Flash Player 10 released
Adobe Systems announced the release of a major update to its Flash technology to enable web sites to have better video and audio with the new version 10 Flash Player (code-named Astro) and it arrived just days after MS released Silverlight (reported here as an afterthought for many, which prompted a few comments of defense for the product).
Flash Player 10, a free download available at the link, includes a lot of new features, which include easier to use and access 3D graphic effects, better font handling for more intricate layouts when putting words and graphics together, and improved support for multilingual applications.
Also with increased capability is the sound subsystem, with better audio mixing of music and sound effects too, with more support for hardware based acceleration.
This should raise the bar for multimedia on websites and other related applications, and may effectively (more or less) bury MS Silverlight, if it works out to be fairly bug free.
SWF Maestro: Flash to Desktop App Made Easy
Have you ever wanted to create an application but you just don’t know how to code c++, VB or one of those difficult programming languages?
If you have used Adobe Flash or Adobe’s new easy to use Flex system - then you can easily pump out your very own Desktop applications.
Using SWFmaestro you can convert any SWF or flash based source file to a standalone application.
Imagine creating a screensaver or presentation easily straight from flash source files!
Both portable and easy to use.
The SWFMaestro website strikes me first as very clear and direct. No grand claims or unecessary flash.
The site gives you the information you need and let’s you get right to work.
Fully functional trial versions are all available at the dowloads page:
Installation is very quick - the downloadable is painlessly small (2 megs or so).
You can see a screenshot of the main SCR creator application configuration screen here:
The appliaction itself is a snap to use.
With relative ease you just point the application to the media files or flash source files.
The configuration has several options for screensaver (or application) settings as well. These are all quite easy to use.
If a support question does arise a full user manual is available online as well a basic customer contact form.
The good folks over at SWFmaestro tell me that a user forum is planned in the near future and should be a great addition.
The SWF Maestro system even allows for time limited keys and hardware based keys to be created for licensing protection.
With Single user licenses starting at $49.95 it is easy to see the value in using SWFmaestro.
This has been a paid review.
The Samsung/Sandisk Buyout Offer - corporate cluelessness at its finest
Time was when SanDisk, the world’s biggest supplier of flash storage cards, was one of the hottest tech stocks this side of the Milky Way. Of course, those also were the days when companies like Lehman and Merrill Lynch were considered unstoppable juggernauts and pillars of financial stability.
These days SanDisk is hardly the big time company it was a couple of years ago. Against a backdrop of weakening consumer demand and with flash memory prices falling, SanDisk’s stock has reflected the company’s changing fortunes, plummeting from a 52-week high of $55.98 to finish at $15.04 yesterday. It’s not just SanDisk feeling the pinch; five of the seven top flash memory producers suffered declines or flat sales during the second quarter. This is due mostly to plummeting prices (have you seen how cheap flash drives are these days?) and a changing marketplace. Storage is dirt cheap nowadays.
But after the close of trading Tuesday, Samsung Electronics confirmed earlier rumors and disclosed it had made a $5.8 billion cash offer to buy SanDisk after what it said were four months of flat and inconclusive talks. SanDisk was quick to reject the offer as inadequate. Interesting strategy, given the stock has lost 70% of its value in the past year or so.
In after-hours trading, shares of SanDisk soared to nearly $23 a share. SanDisk stated it rejected the $26 a share offer, arguing that it undervalues the company. That’s pretty much standard operating procedure in any negotiation, though SanDisk also charged Samsung with “an opportunistic attempt” to exploit a depressed stock price, as well as “the uncertainty resulting from the unresolved patent cross license agreement renewal with Samsung, and general equity market conditions.” That’s corporate lingo for: We want more money.
The rejection of the offer also served as an opportunity for SanDisk to air dirty laundry, suggesting that Samsung’s offer might be “a calculated negotiating ploy or an attempt to gain leverage in the ongoing licensing negotiations between the companies, particularly in light of the fact that the parties have met over 10 times on this issue since June 2007.” Not a company i’d be in a big rush to do business with, but then again, that’s why i’m not in the corporate business world.
SanDisk is not closing the door to future talks with Samsung. Irwin Federman, the company’s lead independent director, said SanDisk remains willing to enter into “good-faith discussions” but did not get more specific. The deal is considered still on thin ice, but why in the world would they turn it down? Do they think they’ll get a better offer in this marketplace?
Blackberry vs. iPhone - Who will win?
The batteground has been marked, the weapons are sharpened. The war has begun.
Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry handheld e-mail device, is moving deeper into the consumer market, where it is sure to run up against tough competition from Apple iPhone, which has expanded its reach this year into various international markets.
Earlier this year, RIM forged a partnership with social networking site Facebook that lets BlackBerry device owners access information from their Facebook pages.
