The Flash and Unity communities are buzzing about a sneak peek that was posted on the Unity blog. And for good reason! The Unity team is doing some amazing work utilizing the new Stage 3D (formerly known as Molehill) APIs available in Flash Player 11 (currently in beta on Adobe Labs). The blog post on Unity’s blog was so popular that it crashed their server earlier today ;-) But now that it’s back up you just have to check it out!

Unity is also organizing a Flash Day during their Unite conference in September. If you happen to be in the San Francisco area on September 27 I’d suggest you book your seat today. The Unity Flash Day is a free event but registration is required. Hope to see you there! Flash on!

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:

• Alternativa3D
• Away3D
• Coppercube
• Flare3D
• Minko
• Sophie3D
• Yogurt3D
• Zest3D

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!

No… That’s not a typo. Yes… You read that correctly. This game developer is dropping HTML5 in favor of Flash!

These guys are working on a game that recently got a lot of attention on Reddit and Twitter. The prototype is written in HTML5/JS but they are now abandoning HTML5 and are moving to Flash!

Their main concerns are the “spotty” browser support, slow performance and the fact that there is no ecosystem for selling HTML5 games.

Is html5 the future? I sure hope so! Unfortunately, it isn’t the present.

Full story on http://blog.tametick.com/2011/01/why-im-moving-from-html5-to-flash.html

Some of you may know that I used to work in the broadcast world. I used to work at one of Belgium’s biggest commercial broadcasters as one of their “webmasters”. Over the 5 or 6 years I was there I worked on projects like Idols, Big Brother, Miss Belgium, sites for sports events, sites for the different channels, and so much more. I know this is going to sound like I’m bragging but when our team launched a new site everyone took notice.

One of the first big projects I did while I was there was the first Big Brother site in Belgium. It was September 2000… The golden years… The site had 12 (if I remember correctly) live streams from the cameras in the house and the site was made entirely with Flash 4 (Flash 4 didn’t even have ActionScript yet and the cameras were streamed with Windows Media because Flash didn’t have video yet). We also had a team of 3 dedicated writers for the site who documented every single thing that happened in the Big Brother house. Obviously we didn’t want to manually update the site every time a new message was posted. We created a “back-end” system where the content writers could add their own text. Today that would be an obvious thing to do but back then we only had name-value pairs (&title=The title&article=Article goes here). The first night the site went live everything went down. Not because it wasn’t built right (well… That depends on who you ask :D) but because the site was so popular. The whole Belgian Internet world was talking about it. Every single Internet provider blamed the other one. At one point I even had to go and explain the downtime in the evening news. Aaah… those were the days…

Sorry to be reminiscing like that but I was just going through some old files and that brought back a whole lot of memories. I was actually looking for a screenshot of another project I did back then because of a really cool studio graphics system I saw at IBC over the weekend.

Flash makes it extremely easy to load and display data. 10 years ago doing something like that on TV would not be possible with traditional broadcast systems. So what did we do? We used Flash on TV. We used Flash for a bunch of things. From displaying SMS chat messages to displaying weather updates and even a countdown clock for New Year’s Eve. The only problem was keying out the background from the Flash Projector.

We would just use a chroma key. On the left you see the Flash application with the green area and on the right what you would see on your TV. This particular application showed weather updates from the Belgian coast as well as event updates on top of a live video feed. The video feed (traditional video not streamed) would be keyed in.

A few weeks ago my Dutch colleague Klaasjan told me about this Dutch company that was using Flash for broadcast graphics. When I saw the demo at IBC last weekend it felt like I had just stepped out of a time machine and went back in time. This is almost exactly like what we used to do back then only better… a lot better!

Displaying real time data is one of the many strengths of Flash and also one of the things that is (still) notoriously hard to do with traditional broadcast systems. When you mix the two you have endless capabilities. If I were still in the broadcast industry today this would be on the top of my wish list. Watching the VidiGo demo at IBC brought a smile to my face. It reminded me of some really good times and it also proved that Flash is extremely powerful and a lot more than the animation player it was back in the early days. Not that I needed any convincing ;-)

Flash on!

The US Open is not only using Flash for their live and on demand video they’re also using it for data visualization. Making data look interesting is probably one of the most difficult things to do but IBM has built a really cool application for the US Open tennis tournament.

The US Open PointStream application (built with Flex by IBM) visualizes match data and stats in real-time to give you insight into the way your favorite players are performing. There currently are no live matches so it only shows the data from the last played match. You can bet on me checking out the app the next time our national tennis heroes Kim Clijsters and Yanina Wickmayer hit the tennis courts.

Hat tip to Read Write Web.