for quite a while. Today we’re upgrading the web with a ton of new features in Flash Player 10.1 and enable developers to build engaging cross-platform desktop applications.

Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 are now available for download.

If you haven’t been able to check out some of the new APIs before today then check out my “What’s new in Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2” presentation and sample code. We’re also hosting a series of free webinars introducing the new multi-screen development capabilities of the Flash Platform. Details and registration link online. Also check out the Flash Player Team and AIR Team blogs for more info.

One of the biggest new features in AIR 2 is the ability to talk to native processes and build native installers. To help you out with building those native installers check out my Package Assistant Pro AIR 2 application.

I can’t wait to see what you will build with these new capabilities! Flash on!

Tech journalists always get to play with the coolest gadgets before everyone else. Luckily one of the benefits of working at Adobe is that I also had access to the early bits of Flash Player 10.1 for Android. I’m sure you’ve all seen us blog and tweet about how great it is to have Flash Player running on mobile devices. I’m also pretty sure that some of you also didn’t believe us ;-). I don’t blame you… I agree… I admit that I did indeed drink the Kool-Aid. Heck… I’ve been drunk on Flash Kool-Aid for at least 13 years now :D.

So… If you have a hard time believing us Flash junkies evangelists then hopefully these tech bloggers/journalists can convince you. Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices rocks!

Financial Times: “I have been impressed with the fully featured experience of 10.1 after trying it for a few days on a Nexus One review unit running Android 2.2. Flash now not only plays video on websites flawlessly and enables full-screen gaming, but it also responds to touchscreen gestures so that objects in a game can be manipulated with a finger stroke. It also taps into accelerometers, meaning automatic adjustment to portrait or landscape mode.”

J/K On The Run: “Pretty reasonably impressed with Flash Player 10.1……[...] Yes, it rocks!”

CNet: “Unsurprisingly, the best performance came from Web sites that have already been optimized for mobile phones; that is, they’ll render the page with hardware accelerometers and trackballs in mind. When we off-roaded from Adobe-suggested sites, we found that Flash Player worked as it would in a desktop environment.”

Engadget: “It’s getting there, it works, it works surprisingly well.”

Mashable: “Adobe Flash 10.1 is also serious about performance. It includes hardware acceleration with H.264 video decoding, advanced memory management (which can decrease RAM usage by 50%), and a sleep mode that slows down the Flash player if an Android-powered device enters screensaver mode.”

Forrester Research: “I’ve been testing a Froyo-based Nexus One for the last week side-by-side with my iPhone, and I think it’s great to not have to deal with “little blue cubes” on the sites I visit every day.  The Froyo Nexus is fast, the multitasking is excellent, and contrary to assertion, I have not noticed a significant difference in battery life when I view Flash enable content (I barely get through a full day with my iPhone 3G even with a Mophie juice pack at full charge). When it comes to Flash apps running on Froyo itself, it’s also pretty clear to me that they can deliver an engaging mobile experience.”

Flash on!

Multi-touch is only just gaining grounds in the tech world. While it’s pretty common on mobile devices these days, you don’t yet see a lot of multi-touch devices in people’s homes. Sure… A lot of trackpads on laptops also support multi-touch these days but they usually only support the common gestures for zoom and rotate.

One of the key advantages of the Flash Platform is that Adobe can innovate and add new features rapidly. As Flash Player is one of the fastest adopted technologies on the web developers can use those new features in their applications almost instantly. Multi-touch is a very good example. When Adobe saw the uprise of multi-touch technology, it immediately started working on adding multi-touch capabilities to both Flash Player 10.1 and the AIR 2 runtimes. With public betas being available to developers, they can immediately start to experiment with these new features and start adding them to their applications.

That said… Developers have been doing multi-touch applications with Flash for years thanks to community driven ActionScript libraries. Check out these videos to get an idea on what people are doing/have been doing with multi-touch and Flash.

There are lots of examples like these out there… Feel free to leave a link in the comments to your multi-touch Flash application.

Flash on!

Other posts in this series:
The power of the Flash Platform Part 1
The power of the Flash Platform Part 2 – Augmented reality
The power of the Flash Platform Part 3 – Video
The Power of the Flash Platform Part 4 – Online gaming

Even though I already have FP10.1 installed on my Nexus One (one of the many perks of working at Adobe ;-)), I’m very happy to see that we will be releasing a public preview of Flash Player 10.1 for Android on my birthday… eh I mean… at Google I/O on May 19th/20th.