Now, RIM has announced partnerships with a host of new companies that will give BlackBerry owners access to Windows Live Search, Google, getting tickets on Ticketmaster, MySpace, and TiVo. This gives it a huge head start against Apple, but RIM lacks their “flash factor” and deep advertising pockets. The bevy of partnership announcements is just the latest move by RIM to tap into the consumer market.
A look at RIM’s business and how it’s changed over the last few years, specifically with the Pearl handset, they’re clearly trying to expand from a traditional enterprise/company customer base to a broader consumer market, and the aggressive nature of these partnerships indicate the battle lines being drawn against the iPhone.
They still have their core business built around e-mail and messaging end of things, but they’ve been adding support for video and cameras, and all the things that fit into the consumer side of the market for a while now. The partnerships with Microsoft’s Windows Live Search and Google have an obvious goal - to get BlackBerry users the fastest, most relevant, location-based search results possible; something the iPhone had been criticized for early on in its product cycle.
The partnerships with MySpace, Ticketmaster, TiVo and Slacker serve the same purpose as RIM’s alliance earlier this year with Facebook — to make the BlackBerry a “lifestyle” device.
It’s made a difference: Like many of its competitors in the handheld market, RIM is growing very quickly. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2008, RIM reported earnings of US$1.7 billion on $6 billion in revenue, up from earnings of $800 million on $3 billion in revenue in the previous year.
One thing is clear: the iPhone will get stiff competition in the smartphone arena from RIM.
Adobe Flex
Adobe Flex is gaining more traction as a development platform. The framework produces a flash based output which can be consumed universally by clients agnostically to browser, OS or type. Flex is much easier to edit and create then native flash formats, using an easy to learn scriptable language.
As a web developer, you may always find yourself looking for possible web development applications that would suit your needs, providing a balance of rapid development, easy maintenance and wide cross-compatibility.
Most make use of JavaScript, Active-X and/or AJAX in order to make your sites dynamic and interactive. These traditional frameworks allow for rapid deployment - but necessitate heavy graphical work to make the app user friendly.
To answer the need for better application, the Adobe flex was released which is an open framework for creating significant web applications that that can be installed on major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.
Adobe Flex paves the way to make advanced application that can be used by traditional programmers. Before its release, traditional flash programmers spent hours with actionscript creating customer friendly but difficult to maintain flash-based apps and sites. The Flash platform was innovative and gained critical traction as a default standard over years.
Taking the next step Adobe’s Flex seeks to reduce the problem through the means of providing a workflow and programming model that is familiar to developers. It is programmed with MXML which is an XML-based markup language offers a way to rapidly build and lay out graphic user interfaces. Furthermore, one can also take benefit of interactivity by using ActionScript which is essentially the core language of Flash Player which was made using ECMA Script standard.
Like any other applications, the Adobe Flex has also its limitations. It is still a Flash application and therefore it is limited to what a Flash player can do. True interaction with the desktop is difficult - the Flex platform is not a browser, but is usually a web-based delivery (ie. drag and drop from Desktop to a Player is not feasible). This should be made possible through the release of Apollo.
The Flex popup window is limited to being shown within the dimensions of the player that created it. Incomparable to the popup window in a browser in where you can relocates them to your desktop, the Adobe Flex popup windows can’t go outside the area occupied by the player. Also, the Flash SWF format is a published specification meaning, it is doable for other vendors to create tools that produce Flash files.
Because the introduction of Adobe Flex was favored by the public, the Flex 2 which is an improved version of the first was made which is programmed with command-line compilers and a comprehensive class library of user interface components and utilities.
This program can be downloaded for free and it has no limitations or restrictions compared to the first. There is also the Flex 3 which was launched on April 26, 2007 and is equipped with Flex Builder IDE and the LiveCycle Data Services.
Adobe proclaims that in the near future they will launch the Flex 4 with Gumbo as a code name. The product plan has yet to be completed and although no one really knows what feature this one has, it is surely better than the other 3.
Flex is worth a look as a development and delivery platform if you are willing to work with a Flash based system. Take a look if you were turned off by Flash years ago and haven’t kept up with it.
-
Recent Posts
- And pigs flew too: DRM-free songs from iTunes soon?
- Yahoo! CEO to step down, and leave a big mess behind
- Black Friday is coming, but are the deals what people are hoping for?
- Seven years for a patch? Say it isn’t so, Microsoft
- PC Makers, the Economy, and who will survive (and thrive)
- “Vista Capable”? Well, not quite…
- Reports: Windows 7 may not improve performance much
- iPhone 2.2 Firmware Update may be out on the 21st of November?
- Circuit City files for bankruptcy: And so the wheel turns
- MGM first to post feature-length films to YouTube
-
-
-