something in the way

If you are into 3d development for games, augmented reality or just interactive stuff like websites, you just can't miss the session entitled Flash Player 3D future scheduled for Max 2010 scheduled on October 27 at 11:00AM in room 503. Sebastian Marketsmueller (Flash Player engineer) will deep dive into the next generation 3D API coming in a future version of the Flash Player.

Now you may wonder, what does this means, what kind of 3D are we talking about ?

What kind of API ? True textured z-buffered triangles ? GPU acceleration ? Even better ? What I can say is forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big

When this will be available ?

We will share plans with you at Max during this session, I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.

If you are also curious about the inner details of the Flash Player renderer, Lee Thomason (Flash Player architect) will delve into the details of the Flash Player renderer, and show how to optimize the rendering performance of your applications. Lee will cover mechanisms like the display list, text rendering, shaders, GPU hardware acceleration, and exclusive features coming in a future version of Flash Player (hehe).

After this session, Flash Player rendering will no longer be a mystery for you. This track called Deep Dive into Flash Player Rendering is scheduled on October 27 at 09:30AM in room 511A.

I will be happy to meet you there at Max in Los Angeles and talk about our future plans and also get your feedbacks about the player around a fresh beer. I will post further details about all this in the following weeks.

If you haven't checked all the sessions available for Max this year check the online scheduler.

John Harding, Software Engineer at Google, has posted a lengthy article about the pros and cons of Flash video and HTML5 video support in today's browsers. It's fair to say that the post is in essence a major thumbs up to the Flash Platform. The author points out that video on the web today is much more than a simple video tag pointed at a file, but involves other considerations such as widely supported codecs, secure delivery mechanisms where required by content owners, two way video and audio for recording live via webcam as well as immersive fullscreen options.
All this is of course supported today via the Flash Player but not via HTML5, and whilst we all agree that it'd be very nice not to have to wrap a video into a SWF wrapper we must also face the reality that in many cases a simple click and play experience just doesn't cut it anymore. HTML5's video capabilities could have given Flash a run for its money about 10 years ago when Flash first started building momentum for online video delivery, but they are no match for the type of features that web users today are accustomed to and demand as standard.

Sure, of course I am biased, but I am also smart enough to know when I'm beating a dead horse, and Flash definitely is not one of those. Whilst new technologies such as HTML5 are most welcome, especially when they make a developer's life easier they also need to make sure that they don't over-promise and under-deliver. The amount of hype some companies have been able to generate around HTML5 is almost unreal, yet the follow-up on that hype remains to be seen. In the meantime I'll get back to work to make bling with Flash, clients are waiting and the biggest app store of all is still the web ;-)

How did I get here? Sorry - here's the YouTube blog post again.

This week at the Google I/O conference Adobe announced that a Flash Player 10.1 beta and an Adobe AIR prerelease are now available for Android devices. This is really exciting news for those of us building apps on the Flash Platform because now we can begin building apps in Flex for these mobile devices (and many others coming soon).

Take a look a some of the quick demos I’ve built with Flex running on Android in Flash Player and AIR:

You can get the source code for all of these demos from github.

Also Christophe Coenraets has posted some great Flex mobile demos. Check out his Employee Directory and Stock Trader demos.

These are very exciting times for developers!

If you want to check out the Flash Player 10.1 beta for Android it will be available in the Android Marketplace for Android 2.2 devices. You can try Adobe AIR for Android today by signing up for the prerelease.

I’m in love with the New York Times data visualization/infographics division. They consistently put out some of the most amazing visualization pieces (both in print and online) that I’ve ever seen. Their recently geographic analysis of Netflix ratings was absolutely superb. And we all probably saw their election maps (either for 2008 or 2004). They produce stunning displays that convey amazing amounts of information in a way that only interactive graphics can do. And they’re all done in Flash.

A Peek Into Netflix Queues

And for even more check out the NYT’s selected infographics list or simply do a Google search for “interactive graphic” on the New York Times website.

So when you see images showing the missing plugin icon on the New York Times website on the iPad or iPhone, that’s not just some annoying ad that’s not playing or a streaming video. That’s some of the most cutting edge visualization work that’s being produced today. And without Flash it simply doesn’t exist.

Sure, you might be able to recreate some of these without using Flash (I’d argue that many you simply would never be able to do, but that’s for another debate). But the point isn’t whether or not you could eventually do it without Flash. The point is that the New York Times does them all with flash. So we need to ask why. It’s not an accident or an arbitrary technology choice. Newspapers operate on a schedule and a budget (and one that is getting tighter and tighter). The simple truth is, creating amazing visualizations like you see on the NYT website is possible and easy with Flash. They use the tools that get the job done most efficiently and produce the best end result. This isn’t an argument about whether it’s theoretically possible to create these types of visualizations without Flash, it’s about whether it’s being done. And save for handfuls of examples, it’s not (for every one good JavaScript visualization I’ll show you ten good Flash ones). Taking away the New York Times’ ability to use Flash is setting their data visualization department back 5 or 10 years. And it would mean that we, as readers and citizens, would be missing out on some of the most important journalism being produced today.

The New York Times (like all newspapers) is in crisis. They are trying to reinvent themselves in an online form. And as a news organization they are one of the most progressive and experimental out there. They are embracing the new medium by doing some of the best damn interactive graphic work I’ve ever seen. They make things that convey news and information in ways that draw people in and keep them coming back for more.

But without Flash they’re just a newspaper. And we all know newspapers are dying.

Do you remember Mouse Gesture ?

I am currently working on its good friend : Voice Gesture.

Well, the name is not very explicit, but it's a voice recognition library based on the Flash Player 10.1 Microphone new feature.

I just want to show you a very early demonstration :

Voice Gesture from didier.brun on Vimeo.

As you can see, it works pretty fine ( > 95% accuracy ) but I have to admit that, for now, the algorithm require these 2 points :

• The user is the trainer (I have recorded my own voice models into the library)
• A silent place

I have some more work to optimize the algorithm and build an AIR application to record and organize the sound library.

So keep in touch, I will publish this library soon...

Tweet friend ? please share :
http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @didierbyte: I have just published a voice recognition demo using FP10.1 http://bit.ly/6b5LM0

PS : Voice Gesture works in a simple web-based Flash Player 10.1 (I have recorded this demo using FireFox), it is not specific to AIR 2.0.

The Morning Highlights from the Adobe Industry Analyst Summit include the following information about the mobile Flash Player. While there was no iPhone reevaluations - Adobe’s position is still, “we’d love to have it on their if Apple would let it” - as Marshall Kirkpatrick outlined in a story, Kevin spoke to the Flash 10 roadmap [...]

The news gets better and better, yesterday news was out that the Palm Pre would ship with the Flash Player and now engadget is reporting Nokia is now also on board for the Flash Player 10 initiative for getting Flash Player 10 on mobile handsets. Apple? Are you listening? You are pretty much the only [...]