If anyone has seen the previews for Flash 10.1 it is very exciting. One medium for playing videos, games, animations, ads, navigators, … working across all platforms, except Apple.

Using Flash can bring down the cost of developing mobile apps. There are currently 5 major app stores for mobile devices; Palm, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Blackberry. As things are right now you would have to make an app in each market (using different languages and technology) to reach the entire mobile audience, but Flash 10.1 will change this.

Flash 10.1 is set to run on everything; netbooks, tablets, computers and smartphones. So every site that works on your computer will also work on any internet connected device if it supports Flash 10.1. Flash 10.1 is also GPU (hardware) accelerated, so animations and video will run extremely fast even on lower priced hardware. This also brings me to question if Adobe CS5 will also have 3d rendering with openGL or DirectX. Flash 10.1: Full Flash for Everyone But iPhone, Actually Playable HD Vids

The exception will be any of Apple’s mobile devices which are unfortunately becoming the IE6 of mobile devices. They hold just enough market share to have to support them, but don’t play nice with everything else out there. Some companies are falling back to HTML5 when encountering a devices from Apple, others are turning to apps. This is a major inconvenience to have to spend extra time and money to develop something specifically for 24% of the smartphone market.

HTML5 is nice for video, but if you support HTML5 with h.264 video then you choose to not support anyone using Firefox (50% of internet users). Also features that can be done on Flash; multi-bitrate streaming, full screen, embeddable video, video ads, overlays, hotspots and interactions are not available. So HTML5 can not be used alone, but only in combination with another technology. If you want to see more about HTML5 you can view my other post for more information.

Fortunately for everyone Adobe has an answer that will save time and money. If you created a mobile application in Flash 10.1 it will not run on Apple, or will it? With the new Adobe CS5 Suite you can now export Flash to an iPhone app. So you will be able to build an app to run on everything with one technology.

There is an example below of Flash application that was built by the New York Times for a mobile site. It can also be exported as an iPhone app, submitted to the store where it will undergo a 2-6 week approval process, hopefully be accepted then can be used as a fallback for the mobile site. The development costs will be lower and the user experience will be consistent across all platforms.

Here are a couple more examples of Flash 10.1:

Flash Player 10.1 prerelease software demos and interviews

Packager for iPhone Examples

I guess only time will tell if Apple will adopt Flash or if it will affect Adobe or Apple’s market shares.

Posted by Beau Durrant

Devices from futuristic television shows are becoming a reality and this year the focus is on the PADD.

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/PADD

A PADD (Personal Access Display Device – coined from Star Trek) is a hand held touch screen device that displays information and preforms various tasks. The devices available to consumers will not be able to open doors, read oxygen levels or complete transactions with a finger print reading, but they are excellent for a quick update on news, checking your email, watching videos or playing a casual game.

Many companies have released or will be releasing their version of a PADD this year. Each one has different features and price ranges, so if this interests you I would recommend taking the time to find the one in your price range that will fill your needs.

Apple iPad

Google Tablet

HP Slate

Notion Ink Tablet (ADAM)

Freescale Tablet

Asus Eee Tablet

ICD Vega

Compal Tablet

Microsoft Courier

Firstview CE/Android Tablets

Pierre Cardin Tablet

MSI

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/msi-shows-off-10-inch-android-tablet-running-new-tegra-chipset/

Dell Streak

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/dell-teases-audiences-with-a-peek-at-its-upcoming-slates/

Quanta

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/quanta-tegra-2-prototype-hands-on/

Posted by Beau Durrant

What is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is a new social network powered by Google.

Similar to Twitter you can follow people and have them follow you, reading and posting constant streams of real time updates. But that’s just the start … there’s the ability to add images and videos, comments, like and share posts/statuses. Integrate your favourite sites and Google Apps together in one place and do everything from your desktop, notebook or mobile device.

There have been many reactions to Buzz in a short period of time both good and bad. Many concerns about privacy, automatic opt-in from Gmail, features and uses.

Google Buzz had made a huge impact in less than a week, only time will tell what is to come in the future.

We have our Google profile set up with Buzz. We haven’t used our Gmail account a lot in the past but will be expanding on it and using it a little more to test this new social media resource.

Tools & Integration

Migrate your Twitter Contacts to Google Buzz
*Beta Code: p4rtr1dg39405

My Tweeple matches Twitter Profiles with Google Buzz Profiles

View Google Buzz Mobile From Your Desktop & Android 1.5+
@Brandon Partridge

How to Send Google Buzz Posts to Twitter
@Darren Humphries

Ping.fm already updates Google Buzz instantly from txt, apps, email …
@Seesmic

HOW TO: Integrate Google Buzz Into Your WordPress Blog
@Christina Warren

HOW TO: Make a Google Buzz Desktop App
@Christina Warren

HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail
@Ben Parr

Buzz off: Disabling Google Buzz
@Jessica Dolcourt

Posted by Beau Durrant

I came across an interesting online solution lately. At first glance, this solution seemed rather similar to Google Docs, being a way to store and distribute files online and offsite. Once I read further I realized that one thing that made this system great was that it was not only a great way to store your files (spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and more stored securely offsite) but it also allowed the user accessing those files to open the files up in a built in viewer. This means that you do not need a powerpoint viewer installed on your computer in order to see a PowerPoint presentation and the same goes with all popular file formats.

This site is called Box.net.

From their security whitepaper found here… http://www.box.net/home/security_whitepaper … it seems that they have thought of everything, granting users specific access as if it were hosted on their own internal network.

But wait…..they have also just recently released an iPhone app as well that allows you to access your company’s files, such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, on your phone, edit them, and send them back to the cloud for others to access.

They have also created APIs for the mobile market that will enable other apps developers to access the content and manipulate it as well. Managing files on the go has never been easier or more convenient.

There is a free lite version similar to Dropbox, but if you require heartier services as a bigger company, you can check out their plans here…. http://www.box.net/pricing

Posted by Jeff Johnston

Facebook has recently undergone a transformation that may not be apparent at first but will speed up the overall use of the popular social media website.

This technology is called HipHop for PHP. Using this has allowed Facebook developers to reduce the CPU usage on their Web servers on average by about fifty percent. How is this done you ask?

HipHop helps the PHP programmers to overcome some shortfalls of scripted languages like PHP, such as less efficient CPU and memory usage. They do this by transforming the PHP code into C++ code with HipHop and then compiling it with g++ (an open source compiler for c++ code that can be found here… http://gcc.gnu.org ).

To help, certain parts of your code can be written in c++ to begin with but the magic of this system is obviously for sites like Facebook that employ PHP experts and need to find an interoperability between languages. This way, the same developers can work on both sets of code without having to be experts in both.

Facebook has also released this system as open source software so that other sites facing similar problems may use their system to speed up their sites as well.

Facebook has reported that they are using HipHop on 90% of all their traffic so it is a great testing ground for such software.  As such, from Facebook come the following statistics:

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month
• More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

This adds up to a site that serves serves nearly 400 billion PHP-based page views every month.

If you would like more information on this project:

Developer Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/hiphop-php-dev

Posted by Jeff Johnston