Does it look familiar? Of course it does, it’s the HP Windows 7 slate. It was certainly one of the most promising looking tablets on the horizon and I for one was a little upset when it looked like HP had pulled the plug on the project. Thankfully HP has just announced that it will arrive this fall/autumn.

It’s a nice looking device and I’m hopeful that they’ve ironed out the usability and performance issues that we were hearing about from those who got their hands on early preview versions of the device. Best of all is that the HP Slate will support Adobe Flash within the browser. Not sure if it will have AIR support but fingers crossed.

Here’s some more info.

Now what about a WebOS version? Now that would be interesting.

UPDATE: Looks like the slate is no longer a consumer products. Thanks to mnem for sending this link.

Flash competitions are like buses. You wait ages for one then three come along at the same time. But hey I’m not complaining and neither should you because three separate competitions simply means three more chances of winning something!

Adobe are really starting to push the Flash platform on mobile and along with its partners is looking for exciting game content that runs on either Adobe AIR for Android or Flash Player 10.1 for mobile. There are generous prizes on offer for each of the contests ranging from cash to software bundles.

Kongregate are offering almost $30,000 in prizes including Adobe CS5: Web Premium for the top 5 entries. Made for Mobile are offering over $20,000 in prize money spread across 105 (yes 105) winners plus Adobe CS5: Master Suite for the best 3 entries. And lastly (but certainly not least) is Cell Your Flash Game’s contest where the top 3 will win Adobe CS5: Master Collection and take a split from a cash pot of $4310. The next 147 (this isn’t a typo either) people will receive $100 each and a few will also receive Adobe Flash Professional CS5.

So what are you waiting for? Get coding and see what you can come up with. Oh and try not to bite off more than you can chew. The submission dates are actually quite tight.

Right all I need now is a great idea! Err,….. Damn! Oh well maybe next time

Good luck!

here’s an interesting video showcasing the Flash Platform being used to deliver a mobile version of the Photobucket site. Before Flash Player 10.1 for mobile’s arrival the conversion effort to support video on mobile would have taken the Photobucket team several months. However by sticking with the Flash Platform the Photobucket team were mobile ready in a matter of days.

Vice President of Engineering Luke Swanson cited cost savings as a major factor. Using Flash removed the need to transcode and store multiple copies of their existing videos in different formats. It was also interesting to hear Software Engineer, Chris Nguyen describe the process of porting their Flash content to the mobile site as “pretty much plug and play”.

I decided to see what all the fuss was about and took the mobile Photobucket site for a spin on my Google Nexus One using Flash Player 10.1 beta 3. The results were pretty impressive although I still think there are a few usability niggles that need ironed out – scrolling on a page that was mostly consumed by a video was a little tricky.

I’m sure the Photobucket team will be looking forward to Flash Player 10.1 rolling out across more mobile devices in the not so distant future.

Okay this is a slightly controversial post but it’s something that’s been nagging at me for a good few months now so I thought I’d put it out there and see what people think.

Will Adobe’s mobile vision for Flash restrict future features?

“Why would it?” you might ask. Well the whole point of Flash Player 10.1 for mobile is to deliver the exact same desktop web experience to our mobile devices. Considering the performance gap between desktop and mobile it surely wouldn’t make sense for Adobe to add any new features to Flash that were CPU intensive or memory hungry. Such a strategy would risk producing content that performs poorly on mobile and gives Flash a bad name. Unfortunately the really cool features are often the ones that require fast CPUs and bags of RAM.

Adobe has committed considerable time and effort educating developers about mobile and encouraging them to optimise their existing Flash content – Take a look at the Ads Optimizations and Optimizing Performance for the Flash Platform white papers. It’s clear they’re desperate to ensure that web-based Flash content runs well on mobile and shows Flash in a good light, so I seriously doubt they’ll want to introduce any new features to the player that might cause problems on mobile.

You could argue that Adobe should just keep adding great new features regardless of how well they might run on mobile and leave developers to decide whether or not to use them. The problem with this approach however is that they risk fragmenting the web with great content that runs brilliantly on desktop but poorly on mobile, which is exactly what they’re trying to prevent at the moment.

