6 ms·

First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS

36 points by sendos 16y ago

Excerpt: "We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources. But it’s not a flawless experience either."

tomlin 16y ago
"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources." Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.
- Timmy_C 16y ago
  The article also pointed out that pages that would otherwise work fine on a PC were borked or had slow performance. This is not the 1-to-1 flash support I think users are expecting.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Two hours of Flash = 40% battery drain. That's still a bit high. Watch a movie on the plane, play a game or two, and you land with a halfway drained battery. Understandable why Flash might be excluded. This level of performance is "acceptable" for most of the industry but not up to the seamless level Apple strives for.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      From Apple on iPhone battery life: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G" That level of performance is acceptable for Apple.
      - stcredzero 16y ago
        About twice as long as that in WiFi. How long would Flash 10.1 play over WiFi?
        jasonlotito 16y ago
        Your contention was 2 hours and 40% was outside Apple's standards. I merely demonstrated that it was, in fact, within Apple's standards, as demonstrated by their own stats. More importantly, this demonstrates that Flash doesn't kill battery life as propose by Jobs. 5 hours of heavy web usage of heavy flash sites doesn't sound unreasonable.
        stcredzero 16y ago
        Nope. To do that, you'd have to talk about performance strictly under 3G, or you'd have to talk about use under conditions like onboard a plane. There should be different expectations for mobile use. 3G use is already a drain, and you're asking to add another drain on top of that. The question to ask, is how would Flash over 3G do? If we're down to just a few hours of battery life, it doesn't sound attractive anymore.
        jasonlotito 16y ago
        I disagree. I've already shown that 5 hours of use is acceptable in Apple's world. On top of this, 3G isn't the only available connection. The iPod is completely non-3G, and the iPad has a non-3G variant working just on wireless. Apple's contention was that Flash would destroy mobile batteries. This is clearly not the case. Look at it this way: With Flash, the battery life is 5 hours. With 3G, the battery life is 5 hours. Yes, on 3G, the battery life might be worse, considering you are using both 3G and Flash. But then, where do you draw the line? If 5 hours is acceptable battery life for 3G, if I don't have 3G, could I have Flash and get the same battery life? Finally, that's 5 hours of 3G browsing the internet. Is that 5 hours of streaming video content? I don't know, the website doesn't say. However, the Wired article makes remarks this is party what he was doing, streaming flash videos over a wireless connection. Hopefully that explains it better. Flash clearly doesn't kill battery life. At least no more than 3G does. I think Apple's point of view is partly that 3G offers something you couldn't get otherwise, whereas Flash replicates things already available on the iPhone/iPad platform. Therefore, 3G battery life issues are acceptable, where as, for Apple, Flash is not. And, you can't offer Flash on non-3G variants, because then you know people would want it on the 3G variants.
    - joubert 16y ago
      are you allowed to have your phone switched on on the plane?
      - azim 16y ago
        With the exception of takeoff and landing, electronic devices are generally permitted in flight. The radio can't be switched on, but many smart phones including the iPhone have an "Airplane Mode" which turns the radios off.
        joubert 16y ago
        Some airlines do not allow cell phones in flight/airplane mode.
    - spot 16y ago
      frankly i don't care about hours of continuous use. what i care about is that i can look up a restaurant and read their hours and menu. it takes 2 minutes. the iphone can't do it.
- Maktab 16y ago
  More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it seems to be a lot better. For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.
  - alex_c 16y ago
    >Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it. But Android is the only smartphone in direct competition with the iPhone, and Android only really picked up steam in the past 8 months or so.
  - JanezStupar 16y ago
    And we have Steve Jobs to thank for that. I believe that what would solve many of today's economy problems, is just a bit more balls from companies. Apple rocked the boat and we got better service. More rocking from all sides please!.
  - tomlin 16y ago
    None of what has transpired in the last few months smells of ultimatum. It's all very childish.
  - tomlin 16y ago
    Great. So Apple will support Flash now that is it up to snuff? Please.
