“Flash is a cross-platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross-platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms,” said Steve Jobs in his Thoughts on Flash, in April 2010.

Apple followed up with a change in its terms for developers, later withdrawn, that required iOS applications to be “originally written in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript”. It was a war against Flash, won by Apple.

As devices and platforms multiply, it’s more challenging than ever to create expressive content that can reach the widest audience possible. The Adobe® Flash® Professional Toolkit for CreateJS — a complimentary extension available for Flash Professional CS6 users — enables you to leverage the rich animation and drawing capabilities of Flash Professional while you make the transition to creating HTML5-based content.

Convert your library to JavaScript in one click

Traditionally, interactive designers have leveraged Flash Professional to create assets that target both the Flash Player and Adobe AIR® runtimes. With the Flash Professional Toolkit for CreateJS, you can now easily export assets and animations to JavaScript using the open source CreateJS framework. The output generates nicely formatted, readable, and editable JavaScript code. This can jump-start your ability to design highly expressive content that runs in any HTML5-compatible mobile or desktop browser

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/flash-to-html5.html

There has been some Twitter chatter about the closure of silverlight.net, Microsoft’s official site for its lightweight .NET client platform. multimedia player and browser plug-in.

One of the things this demonstrates is how short-sighted it is to create these mini-sites with their own top-level domain. It illustrates how fractured Microsoft is, with individual teams doing their own thing regardless. Microsoft has dozens of these sites, such as windowsazure.com, windowsphone.com, asp.net, and so on; there is little consistency of style, and when someone decides to fold one of these back to the main site, all the links die.

What about Silverlight though? It was always going to be a struggle against Flash, but Silverlight was a great technical achievement and I see it as client-side .NET done right, lightweight, secure, and powerful. It is easy to find flaws. Microsoft should have retained the cross-platform vision it started with; it should have worked wholeheartedly with the Mono team for Linux-based platforms; it should have retained parity between Windows and Mac; it should never have compromised Silverlight with the COM support that arrived in Silverlight 4.

The reasons for the absence of Silverlight in the Windows Runtime on Windows 8, and in both Metro and desktop environments in Windows RT, are likely political. The ability to run Silverlight apps on Surface RT would enhance the platform, and if COM support were removed, without compromising security.

Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over

Despite significant investments from Microsoft, Google, and others, HTML5 remains not quite good enough for a range of apps. So says Mark Zuckerberg, but I also heard that this week from the chief technology officer of a large media company. Rather than gloat over HTML5′s long road to native app parity, though, he fretted about how much money is being wasted rebuilding the same app multiple times for disparate platforms.

In other words, HTML5′s as-yet unfulfilled promise is minting money for app development shops.

My hope? The company that gave us Flash, Adobe, has jumped into HTML5 with both feet, buying Nitobi, the sponsor of the popular PhoneGap project, and releasing a promising set of HTML5 authoring tools. Adobe, once pilloried by Steve Jobs for inflicting bloated Flash on the industry, may come back to haunt Apple by replacing native iOS development with serious HTML5 development tools. Apple was one of the earliest advocates for HTML5, and Steve Jobs chided Adobe for its proprietary approach to Flash.

But Adobe may have the last laugh, if its HTML5 tools work as advertised (so far, so good) and it is able to advance the state of the art for HTML5 functionality.

Adobe Flash is available in the Google Play for UK Android users following pressure from a group of strategic partners including the BBC.

“Flash Player continues to be available on Google Play for users in the UK for a short while due to requests from strategic partners,” a spokesperson for Adobe told the BBC.

The Beeb says that it asked Adobe to bring back the app because it uses Flash as the underpinning technology for the corporations BBC’s iPlayer application and it is thought that the move is to allow users to still continue to use the iPlayer on the go on Android devices.

No date has been set for when Flash will be removed from Google Play for a second time, and the app has only been reinstated in the Google Play UK store.

“Flash Player is no longer being updated for new device configurations,” the listing states. “Flash Player will not be supported on any Android version beyond Android 4.0.x.”

In November of last year, Adobe made a surprising about-face on its popular Flash plugin, announcing that it would stop development of Flash for mobile devices.

Today, Adobe will disable new installs of Flash on Android, effectively cutting it off from the future of the mobile web — despite the company’s historical assertion that Flash would enable the “full web experience” on mobile devices. Adobe had grand plans for mobile Flash, but the company met a sizable early wall when Apple refused to adopt it.

Instead, Adobe surrendered the major mobile battlegrounds and pledged allegiance to HTML5. Adobe strongly endorsed HTML5 as the “best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across multiple platforms,” instead of Flash.

Adobe, of course, is not giving up by any means: the company’s roadmap includes plans to focus on gaming and “premium video,” and the company will continue to support Flash on PCs. Still, it’s hard to imagine Flash’s ongoing relevance in a world that’s increasingly mobile, and Adobe’s support for HTML5 doesn’t bode well for the plugin: in a web with increasingly less Flash, HTML5 will soon provide the “full web experience” for most users.

Adobe was very public about dropping mobile Flash last fall. In case that wasn’t clear enough, the developer just drew a line in the sand: Android 4.1 doesn’t, and won’t ever, get certification for Flash.

The company is stopping short of saying that Flash won’t run, but it’s evident that Adobe won’t help you if the web browser plugin doesn’t install (or breaks in spectacular fashion) on that Nexus 7.

The company had already said that HTML5 was the way forward on phones and tablets

Adobe announced last winter withdrew its mobile Flash

The company is not saying that Flash is not working with a new software platform, but Adobe does not, however, publish it to any patches or updates. This applies on Wednesday released Google ‘s Nexus 7-tablets, which is one of the first new Android-powered devices.

Adobe plans to focus on the HTML5 standard because HTML5′s support has become more common in many mobile devices.

Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/adobe+ei+flashia+android+41+jelly+beaniin/a819963?s=r&wtm=tietoviikko/-29062012&

Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.

Before this, the general assumption was that Microsoft would pursue only web-standard technologies in IE 10. But with the Metro version of IE 10 not offering users the ability to extend the capabilities of the browser with add-ons, the software giant realized this may be too restrictive for consumers. So how could it meet the needs of consumers by providing Flash in a way that didn’t subvert Metro?

Interestingly, they were able to do so without contradicting any of the earlier statements the company made about web standards and Flash in IE.

As Mr. Hachamovitch noted, Microsoft does work closely with Adobe, closely enough that Adobe actually provided Microsoft with source code access to Flash, allowing them to seamlessly integrate the technology into IE 10.