Sure, as time goes on, mobile devices will get faster and faster but there is always going to be a gulf between the power of mobile handsets and desktops. My guess, and my hope is that Adobe let their mobile strategy dictate, to a certain extent, the future of Flash and the features that we’ll see in upcoming releases.

In the short term I think it’s very important we start to see some performance parity between mobile and desktop Flash content. Much of it is down to the developers producing the content but I think Adobe can help by ensuring that any new features aren’t likely to melt our mobile phones.

Thought I’d share a video I stumbled upon today showing the latest beta build of Flash Player 10.1 running on an Android 2.2 handset. I’m pleased to say that the performance now looks significantly better than the first beta build I got to play with at the Adobe CS5 Road Show in Edinburgh. I guess from the performance gains I’d say that hardware acceleration has now been switched on, which was definitely missing when I tried it out.

From the video it also looks like many of the usability issues have also been ironed out – previously it was very difficulty to switch into full-screen mode but it does seem much more intuitive now. Some Flash heavy sites do still seem to be a problem though. The UFC site at the end of the video seemed quite sluggish and unresponsive as its content loaded, and there were also a few occasions where full-screen video looked a little choppy. Hopefully Adobe can fix these remaining issues.

For the most part however I was once again very impressed and looking forward to a final build of Flash Player 10.1 making it onto handsets.

Update: I’ve just been informed that Flash Player 10.1 for Android went live about a week ago. I’ll need to try and stay in the loop – it’s been a busy past two weeks for me though so at least I have an excuse Thanks to Dave for informing me.

Last week saw a series of free live webinars presented by Adobe technology experts showing users how to create RIAs using the Flash platform. If you missed out or simply want to cover the material again then fear not as you can find links to each session below.

• Rapidly build, deploy, and maintain Internet apps with ColdFusion
• Bringing web applications to the desktop with AIR 2
• Code once and run on multiple mobile devices
• Going multiuser with P2P in Flash Player 10.1
• Developing multiuser applications with LiveCycle services
• Connecting a web application to a J2EE back end using Flash Builder 4
• Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project
• Erasing the designer-to-developer gap: Adding interactions to your design
• Connecting your design to PHP services

If you found the links above useful then you might want to head over to Adobe Developer Connection where you can find recordings from many other events including Flash Camps to the recently held Adobe Developer Week.

Flash Player 10.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux is finally available. It’s so packed full of new features and has had such a significant architectural change that’s it’s hard to believe Adobe hasn’t just labelled it Flash Player 11. And with Flash Player 10.1 for Android scheduled for release later this month it really is quite an exciting time for the Flash community.

So what’s new? Well performance and power management are two huge features that have forced the team to re-architect much of the code base. With the intention to create a single runtime that works across both desktop and mobile, much of the engineering focus was on improving execution speed and reducing resource consumption. The player’s garbage collector has also been tuned to run more efficiently.

With Flash video under the spotlight of late, huge investment has also gone into extending video features and improving performance. Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across supported operating systems (including Mac). Video delivery options have also been expanded with the addition of HTTP Dynamic Streaming for high-quality full adaptive bit-rate streaming, allowing publishers to leverage the standard HTTP networking infrastructure.

Another huge feature is the inclusion of multi-touch. With Flash Player 10.1 coming to touch-screen mobiles and tablet devices, Adobe has provided ActionScript 3 APIs supporting multi-touch and native gesture events.

Although I have mentioned hardware accelerated video playback for Mac and talked about some of the gains coming to Flash Player 10.1 for Mac in a previous post, it is worth mentioning the extra effort that has gone into the Mac player for this release. First and foremost, Flash Player 10.1 is a fully-fledged Cocoa app, with Carbon legacy support being maintained for browsers that require it. Double-buffered OpenGL support was implemented for improved full screen playback along with rendering performance improvements by using Apple’s Core Animation drawing model. Flash Player 10.1 on Mac will be more CPU efficient and will result in greater battery life on laptops.

So what are you waiting for? Install it now. For a full list of new features pop over to Adobe’s site.

I’ve been told that all the cool kids will be heading to Manchester on the 8th of July for Flash Camp. Kindly organised by Flash Midlands the event will take place at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School for an afternoon and an evening of presentations, discussions and demonstrations of all things Flash.

It sounds like there will be some really exciting content on show including Flash Player 10.1 on Android, Papervision 3D, Flash Builder 4 and Flash Professional 5. So if you want to up your street cred make sure you register online and get yourself to Manchester.

