Adobe Delivers Flash Player 9 with H.264 Video Support

"HD Quality Web Video and Audio Now Available With Adobe Flash Player Update... Adobe Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers. The combination of Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 (also announced today) enables the delivery of HD quality video to the broadest online audience. Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 is available immediately at http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"

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Adobe's AIR: Niche or the future of desktop development?

CNET News.com: "AIR, or Adobe Integrated Runtime, is a download that lets Web applications run on a desktop. With AIR applications, people can work offline and drag and drop items like graphics or text between Web and desktop applications.

AIR is still in beta, but Adobe and many other software developers are already building applications on it. For Adobe's platform business, AIR gives the company a way to extend its investments in Web documents and Web development tools onto desktops across different operating systems."

Some of the new apps are very interesting, such as the eBay desktop. It will be interesting to see where AIR will go. It certainly seems more compelling than Java.

Apple Safari 3 Public Beta Fixes Flash Drop-menu Issue

Apple has released a Beta version of its Safari browser for both Mac and Windows. While this is news itself, I'm more excited about the following revelation.

Anyone out there who has done website work where the design called for drop-down navigation menus which overlap Adobe flash content will be happy about this announcement. In previous versions of the Safari Mac browser, there was a 'bug' where drop down menus would flicker badly if they overlapped Flash content. This issue even plagues www.adobe.com in Safari 2.x!

After testing both the Mac & Windows versions of Safari 3, Apple appears to finally have fixed this problem!



Check out the Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta

Adobe Launches Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) BETA

"Adobe® AIR™, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop."

Electric Rain Announces "Harmony" - Flash SWF to XAML Converter

Electric Rain Harmony - Flash SWF to XAML Converter - For WPF and Silverlight: "Announcing Electric Rain Harmony - Coming Summer 2007 A New Flash SWF to XAML-markup Converter Tool for Microsoft WPF and Silverlight Application Development... Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations*) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms."