Category Archives: Flash

The Future of Flash – some thoughts

By Trond. June 15, 2010

Once again Flash is in trouble. It’s not the first time, and I believe it’s still not the last. From Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, Google, Microsoft… you name them, they’ve probably had some thorn in Flash’s side.

Now it’s piling up for Flash again: Steve Jobs is crusading against Flash accompanied by the entire HTML5 consortium. Atop of this all major video-service providers, mobile phone makers, and a whole lot of others are now leaving Flash behind in the dust.
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Flash and Search Engine Optimization

By Sven. May 19, 2010


HTML, video, and images are indexed by search engines and stored so you can easily find them in a web search. The question is still, does Flash content get indexed by the search engines? Already in 2008 Adobe announced that they had teamed up with the search industry leaders (Google & Yahoo!) to improve search results of dynamic web content and Internet applications. At the time Adobe said:

“Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”

Two years later we have experienced that some of our Flash solutions does not get many results when googling them. Now why is this? Has Adobe/Google/Yahoo! failed or is it just that we have missed out on the details on how to really make the Flash more search optimized? Adobe stated in 2008 that all existing SWF solutions, across all versions of the SWF file format should be supported. That is without taking any grips to improve existing solutions for SEO. Can this be true? There are a lot of rumors and myths about Flash and CEO around on the web. I’ll try in this article to figure out what the real facts are…

What does it really take to make your Flash site optimized for search engines?
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9
Testing the iPhone packager in Flash CS5

By Sven. March 24, 2010

Flash iPhone App
A while ago I joined the Flash CS5 pre-release program eager to test the iPhone packager that there has been so much fuzz about. After downloading the latest beta version of the Adobe Flash CS5 I started with some small and easy tests, to test the performance when running a Flash solution on an iPhone.

My first App consisted of an image of the iPhone “homepage” with some basic touch-behavior. Tapping the left side would make the image spin, rotating the Y-axis 180 degrees (.rotationY). Tapping the right side would spin the image the other way, while tapping on the top or bottom the image would rotate the X-axis (.rotationX). I used the Tweener-class to animate the rotation, using a “easeOutElastic” transition effect. The animations where of course quick and responsive on my computer, but how will the iPhone react to this? I worked very fine indeed. I tested on a iPhone 3GS and my old 3G. Both reacted as quick and responsive as it did on my computer. Nice! But hey, this was very basic…

I expanded my tests by using the new Accelerometer Class in AS3, making the image change its rotation-parameters according to how I held my iPhone. This also worked very well and my belief in the Flash iPhone packager continued to grow.

Time to build a real App!
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Also posted in Front-end, Mobile | 9 Comments

The iPad experience

By Sven. January 29, 2010

iPad
When Steve Jobs presented the newest Apple gadget, the iPad, the discussions started all over the world. Some call it a ”giant iPhone”, except that you can’t use it as a phone, so maybe a giant iPod Touch is more accurate. The similarities are many. The iPad can run most of the applications on Apples App Store, and to develop iPad applications you use the iPhone SDK, although a updated version with better support for the new giant. Will the iPad be the next big thing and experience the same success as the iPhone? There are a bunch of discussions out there. The price, the size, the possibilities and of course the limitations. One of the limitations I have read most about, and as a Flash developer are very interested in, is the lack of support for the Adobe Flash Player.

Since the release of the iPhone Adobe have tried to get Apple to release a Flash player version for the iPhone, but without any luck. The situation has not changed when it comes to the iPad. The big difference here is that one of the major things to use iPad to is surfing the web. We have been used to limitations when surfing the web on mobile devices. But I must admit that I don’t expect any of these limitations when it comes to a “mini-computer” like the iPad.
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1
Flash Player 10.1 debug released, CS5 preview (but no beta)

By Mats Mikkel. December 18, 2009

The debug version of the Flash Player 10.1 beta is available now, which is a relief.

As for the upcoming CS5 release, Lee Brimelow’s put up another preview video. In addition to the iPhone compiler previously uncovered, this is our first peek at some of the other features we’re looking forward to, such as the new text engine, improved font embedding, the XLF format, improved code panel with custom class completion and various other improvements and tweaks. Looks pretty good, although I get the feeling that CS5 is a far smaller update than CS3 and 4; this feels more like CS4.5 than a fullbred new version. As for CS4, it was just upgraded to 10.0.2, and it seems far more stable and responsive now. Read More »

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1
Watch out for wmode

By Sven. November 30, 2009

wmodeThe Flash Player has supported the wmode parameter since version 3. The default value for wmode is “window”, which causes the SWF movie to run in its own invisible window above all content in the browser window.
<param value="window">

This causes problems when using DHTML menus and the like. The solution for this is to set the wmode parameter to “opague” which makes the Flash Player render its content directly onto the browser’s window.

Setting the wmode to anything other than “window” (opague or transparent) solves the DHTML menu issue and other issues, but at the same time it creates a bunch of other problems to be aware of!

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Also posted in Front-end, HTML, RIA | 1 Comment

1
Full 1080p HD on the web

By Helge. November 17, 2009

1080pLast week Youtube announced they are adding support for viewing 1080p HD videos. (tips: add &fmt=37 to end of the links)

Today Adobe released Flash Player 10.1 beta that use the GPU for hardware decoding of H.264 video. Let’s hope this gets as good as it sounds.

1080p HD comes to Youtube

About Flash Player 10.1

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