Oh and did I tell you the best bit? It’s completely FREE!

I gotta take my hat off to Apple. In the three years since the iPhone’s launch the other mobile OEMs are still desperately trying to play catch-up. Even the impressive Android OS doesn’t quite managed it. Android handsets are already suffering the terrible fragmentation issues (different OS versions, screen resolutions, user interfaces) that Apple has managed so well across its handsets. Sure with so many manufacturers adopting Android it was always going to be impossible to prevent this but it still gives iPhone the edge in my opinion.

Now with the release of the iPad there’s a new super shiny device on the market for all of Apple’s competitors to try and better. Let’s hope they can catch-up a little quicker than they managed on mobile. The iPad has only been on release for a month or so and Apple has already sold like a zillion units, which might not read well for Adobe who will no doubt be hoping that tablet devices from other manufacturers will support Flash and make it a viable option for parties wishing to create apps and web content for these devices.

To date there haven’t been many alternatives to the iPad that have impressed. One device however that’s looking promising is the ExoPC Slate. From the video and preview from engadget this 11.6 inch slate sounds like it could be a worthy competitor and unlike the iPad will support Flash Player 10.1. Given the recent bad press with the HP Slate, it’s a little surprising to see that the ExoPC uses Windows 7 and has its own UI layer built on top. Perhaps Windows 7 will prove itself to be a capable OS for tablets after all.

The ExoPC looks fairly complete but don’t expect it to hit the streets until September. And although there wasn’t a lot of Flash content shown in the preview video, its fairly high specs should mean that playback of Flash content will be a breeze, especially with the great optimisation work that has gone into Flash Player 10.1 by Adobe’s engineers. The second half of this year should be really interesting as we start to see more and more great Flash enabled mobiles and tablet devices appear. The big question is “By end of this year what will the number of all these Flash enabled tablets be compared to the iPad?”. Currently it stands at 2 million to zero in the iPad’s favour.

Edinburgh is such a beautiful city and was an ideal location for the first stop of Adobe’s CS5 Road Show. It gave me the opportunity to appreciate some great architecture as well as feasting my eyes on the new features that have made it into CS5′s range of products. Being primarily a developer I tend not to focus that much on the more design orientated tools so Tuesday was a great opportunity just to catch-up on some of the CS5 products.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how many times you see it in action, Photoshop’s new content-aware fill feature is simply amazing and Adobe’s representatives were eager to show it off as often as they could during the day. Dreamweaver was another that had a lot of interest at the event and with its support for HTML5 I thought it would be a good one to check out. It didn’t disappoint and is something I might try and tinker with if I can find the time.

The highlight of the day however was Mark Doherty’s session where he demonstrated Flash Player 10.1 running on the Google Nexus One. It was great to finally see 10.1 running on a mobile device and I did manage to actually get some hands on time with the hanset at the end of the session.

The performance was reasonable but Mark informed me that the current beta build actually had hardware optimisation disabled due to a last minute bug just before the announcement at Google IO. It’ll be interesting to see just what can be achieved once the issue is ironed out and hardware acceleration is switched back on. This might also explain the really bad performance we’ve been seeing in some videos on the web.

One thing that niggled me, and I’ve constantly noticed this in videos of 10.1 on the web, is the difficulty Mark had trying to focus on and sending the Flash content into full screen mode. Again I quizzed him on this and he put it down to the Flash Player 10.1 engineers changing how this feature works between builds. Fingers crossed that this usability issue gets resolved as it doesn’t seem that intuitive at the moment and actually gives the impression that 10.1 is broken.

Oh and although I enjoyed myself I do have two serious complaints to make. Firstly there were no free t-shirts to be had anywhere. The Dot Net developers at work always get free t-shirts when they go to events and used my t-shirt misfortune to deride me and mock Flash in general. Secondly the cool badges that were being given out during registration – why weren’t there any Flash badges? Don’t get me wrong, the Fireworks badge I ended up with was pretty good but wearing it didn’t let others know at a glance what a complete Flash fan boy I am

If anyone at Adobe is reading this, please send me a medium t-shirt with a huge Flash logo on it and a few Flash badges that I can pin on the foreheads of my Dot Net loving colleagues. Thanks!