    - Maktab 16y ago
      Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?
- martythemaniak 16y ago
  First he said you didn't need a native SDK, you could make-do with web apps, then they released the SDK. Then he said Apple had to approve apps because otherwise very bad things would happen, but with 50000 apps and millions of users, Android showed that's not the case. Now he says Flash is bad for mobile and Android is once again showing that's not the case. The best part is, you don't have to care what Jobs says as much anymore. I switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One a few months ago and after watching the Froyo keynote, I have a hard time imagining going back.
- tvon 16y ago
  So Adobe could have fixed Flash at any time, they just didn't feel like it?
  - otto 16y ago
    "Adobe says it has made tweaks that will shut down the Flash Player 10.1 when the system runs out of memory." I'm not sure that I would call that fixed.
    - not_an_alien 16y ago
      The player has had major changes in terms of memory use, frame/execution timing, and how it is suspended or not. You're taking one phrase from a non-tech person and judging from that.
      - otto 16y ago
        I took that as a paraphrased quote from a tech journalist. I hope you are right though. I know from my experience with Flash on Linux that it is insane, Flash eventually consumes 4gb of memory and slows my computer to a halt. I finally just removed the plugin and browse without flash.
        cjbos 16y ago
        You can read the release notes to understand the changes, they detail them pretty well. First 7 pages are changes. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote... (PDF Link) Also there is a huge number of bug fixes in this release... don't know why they didn't just call it Flash Player 11, it's not really a dot release.
    - DrSprout 16y ago
      Flash is an application platform. If it runs out of memory, it's an application that is responsible, and Flash naturally has to compensate.
- ptomato 16y ago
  That's not what Engadget says. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-hands-on-flash-10-1-wifi-hotspots-an/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-ha... Money quote: "our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent."
  - joshfinnie 16y ago
    I think those are two very different contexts to the useage of flash on the phone. After 30 minutes of watching video versus opening up a webpage that is based in flash are not very compariable.
    - AGorilla 16y ago
      Who cares about websites made in flash? People want flash for games and video. With that in mind, I think that engadget tested the context that most of us care about.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Actually the real money quote is: "the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration" You really can't judge the power/heat of a version w/o HW acceleration.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
davidedicillo 16y ago
Keep reading. Not sure about you, but I consider using 40% of charge for two hours of Flash a lot.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  That's actually on par with the iPhone 3GS. Let's look at some numbers! FTA: "As I surfed a number of Flash-heavy websites, played movie trailers and little video clips on and off for about two hours the battery level on my phone was down to about 61 percent from a fully charged battery" So, 2 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites, at about 20% of battery life per hour. So, that's 5 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites doing a mix of things. Compare that to the iPhone: From the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html Under the Battery life sidebar: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G" So, the author experienced the same level of battery use as a user would experience on an iPhone 3GS doing a comparable task. Edit: I should point out that the it appears the Wired author was using an internal network, which, for the iPhone is: "9 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi". However, I still feel as if this doesn't change the results much.
  - glhaynes 16y ago
    It's not clear from the article, though, whether the Android device was on 3G or WiFi... WiFi uses considerably less power.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      Yeah, I noticed I hand't clarified that. Even still, 5 hours of browsing highly interactive content isn't bad. You get the added bonus of Flash, which for some sites, is critical. FTA: "Our corporate Wi-Fi connection just didn’t seem good enough and most Flash-heavy sites took a while to load." So I assume the testing with Wi-Fi, though again, this isn't completely clear. Even still, I think this demonstrates that mobile flash isn't the harbinger of death that Jobs was making it out to be, and demonstrates that the reaction to Flash is more than just for technical reasons.
  - 16y ago
awolf 16y ago
No Hulu? ... Then what's the point?
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  There is more to the internet then Hulu. In fact, the majority of the internet doesn't care about Hulu, because Hulu restricts access outside the US anyways. However, their are a far greater number of sites with Flash content that would benefit from this.
- not_an_alien 16y ago
  I'm betting that that can be circumvented by changing the browser's user agent.
johnrob 16y ago
I wonder if rejecting flash is Apple's 21st century version of not licensing their operating system. In the 80's, nobody knew such a move was a death magnet. Perhaps missing the mobile flash train could be something similar today. Interestingly, running flash on phones could pose a threat to Apple's current business model. On the iPhone, music/movies/games all come via the app store. However, flash can deliver all of those directly to the browser - whether for free (youtube), or for a fee (netflicks).
- rryyan 16y ago
  I don't think protecting the app store is a reason why Apple is disallowing Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Apple has indicated that it runs the app store near break-even, and doesn't view it as a profit generator: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wildly_successful_but_not_hugely_profitable_for_apple.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild.... The app store is there to sell devices -- like the iTunes store for the iPod.
  - glhaynes 16y ago
    It's not App Store revenue that Apple's concerned about, it's app exclusivity and platform control, both of which they expect to lead to device sales.
  - buster 16y ago
    So an Apple site repeats something that Apples wants us to believe... uhmm, no, i won't believe that just because they said so. Apples takes 30% of an apps price? Charges for SDK/license (whatever you call it) per year? Has Billions of downloads? And they doon't make much money? Never ever will i believe that. An interesting read on that, by the way: http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/about-those-iphone-app-store-numbers/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/about-those-iphone-app-stor...
MikeCapone 16y ago
Any word on when Flash 10.1 is coming to OS X? Flash is such a resource hog even on my Mac Pro, I'm hoping this will mitigate the problem.
- gb 16y ago
  It's been out as a beta for quite a while: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html Not sure when the release is due though.
- abstractbill 16y ago
  Adobe has consistently said Flash 10.1 will be released for all desktop platforms in the first half of 2010 (which ends in a few weeks).
- not_an_alien 16y ago
  Depending on your needs, you may want to try the 'Gala' beta instead: http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89 http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89 It's Flash 10.0, but with the hooks for hardware decoding in Mac OSX (that Apple only added very recently to the plugin API). It's supposed to perform much, much better on Mac OSX for video playback.
neovive 16y ago
This is good news for the thousands of skilled Flash developers that really know how to leverage the platform for interactivity and gaming. As the article points out, content must still be optimized for 10.1 to see the most benefit and that will take time. Although Flash filled an important need for video when the FLV format was first introduced, it's role as the primary video player for the web will be marginalized over time. However, that will bring the focus of Flash back towards it's roots of vector animation and interactivity at which it does an excellent job.
jim-greer 16y ago
We did a kongregate mobile site and I was surprised how many games played really well. The best were adapted slightly for mobile, but a lot of these are just the desktop version - the developers have never seen them on a mobile device. http://m.kongregate.com http://m.kongregate.com
- cjbos 16y ago
  Love your site! I was at a flash conference last weekend... all the adobe developers compiled to native android apps and then show them working on the nexus one. It was surprising how simple the whole process was. Do you think the flash games on your site will also be compiled as native apps? If so is there a way to integrate kongregate achievements so I can still gain the points?
  - jim-greer 16y ago
    Thanks! At this point we're just doing them through the browser. I don't think 'compiled as native apps' is the right description. They're converted into Air apps, but they're still using the Flash runtime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime
icefox 16y ago
"Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources. But it’s not a flawless experience either. Flash content — especially video — can take up to a minute to load, which is more frustrating on a phone than it is on a desktop. And it sucks bandwidth." How am I suppose to merge those two statements?

