On Friday I gave the Keynote at Flash Camp Seattle and as part of that keynote I tried to show off Flash Player 10.1 running on Nexus One. Unfortunately the demo didn’t go well and it got some attention around the web. I’ve had a great experience with Flash on my Nexus One but in this case I was running an interim Flash Player build, one I probably should not have installed, and one that I definitely should not have used for any public demos

After I saw Jeff’s blog post, I sat down, upgraded my Flash Player, and went through and tested some of the sites I use on a regular basis. The experience was fantastic. Everything from the Eco Zoo to the NHL video site runs almost flawlessly. While it won’t make up for my mistake at Flash Camp, I recorded a video so people could see an experience that will be much closer to the final experience with Flash Player on Android.

It’s been cool to see so many Flash sites work on mobile devices. However because there is such a variety of Flash content out on the web, it’s important to understand that not all of it is going to run on devices like the Nexus One, both because of lower hardware capabilities of devices and because of user interface design.

A lot of people are clearly interested in Flash Player on mobile devices. It’s a big issue, and I feel terrible that my unpreparedness ended up being a strike against Flash on mobile devices. We’ll be releasing a public version of Flash Player 10.1 at Google I/O and would love to hear how your Flash sites perform. You can always submit issues by using the open Flash Player bug base.

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TechCruch just posted about the news that Adobe and Google are going to be collaborating a bit around Chrome and the Flash Player. The basic gist is that Chrome will start integrating the Flash Player directly into the browser so that users will always have the most up to date versions and anyone who downloads Chrome won’t need to also install the Flash Player. I think that’s good, but the much bigger news in my opinion, is that we’re working with Chrome and Mozilla to revamp the plugin architecture. This has huge implications.

We’ve been using an old-school plugin model for a long time. In fact NPAPI, the plugin interface, stands for Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface. And as the Wikipedia entry states, it’s so sucessful because it’s so simple. The API basically lets plugins associate themselves with a content type (like a SWF file) and then puts that plugin in charge of all the rendering. There’s not a lot of integration between the plugin and the content in the browser which means the plugin lives in its own little world and it’s tough to break out. You can do things like ExternalInterface but it’s still pretty hacky.

But under this new plug-in, we’ll have much closer integration at the browser level. There’s a great summary of what this means at the Chromium blog:

Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines. Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.

Think better access to the hardware APIs via this new plug-in model, better access to the DOM, and a generally much better, more stable experience. The Flash Player in the browser has always felt a little like a black box largely because ofthe constraints in the plugin model. Certain things didn’t work quite as you’d expect in a regular HTML site. Hopefully this changes that. In theory this could make it possible to use the save-password feature with your Flex/Flash apps, or make Flash SEO a lot easier, and it allows us to innovate around HTML-Flash integration. If you’ve used AIR, you’ve seen what’s possible when you have complete control over both technologies. This new plugin work makes that easier to do across all browsers that support it. I don’t know when/if we’ll see it, but it’s easier now.

Another benefit is that the API is going to be OS and Browser neutral so you won’t see such wildly different performance on different platforms. The hooks that we can use to make the browsing experience better will work across all of the browsers that support the new plugin across all of the operating systems.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Last week I did a very quick, Flip Cam-quality video of Flash Player 10.1 running the March Madness on Demand site on a Nexus One. There is some stuttering when I switch from portrait to landscape, but other than that, it plays pretty well. It’s hard to capture with the Flip, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.

Also, Harish, one of the Adobe Evangelists in India, ported an AIR application he built to a browser app with Flex 4 and shows it running on the Nexus One. It’s pretty slick to see how well a Flex 4 app works on that little device.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

It feels like a long road, but today we’re releasing the final versions of Flash Builder 4 and the Flex 4 SDK. If you were one of the attendees at Flash Camp Boston, you got the final versions on the DVD (but we had to call it a release candidate) so there’s no need to update. For the rest of you, make sure to grab the latest and greatest right now. If you’ve installed previous betas/prerelease versions, you will need to uninstall those before you install the new versions.

I’ve been a Flex developer for a long time, since version 1.5, and I genuinely think this is the most significant release in the history of Flex. We made some huge architectural changes in this version of the SDK. The new skinning model which separates the logic of a component from the look and feel is going to let you create some very complex and unique user interfaces. An improved states model along with a much more efficient transitions/effects engine mean that it will be easier to create multi-screen applications with meaningful rich transitions. And arguably the most important thing we did was optimize. The compiler is much faster which means you’ll be spending less time compiling and more time building.

But the biggest thing about this release in my mind is Flash Builder. This tool has come such a long way and Flash Builder 4 is a home run. The added productivity enhancements like ASDoc support and event handler generation make it so much nicer to program. Throw in things like better refactoring and built in unit testing and you’ve got a very powerful IDE on your hands. I’ve been using it for a while now, but when I step back and look at it, I’m very happy with what the team accomplished. Hopefully you also enjoy the new network monitor and the DCD features which make it easy to connect to data and start building RIAs. And with the new leadership in place, the future of Flash Builder is only going to get better.

I’ve got a bunch of articles up on the Developer Center for using Flash Builder 4 with PHP. If you’re a PHP developer interested in testing the new features, these should get you pointed in the right direction. We’ve also got recordings up of all the talks at Flash Camp Boston which cover a variety of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 features as well as some thoughts straight from developers who are going to be using Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4.

Congrats to the teams who made this happen. I hope you all enjoy the hard work that went into the release.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Very good perspective on Flash and standards.

Both the standards community and the Flash community are extremely good at sharing knowledge and supporting the people within their respective groups. The relationship across communities, however, isn’t nearly as cordial. Two things are happening: either the people within each camp stay to themselves, or one ignorantly hurls insults at the other.

I love that angle. Both camps have very passionate communities but the problem is that there’s not enough cross-pollination between groups. Part of that is that (I don’t think) Flash has done a good job of playing well with HTML. It has been and still is largely a black box. So at a technical level the two technologies don’t work as well as they should have. That carries over into the communities. As a company that makes tools for both HTML and Flash, it behooves us to be involved in both sides of the debate. My hope is that as Flash opens up more and hopefully works better with HTML, the people on both sides will start to work more closely as well.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog