Flash posts

We have received exclusive access (via an envelope slipped under the door of TUAW headquarters somewhere west of Socorro, NM) to a set of documents outlining last-minute changes to Apple's iPad, which is due to arrive in stores, homes, and offices throughout America on Saturday, April 3rd. These documents are part of a required Apple filing with the FCC*, released today -- April 1 -- and they show hardware features that have not previously been seen in public demos or videos of Apple's new tablet device. A gallery of photos accompanies this post and shows these changes for the first time.

First, and most important to the estimated quarter-million people who will have iPads in their hands on Saturday, is that there will be a front-facing digital camera on the device. As you can see in the gallery, the camera is a 6.0 megapixel unit with a zoom lens. It's apparent that Apple partnered with Canon on the camera -- the first time the Cupertino-based computer manufacturer has gone "out of the house" on a digital camera since the original Apple QuickTake was designed and manufactured by Kodak.

The second feature makes a lot of sense, considering the power of the Canon-designed camera on the device. It's an SD card slot, which means that photos and videos captured with the camera can now be easily transferred to other devices via inexpensive and commonly-available SD cards.

In the documents, there are also details of other members of the iPad "Most Wanted List" that appear to have made it to the shipping. In particular, Flash has been added as well. That's right -- Flash can be seen in one of the photos. Be sure to click the Source link below for a better look at the documents.

TED is one of my favorite sites on the net. For those of you who don't know about it, TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an conference given in Long Beach and Oxford each year that brings some of the greatest minds on the planet together to "give the talk of their lives" in a limited time of 18 minutes. The talks are recorded and put on the TED website for all the world to see -- for free (living up to its slogan "Ideas worth spreading"). Speakers include everyone from J.J. Abrams to Al Gore. If you're ever bored and need something to watch, a TED video will be eighteen of some of your most informative, entertaining minutes ever spent.

I'm happy to report that TED, following in the footsteps of so many others, has now created a Flash-free version of its website for the iPad and iPhone. The new site automatically detects your browser and OS and shows the video in either Flash or HTML5. TED curator Chris Anderson first announced a Flash-free version of TED on his Twitter account on March 28: "Excited about this. Non-flash version of http://ted.com is now live for iPhone. Videos, comments, ratings. Hurrah!"

No Flash? That is an idea worth spreading.

[via Obama Pacman]

Well the good news is: Flash is going to be on the iPhone and iPad. The bad news is that it's going to be only for ads.

Greystripe, a rich media mobile advertising network, has announced that a system called "iFlash ad units" will launch in May. The tech allows advertisers to deliver their ads to the Apple devices which, of course, don't support Flash. According to a company news release, Greystripe takes ads created using Flash and transcodes them to run on the iPhone and iPad, presumably in other companies' applications. The company has been delivering ads to the iPhone using this method already. And now an updated version will hit the iPhone and the iPad, including full screen ads.

Many advertisers believe Flash-delivered ads have higher awareness and are more effective. But ads are ads -- the code behind them is just code, and of course it depends on the advertiser and the form whether they're effective or not.

Yesterday, we reported on technology from Brightcove, which automatically detects the platform video is aimed at, and uses HTML5 rather than Flash when needed. The iPhone, iPod touch and iPad all support HTML5 playback when it is encoded to the H.264 standard.

Bet you can't wait to see all those ads, eh?

Brightcove, a Cambridge, MA-based company that specializes in online video provisioning for media companies and content providers (like TUAW and Engadget, for instance), has announced they will officially be supporting HTML5 video for their clients. Unlike Flash, HTML5 video (when encoded using the H.264 standard) will play on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Brightcove's new HTML5 video platform will automatically detect what device the user is running and dynamically switch between Flash and HTML5 players to suit the device's capabilities. For existing Brightcove content providers, all they need to do (assuming their clips are already in H.264 format) is change the embedding code in their webpages to immediately access the HTML5-savvy version. Brightcove automatically encodes each submission in seven different formats & bitrates for optimal client delivery.

Mike Rose spoke with Brightcove's CEO Jeremy Allaire last week, and in the conversation Allaire pointed out "the problem space for most publishers of video is not just about getting content to play back... the expectations for publishers of video have grown to include a lot of different things." The pieces to the video experience (beyond simply pushing pixels to the screen) include player UI, branding, analytics & monetization/ad strategies, to name a few. HTML5 doesn't yet have all the components of the toolkit to enable those features. "Ultimately what's necessary is that the industry needs to have this whole stack... of what people expect in the overall user experience of video, to be accessible and available in the HTML5 world," Allaire said.

That full-featured playback option is what Brightcove Experience for HTML5 is trying to address. According to Allaire, right now there is "a pretty big gap, a lot of infrastructure that needs to be put in place" before all those capabilities are online, but "ultimately the objective is to provide the exact same quality, interactivity and built-in features [as Flash]... for any HTML5-capable device. Publishers want a single workflow to upload their content... that will work seamlessly for all their users." The initial version of the Brightcove tools for HTML5 will provide a basic playback template, but updates later in 2010 will add player template cutomization, advertising tools and analytics. HTML5 support will also work on Android phones.