Ever since I switched to the Nexus One as my main phone I’ve been using Flash Player on the Android browser just about every day. I already told you a while ago that I am a news junkie and that I like to keep up with the news wherever I go. When something happens in the world, I usually visit a number of different news sites to see what they have to say. A lot of news outlets use Flash to deliver their videos. With Flash Player 10.1 installed on my device I can just open up a browser window, type in the URL that I am used to browsing to on my desktop machine and then just click on the video which starts playing instantly. No need to (purchase) download and install an app. The same content that I am used to seeing on my desktop machine is just right there.

I can’t wait to see and read your experiences with Flash Player on your mobile device. Google’s Android may be first but RIM, Palm (soon to be HP), Microsoft, Nokia and others will follow soon.

There seems to be some confusion around whether or not Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices (including Android) will ship in the first half of 2010 like we promised. It’s very energizing and refreshing to see the excitement about Flash Player coming to Android! However, I do want to set the record straight.

Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices (including Android) is still on track for an H1 2010 release!

The confusion started when an interview with Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen was misinterpreted. He said that Android devices with Flash Player 10.1 preinstalled will start shipping in H2.

It’s perfectly normal that devices with Flash Player preinstalled ship a little bit later than the actual release. That said, Flash Player 10.1 will also be available in the Android Market, on our website and/or via an OTA update of the OS. If you already own a recent Android device like the Nexus One, you will be able to download and install Flash Player yourself.

Make sure you sign up for the Flash Player 10.1 for Android beta notification and you may also be interested in signing up for the AIR2 for Android beta notification.

I’m sure by now you know about all the new features in Flash Player 10.1 but I’m also sure that there are a few that you don’t know about yet. Some of them are pretty cool and very useful/good to know. That is why I wanted to give you a quick list of 6 lesser known features.

1. Disabled screen saver in full screen mode
   There’s nothing more annoying than having to press the keyboard or moving your mouse every few minutes to prevent the screensaver from kicking in while watching a video in full screen. Flash Player 10.1 now temporarily disables your screensaver if video is playing and not paused, stopped or buffering. But it also works with audio. So… if you’re running a full screen app that plays audio and it is not paused, stopped or buffering and actually has volume the screensaver will not kick in.
2. Flash Player throttling
   Before Flash Player 10.1 the runtime would just render out all SWFs at the maximum possible frame rate even when they were not visible. In 10.1 this is now changing as Flash Player can detect whether or not a SWF is visible or not… if the browser actually supports it. Check out Tinic’s blog post on this topic and his follow up on which browsers support it.
3. Mobile text input
   I’ve been asked this question a couple of times over the last few weeks which is why I wanted to highlight it in this post. Flash Player 10.1 provides support for use of native device virtual keyboards with TextField support if no physical keyboard is detected. A virtual keyboard is automatically raised and lowered in response to focus changes on text fields.
4. Globalization API
   The new ActionScript globalization APIs allow Flash Player to use the values chosen in the operating system locale preferences to process text and lists and present information based on location context. Locale specific information and processing can include: date, time, currency and number formatting; currency and number parsing; string comparison for sorting or searching for text; and upper/lower case conversions.
5. Graphics hardware acceleration on mobile
   A GPU-based vector renderer replaces the software renderer on smartphones and other mobile devices, resulting in faster rendering performance for more expressive user experiences while consuming less power. This supports hardware acceleration of all rendering, including vector graphics, bitmaps, 3D effects, filters, color transforms, alpha, device and embedded text, Saffron type, and cacheAsBitmap.
6. Private browsing mode
   Flash Player 10.1 now automatically respects the host browser’s “private browsing” mode (Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer), where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content.

The release of Flash Player 10.1 is just around the corner now but you can already start developing applications that target the new APIs today. The release candidate of Flash Player 10.1 as well as all the information on how to start building apps today is available on Adobe Labs.

Flash on!

There’s been lot of buzz in the blogs about this over the last 24 hours. Now, the news is official: Google and Adobe are bringing improved Flash Player support in Chrome.

Paul Betlem: Today, Google is releasing the initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in their developer channel (behind a command line flag). Moving forward, Google will be including Flash Player in Chrome so users will always have the most current release and a safer and more seamless experience. The robust integration between Chrome and Flash Player will serve as a showcase for more consistent, seamless, and efficient Web browsing experiences. We feel that this significant effort by both Google and Adobe will directly improve the speed of innovation and move the Web forward, benefiting the entire community of developers and end-users.

Adobe is also working with Google, Mozilla and the broader community on a new plugin integration API that will be OS- and browser-neutral and thus maximize consistency across platforms. The new API will also provide performance benefits as the browser will be able to directly share more information about its current state and also provide a more secure browsing experience.

For more information, check out the Chromium Blog and Paul Betlem’s blog post on the Flash Player team blog.

To enable the internal Flash Player on OS X, download and install the Chrome developer channel version. Then open up Terminal and type: “open -a Google\ Chrome –args –enable-internal-flash”

Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert have inspired and amazed me many times. The things they do with Flash are unbelievable. The new version (completely rewritten from the ground up) of their Audiotool is absolutely amazing and a must see. They built an entire electronic music studio with the Flash Platform. I cannot think of a better way to demonstrate the power of the Flash Platform than to point you to http://www.audiotool.com

Aah man… This is going to keep me busy for hours and hours and hours!

Last Friday I blogged about how HTML5 and Flash could also just work together. A few people have asked if they could get the source files. I just packaged and uploaded the FLA, ActionScript class and HTML files. Download the zip file here.

A few people have also noted that the demo doesn’t work across different platforms even when using the same browser. While I wanted to demonstrate how Flash and HTML5 can coexist and even complement each other, it is (sadly) also a demonstration on how HTML5 is being implemented differently across browsers and operating systems. Feel free to post a comment if you know about fixes or workarounds in the JavaScript to make it work on more browsers.

I probably don’t need to tell you that there’s a lot of buzz (and fuzz) about how HTML5 is going to kill Flash. You probably know how I feel about this… I think the web is big enough for both of them… Even better… I think they could potentially complement each other!

Geolocation is a good example. HTML5 is going to get a geolocation API that works just beautifully even on devices with no GPS. Flash based applications will (currently) only get access to geolocation APIs when targeting the AIR runtime on mobile. Some browsers (I only know of Firefox 3.5 on Mac and the WebKit browser on the Nexus One) already support the HTML5 geolocation API… So why not use that to get geo information into your Flash based application?

It’s actually extremely easy to do…

But first a little bit of background as to why I was looking for this functionality. I’m actually building “this demo app” that needs the geolocation in order to have the functionality I was looking for. I want this app to work in as many places as possible. With the Flash Platform I can build this for my browser and my desktop. For the Apple phone I can export it as a native app and for the Nexus One I can use the device browser with Flash Player 10.1.

Now… How does it work? The HTML5 geolocation API is extremely easy to use and, like I said earlier, you don’t even need to have a GPS enabled device.

function getGEO()
{
	// First check if your browser supports the geolocation API
	if (navigator.geolocation)
	{
		alert("HTML 5 is getting your location");
		// Get the current position
		navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
		{
			lat = position.coords.latitude
			long = position.coords.longitude;
			// Pass the coordinates to Flash
			passGEOToSWF(lat, long);
		});
	} else {
		alert("Sorry... your browser does not support the HTML5 GeoLocation API");
	}
}
function passGEOToSWF(lat,long)
{
	alert("HTML 5 is sending your location to Flash");
	// Pass the coordinates to mySWF using ExternalInterface
	document.getElementById("mySWF").passGEOToSWF(lat,long);
}

In my Flash application, I’m using ExternalInterface so I can communicate between JavaScript and my SWF. When my Google Maps component is ready, I call the GetGEO JavaScript method:

ExternalInterface.call("getGEO");

When the JavaScript method gets a result from the geolocation API, it will pass it on to the passGEOToSWF method. In my Flash application, I just listen for that method call and then call the code to update the map.

ExternalInterface.addCallback("passGEOToSWF", onPassGEOToSWF);

If you don’t have an HTML5 ready browser, check out this video of the application running in Firefox 3.6. Even cooler is that this also works in the browser on my Flash Player 10.1 enabled Nexus One (Please note that the network is slower on the N1 and thus it isn’t able to keep up with loading new map images. This has nothing to do with Flash Player 10.1 or the application.):

If you have Firefox 3.5 or newer installed, you can give it a try yourself: http://www.webkitchen.be/geolocation. I’m sure there are other browsers out there that also already have the geolocation API but this is the only one I tested on the Mac.

Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how HTML5 and Flash can also just work together (instead of killing each other ;-)). Flash on!

UPDATE: While writing this blog post, @robertbak pinged me on Twitter saying that he wrote a library to use in your Flex applications. Check it out on the Flex Exchange.

UPDATE: For the source files check out this blogpost.