Category: air

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Adobe unveil Creative Suite 4 on 23/09, AIR for Linux, Flash Player 10 Release candidate

Adobe will be unveiling the next version of their Creative Suite software on the 23rd of September. This will be done via a special web broadcast, you can sign up for email notification via the following webpage – http://adobe.istreamplanet.com.

Details of any new features have not been revealed but Adobe did release public beta versions of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth on the Adobe Labs website a few months ago.

Adobe AIR for Linux beta released on Adobe Labs

Support for the Linux operating system has been increasing from Adobe with continual improvements to the Linux version of the Flash Player plugin. Now Adobe have fulfilled their promise of full cross-platform support for their AIR runtime with the release of Adobe AIR for Linux beta.

Flash Player 10 release candidate on Adobe Labs

A new release candidate of Flash Player 10 was released on Adobe Labs. If you haven’t already checked it out then there’s quite a few new features such as 3D Effects, a new text engine, enhanced drawing API, GPU support and enhanced sound APIs to name a few.

Once you’ve downloaded it then go an check out the Feature demonstrations page to get a taste of these new features.

One thing to keep in mind though, if you a frequently upload images and video to sites such as Flickr, Vimeo and even Adobe’s own Photoshop Express web apps then you’ll want to avoid this version of the Flash Player just now as there’s still a ‘bug’ which affects the uploaders for these sites. It seems to be a hotly debated issue just now but it appears that Flash Player 10 stops these kinds of image uploaders from working due to a new security restriction. You can catch some of the discussion on this Flash Player thread.

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AIR Vs Silverlight? Adobe Vs Microsoft? Open Source Vs Proprietary?

TechCrunch ran an article on 26th February titled ‘Adobe AIR Vs Microsoft Silverlight: It?s All About Numbers‘ which kind of compared them both as being quite similar, but it struck me that it’s really not a fair comparison.

There’s a big difference between AIR and Silverlight at the moment. It’s fair to say Microsoft will push Silverlight forwards quickly but there’s no fair comparison between them just now, it’s far closer to compare Flash and Silverlight for the time being as AIR features a lot more than Silverlight.

Flash and PDF have huge market share and AIR brings those plus regular HTML/CSS/JS web development into one runtime as well making easy cross-platform offline / online application development.

Competition = good

It’s certainly good that there’s some competition in the market but AIR’s incorporation of various open source projects such as Webkit as well as the fact that Adobe have open sourced a lot of their own code such as Flex and Flash Player code will hold a lot of mindshare of developers. While AIR is not 100% open source it’s certainly a lot more attractive on several levels, not least being able to create Apps whether you’re used to HTML/JS, Flash or Flex.

Competition is good, and the fact the MS are developing web development apps to challenge Dreamweaver is a good thing. Dreamweaver is a great program but it needs to keep progressing to provide the tools that developers need.

One aspect that Dreamweaver (Adobe / Macromedia) has done a good job with is support for multiple server platforms such as their own ColdFusion but also PHP and JSP development. I’m not sure we’ll see any of Microsoft’s ‘Expression’ development apps support PHP and JSP any time soon! This multiple server platform support is something Adobe need to keep supporting as it’s definitely one thing that will separate their tools from Microsoft’s offerings.

~Rick