A few readers have sent up tips about odd "iPad - test" video links showing up on CBS.com. MacRumors did some digging and discovered that if you click on the iPad-test links in your computer's browser, you'll be taken to the normal Flash versions of the video. However if you're on the iPad SDK Simulator or spoof your browser's User-Agent to impersonate an iPad, you're sent to a HTML5 version of the video.

MacRumors notes that the HTML5 version of the videos doesn't work yet, but there does seem to be full screen support and the CSS fills reference HTML5 and have a number of specific "webkit" calls.

Many, including Steve Jobs, see HTML5 as the successor to Flash -- and things aren't looking too hot for the Adobe plugin's continued dominance. In January Google launched a HTML5 Youtube beta site followed by Virgin America announcing earlier this month that they dumped Flash from their website because the iPhone doesn't support it. Of course, HTML5/iPad support doesn't mean CBS is ditching Flash. They could be following in the footsteps of NPR and the Wall Street Journal and creating two different websites -- one Flash-free -- for users of the iPad. Whatever the case, it's nice to see CBS planning for the iPad and one hopes the other major networks will follow suit.

Adobe has put up a counter, and announced a launch event for the release of Adobe Creative Suite 5 on April 12 at 11am EDT. Though little is known about the features of CS5, Adobe had previously announced that it will give Flash CS5 the features to allow devs to build Flash-based applications and then export them to the App Store's .ipa standard. This will effectively allow developers to build iPhone apps in nothing but CS5. If you've registered for an Adobe ID, you'll be able to view a video broadcast of the launch event on Adobe TV. CS5 will also be Intel-only, Cocoa and 64-bit native.

Adobe has also announced a second beta of the Lightroom 3 digital darkroom software. Lightroom competes directly with Apple's Aperture software. On February 9th, Apple released Aperture 3. This latest version of the Lightroom beta includes the following features:

• Improved performance throughout the application for faster importing and loading of images
• Native tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras
• Luminance noise reduction has been added to the previous color noise reduction improvements available in the first public beta, for outstanding overall high ISO quality
• Support for importing and managing video files from DSLR cameras for better overall photographic workflow control
• Improvements to the import experience in the first beta to reflect public feedback
• Improved watermarking functionality from the first beta to reflect public feedback

You can download the Lightroom 3 beta 2 here (requires an Adobe ID).

Both National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal are preparing Flash-free iPad sites in time for the device's April 3rd debut.

MediaMemo cites a blog post over at NPR, letting us know that NPR fans can either download an updated app for NPR (once the iPad ships and the app is ready), or visit an iPad-optimized version of NPR.org that contains no Flash. The Wall Street Journal is also going with a Flash-free site, although visitors can expect to hunt through the site and find some pages which still have Flash.

Having non-Flash sites exist alongside their Flash siblings will probably be the solution for many publications in the near future. However, we know that Steve Jobs hopes that Flash will go the way of the PowerPC and the floppy disk, and developers will turn to alternatives such as HTML5.

[Via MacDailyNews]

If you have ClickToFlash installed, you may have seen a note telling you that you have an old version of Flash and encouraging you to upgrade.

As you might expect, you don't need to upgrade Flash, but you do need to upgrade ClickToFlash. The current version is ClickToFlash-1.6b7-upload1.zip, but you may have go to the Github page for ClickToFlash to download it.

Jonathan Rentzsch explained that he hasn't been able to update it himself due to illness. However, given that it is open-source, four others (identified as ndfred, Justin, ssp and lapcat) identified the problem and a solution, and Rentzsch merged it back into the main branch of the code.

That's pretty awesome, if you ask me.

So if you've run into this problem at YouTube, take a few minutes, download the new version, quit Safari, and run the installer. Voilà!

"What kinds of games do you like?" Adam "Atomic" Saltsman asked of his panel audience at the Canabalt postmortem during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. "Role-playing" was yelled out, as was "puzzler," and eventually Saltsman picked "platformer" as the genre. Without another word, he quietly went to work on a laptop. Then, his partner at Semi Secret Software, Eric Johnson, took the podium to tell us all about what it was like to make one of the App Store's most popular games.

He started by saying that the game was originally developed in just "five very long days," and was created for the Experimental Gameplay Project and based around simplicity -- it only uses six colors and, obviously, the one button. For a game that's so simple, it actually had a lot of complex influences. It drew from older games, like Another World and Flashback, as well as modern works, like Half-Life 2 and District 9.

During CES 2010, HP gave the public a slight tease of its upcoming slate device. The touchscreen device, which runs Windows 7, sports a form factor similar to Apple's iPad, as well as similar uses; it supports eBooks, music, videos, and of course, the Internet. But wait, there's more. According to a post on HP's Voodoo blog, the device will give you a "full Web browsing experience," not a "watered-down Internet" with "sacrifices." In other words, the HP slate device supports Flash and, well, the iPad doesn't.

While the blog posting didn't mention the iPad by name, it was fairly clear that the statement in question was an indirect jab at it. Accompanying the post is a short, 30 second clip. The highlight of the clip, which occurs toward the end, shows the user going to Hulu.com and watching a Flash-based video.