36 points by sendos 16y ago

tomlin 16y ago

"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources." Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.

Timmy_C 16y ago
The article also pointed out that pages that would otherwise work fine on a PC were borked or had slow performance. This is not the 1-to-1 flash support I think users are expecting.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Two hours of Flash = 40% battery drain. That's still a bit high. Watch a movie on the plane, play a game or two, and you land with a halfway drained battery. Understandable why Flash might be excluded. This level of performance is "acceptable" for most of the industry but not up to the seamless level Apple strives for.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    From Apple on iPhone battery life: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G" That level of performance is acceptable for Apple.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      About twice as long as that in WiFi. How long would Flash 10.1 play over WiFi?
      - jasonlotito 16y ago
        Your contention was 2 hours and 40% was outside Apple's standards. I merely demonstrated that it was, in fact, within Apple's standards, as demonstrated by their own stats. More importantly, this demonstrates that Flash doesn't kill battery life as propose by Jobs. 5 hours of heavy web usage of heavy flash sites doesn't sound unreasonable.
        stcredzero 16y ago
        Nope. To do that, you'd have to talk about performance strictly under 3G, or you'd have to talk about use under conditions like onboard a plane. There should be different expectations for mobile use. 3G use is already a drain, and you're asking to add another drain on top of that. The question to ask, is how would Flash over 3G do? If we're down to just a few hours of battery life, it doesn't sound attractive anymore.
        jasonlotito 16y ago
        I disagree. I've already shown that 5 hours of use is acceptable in Apple's world. On top of this, 3G isn't the only available connection. The iPod is completely non-3G, and the iPad has a non-3G variant working just on wireless. Apple's contention was that Flash would destroy mobile batteries. This is clearly not the case. Look at it this way: With Flash, the battery life is 5 hours. With 3G, the battery life is 5 hours. Yes, on 3G, the battery life might be worse, considering you are using both 3G and Flash. But then, where do you draw the line? If 5 hours is acceptable battery life for 3G, if I don't have 3G, could I have Flash and get the same battery life? Finally, that's 5 hours of 3G browsing the internet. Is that 5 hours of streaming video content? I don't know, the website doesn't say. However, the Wired article makes remarks this is party what he was doing, streaming flash videos over a wireless connection. Hopefully that explains it better. Flash clearly doesn't kill battery life. At least no more than 3G does. I think Apple's point of view is partly that 3G offers something you couldn't get otherwise, whereas Flash replicates things already available on the iPhone/iPad platform. Therefore, 3G battery life issues are acceptable, where as, for Apple, Flash is not. And, you can't offer Flash on non-3G variants, because then you know people would want it on the 3G variants.
  - joubert 16y ago
    are you allowed to have your phone switched on on the plane?
    - azim 16y ago
      With the exception of takeoff and landing, electronic devices are generally permitted in flight. The radio can't be switched on, but many smart phones including the iPhone have an "Airplane Mode" which turns the radios off.
      - joubert 16y ago
        Some airlines do not allow cell phones in flight/airplane mode.
  - spot 16y ago
    frankly i don't care about hours of continuous use. what i care about is that i can look up a restaurant and read their hours and menu. it takes 2 minutes. the iphone can't do it.
Maktab 16y ago
More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it seems to be a lot better. For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.
- alex_c 16y ago
  >Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it. But Android is the only smartphone in direct competition with the iPhone, and Android only really picked up steam in the past 8 months or so.
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  And we have Steve Jobs to thank for that. I believe that what would solve many of today's economy problems, is just a bit more balls from companies. Apple rocked the boat and we got better service. More rocking from all sides please!.
- tomlin 16y ago
  None of what has transpired in the last few months smells of ultimatum. It's all very childish.
- tomlin 16y ago
  Great. So Apple will support Flash now that is it up to snuff? Please.
  - Maktab 16y ago
    Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?
martythemaniak 16y ago
First he said you didn't need a native SDK, you could make-do with web apps, then they released the SDK. Then he said Apple had to approve apps because otherwise very bad things would happen, but with 50000 apps and millions of users, Android showed that's not the case. Now he says Flash is bad for mobile and Android is once again showing that's not the case. The best part is, you don't have to care what Jobs says as much anymore. I switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One a few months ago and after watching the Froyo keynote, I have a hard time imagining going back.
tvon 16y ago
So Adobe could have fixed Flash at any time, they just didn't feel like it?
- otto 16y ago
  "Adobe says it has made tweaks that will shut down the Flash Player 10.1 when the system runs out of memory." I'm not sure that I would call that fixed.
  - not_an_alien 16y ago
    The player has had major changes in terms of memory use, frame/execution timing, and how it is suspended or not. You're taking one phrase from a non-tech person and judging from that.
    - otto 16y ago
      I took that as a paraphrased quote from a tech journalist. I hope you are right though. I know from my experience with Flash on Linux that it is insane, Flash eventually consumes 4gb of memory and slows my computer to a halt. I finally just removed the plugin and browse without flash.
      - cjbos 16y ago
        You can read the release notes to understand the changes, they detail them pretty well. First 7 pages are changes. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote... (PDF Link) Also there is a huge number of bug fixes in this release... don't know why they didn't just call it Flash Player 11, it's not really a dot release.
  - DrSprout 16y ago
    Flash is an application platform. If it runs out of memory, it's an application that is responsible, and Flash naturally has to compensate.
ptomato 16y ago
That's not what Engadget says. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-hands-on-flash-10-1-wifi-hotspots-an/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-ha... Money quote: "our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent."
- joshfinnie 16y ago
  I think those are two very different contexts to the useage of flash on the phone. After 30 minutes of watching video versus opening up a webpage that is based in flash are not very compariable.
  - AGorilla 16y ago
    Who cares about websites made in flash? People want flash for games and video. With that in mind, I think that engadget tested the context that most of us care about.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Actually the real money quote is: "the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration" You really can't judge the power/heat of a version w/o HW acceleration.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

davidedicillo 16y ago

Keep reading. Not sure about you, but I consider using 40% of charge for two hours of Flash a lot.

jasonlotito 16y ago
That's actually on par with the iPhone 3GS. Let's look at some numbers! FTA: "As I surfed a number of Flash-heavy websites, played movie trailers and little video clips on and off for about two hours the battery level on my phone was down to about 61 percent from a fully charged battery" So, 2 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites, at about 20% of battery life per hour. So, that's 5 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites doing a mix of things. Compare that to the iPhone: From the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html Under the Battery life sidebar: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G" So, the author experienced the same level of battery use as a user would experience on an iPhone 3GS doing a comparable task. Edit: I should point out that the it appears the Wired author was using an internal network, which, for the iPhone is: "9 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi". However, I still feel as if this doesn't change the results much.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  It's not clear from the article, though, whether the Android device was on 3G or WiFi... WiFi uses considerably less power.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    Yeah, I noticed I hand't clarified that. Even still, 5 hours of browsing highly interactive content isn't bad. You get the added bonus of Flash, which for some sites, is critical. FTA: "Our corporate Wi-Fi connection just didn’t seem good enough and most Flash-heavy sites took a while to load." So I assume the testing with Wi-Fi, though again, this isn't completely clear. Even still, I think this demonstrates that mobile flash isn't the harbinger of death that Jobs was making it out to be, and demonstrates that the reaction to Flash is more than just for technical reasons.
- 16y ago

awolf 16y ago

No Hulu? ... Then what's the point?

jasonlotito 16y ago
There is more to the internet then Hulu. In fact, the majority of the internet doesn't care about Hulu, because Hulu restricts access outside the US anyways. However, their are a far greater number of sites with Flash content that would benefit from this.
not_an_alien 16y ago
I'm betting that that can be circumvented by changing the browser's user agent.

johnrob 16y ago

I wonder if rejecting flash is Apple's 21st century version of not licensing their operating system. In the 80's, nobody knew such a move was a death magnet. Perhaps missing the mobile flash train could be something similar today. Interestingly, running flash on phones could pose a threat to Apple's current business model. On the iPhone, music/movies/games all come via the app store. However, flash can deliver all of those directly to the browser - whether for free (youtube), or for a fee (netflicks).

rryyan 16y ago
I don't think protecting the app store is a reason why Apple is disallowing Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Apple has indicated that it runs the app store near break-even, and doesn't view it as a profit generator: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wildly_successful_but_not_hugely_profitable_for_apple.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild.... The app store is there to sell devices -- like the iTunes store for the iPod.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  It's not App Store revenue that Apple's concerned about, it's app exclusivity and platform control, both of which they expect to lead to device sales.
- buster 16y ago
  So an Apple site repeats something that Apples wants us to believe... uhmm, no, i won't believe that just because they said so. Apples takes 30% of an apps price? Charges for SDK/license (whatever you call it) per year? Has Billions of downloads? And they doon't make much money? Never ever will i believe that. An interesting read on that, by the way: http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/about-those-iphone-app-store-numbers/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/about-those-iphone-app-stor...

MikeCapone 16y ago

Any word on when Flash 10.1 is coming to OS X? Flash is such a resource hog even on my Mac Pro, I'm hoping this will mitigate the problem.

gb 16y ago
It's been out as a beta for quite a while: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html Not sure when the release is due though.
abstractbill 16y ago
Adobe has consistently said Flash 10.1 will be released for all desktop platforms in the first half of 2010 (which ends in a few weeks).
not_an_alien 16y ago
Depending on your needs, you may want to try the 'Gala' beta instead: http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89 http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89 It's Flash 10.0, but with the hooks for hardware decoding in Mac OSX (that Apple only added very recently to the plugin API). It's supposed to perform much, much better on Mac OSX for video playback.

neovive 16y ago

This is good news for the thousands of skilled Flash developers that really know how to leverage the platform for interactivity and gaming. As the article points out, content must still be optimized for 10.1 to see the most benefit and that will take time. Although Flash filled an important need for video when the FLV format was first introduced, it's role as the primary video player for the web will be marginalized over time. However, that will bring the focus of Flash back towards it's roots of vector animation and interactivity at which it does an excellent job.

jim-greer 16y ago

We did a kongregate mobile site and I was surprised how many games played really well. The best were adapted slightly for mobile, but a lot of these are just the desktop version - the developers have never seen them on a mobile device. http://m.kongregate.com http://m.kongregate.com

cjbos 16y ago
Love your site! I was at a flash conference last weekend... all the adobe developers compiled to native android apps and then show them working on the nexus one. It was surprising how simple the whole process was. Do you think the flash games on your site will also be compiled as native apps? If so is there a way to integrate kongregate achievements so I can still gain the points?
- jim-greer 16y ago
  Thanks! At this point we're just doing them through the browser. I don't think 'compiled as native apps' is the right description. They're converted into Air apps, but they're still using the Flash runtime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime

icefox 16y ago

"Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources. But it’s not a flawless experience either. Flash content — especially video — can take up to a minute to load, which is more frustrating on a phone than it is on a desktop. And it sucks bandwidth." How am I suppose to merge those two statements?