The reason that the clip is only 30 seconds long, and the Hulu portion is at the end of it, is that running Flash may have drained all of the device's batteries before all footage could be shot. (Just kidding! I couldn't help myself).

On a serious note, while the lack of Flash on the iPhone, and now the iPad, has its drawbacks, these drawbacks have been muted to a degree. The advent of the App Store created a non-Flash, potentially monetizable, playground for the creations of developers and content creators to play in. In addition, HTML 5 is emerging as a potential Flash development alternative.

via [AppleInsider]

As the smack down between Apple and Adobe continues, Virgin America has dumped Flash from its website because of the lack of iPhone support. Virgin's new website, which launched Monday, replaces Flash with HTML to give users the ability to check in via their iPhones in the future. Virgin plans on moving their new site to HTML 5, once it's cleared standards ratification at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Virgin's Chief information officer Ravi Simhambhatla told The Register: "I don't want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin]."

While Apple has left Flash out of the iPhone since it debuted in 2007, things stayed relatively civil between Apple and Adobe. That all changed when Apple unveiled the iPad and decided to leave Flash off that as well. Four days after the launch of the iPad, Steve Jobs held a town hall meeting with Apple employees where he trashed Adobe and Flash, saying, "They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5." Three weeks later Jobs met with the board of the Wall Street Journal where he allegedly talked smack about Flash again, saying Flash is a dying technology and likened it to floppy discs and CCFL-backlit LCDs.

With iPhone sales soaring with no peak in sight, will Flash still thrive without Apple's support? Then again, it's not just Apple that is turning against Flash. Google is openly committed to HTML5 and Microsoft has its own proprietary Flash competitor in Silverlight. Only time will tell if Virgin's dismissal of Flash is a one-off case or the first domino to fall.

You may have noticed that I'm not a huge fan of Flash. My feelings pre-date the iPhone/iPad debate about whether or not Flash should be included on those devices. Even back when I was using Windows and Opera, one of the features I used most often was "Disable Plugins" -- which was really another way of saying "Disable Flash," and I do that these days in Safari using ClickToFlash.

Flash lovers usually talk about how many games are only available using Flash. Flash haters usually talk about performance issues, especially on the Mac. Adobe tries to make the argument that not including Flash is bad for users' freedom of choice.

When it comes to browser security, Charlie Miller says that it's all about Flash. More specifically, avoiding Flash.

Miller, who has won the Pwn2Own contest two years running, was interviewed by Italian site OneITSecurity. They asked him what browser and OS he thought was the safest. The first part of his reply probably won't make Mac users happy: he suggests Windows 7 with either Chrome or IE8 saying "there probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about." But the highlight for me was the next quote: "The main thing is not to install Flash!"

The guy who seems to be the best in the world at breaking into your web browser tells you that you shouldn't install Flash. Perhaps you should consider installing ClickToFlash; it's completely free, and tells Flash to load only when you tell it to load. That should make your browsing significantly safer on any platform.

Hat tip to Jay Hathaway at DownloadSquad for bringing this to our attention.

Valleywag reports that during a recent iPad-promoting visit to the offices of the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time trash-talking Adobe Flash yet again, and doing his best to get the Journal to move away from what he called "old technology." Just like Jobs's comments during the recent Apple Town Hall meeting, these comments are unconfirmed, but Valleywag claims to have heard from people who were present at the meeting.

Click the "read more" link to see some more tidbits from the meeting and some analysis of the remarks.

Two things happen like clockwork every year: Apple raises the capacities on its NAND flash-based iPods and the iPhone, and analysts like iSuppli release a report saying that worldwide supplies of NAND flash are likely to be constrained as a result. The supply constraints aren't likely to affect Apple, which signed a supply deal with Toshiba last year, but other companies that depend on flash memory for their consumer electronics products may find themselves scrambling to find enough memory to keep production going ... just like last year, and the year before that, when analysts said almost exactly the same thing.

iSuppli predicts Apple will ship in excess of 33 million iPhones this year with an average capacity of 35.2 GB of NAND flash memory -- consistent with a doubling of capacities across the line. 2010 sales estimates for the iPad range from 4 million units and up, and the iPod touch may also see a capacity bump to 128 GB in September/October. That all adds up to a lot of flash memory. With the introduction of the iPad and a likely storage increase to 64 GB for the next-gen iPhone in mid-year, it's no surprise that chipmakers will have a hard time keeping up.

[Via All Things Digital]

A couple of years ago Violet Blue attempted to make nice with Steve Jobs (or just shake his hand, really) and was rather infamously rebuked by the persnickety CEO. Despite this, she's maintained a love affair with Apple before and after, citing the style, design and attention to detail and user experience that Apple products are famous for as logical reasons for her affinity. In addition to being an unrepentant Apple fangirl, Violet is a sex educator and author of several books on the subject, and she stands at the intersection of sex and technology, once giving an excellent talk on sex and privacy on the Internet for Google which you can watch here.

I chatted with Violet about Macworld without Apple, the iPad, the lack of Flash on iPhone and iPad, and the squeaky-clean App Store. Part one is below and part two is on the next page.