Flash 10.1 mobile roadmap confusion, Windows phone support far off

When is the right moment to buy a mobile phone? Usually the answer is not quite yet; and that seems to the case if you want to be sure of support for Flash Player 10.1, the first full version of the runtime to run on mobile devices. Adobe recently struck off support for Windows Mobile

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Flash developers are now mobile developers

Adobe’s announcement of AIR for mobile today at the Mobile World Congress means that any Flash or Flex developer can compile an AIR application that will run on a supported mobile device. I understand that AIR for mobile is a subset of desktop AIR, but does include Flash Player 10.1, local database support with SQLite,

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Pros and cons of Adobe’s LiveCycle services in the cloud

Adobe has fully released LiveCycle Managed Services, offering a hosted platform for LiveCycle applications. The software is configured and managed by Adobe, but runs on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtual servers.

LiveCycle is a suite of applications which I think of as two things combined. On the one hand, it forms a server platform for

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Adobe Flash vs Apple iPad: RIA in the balance

Adobe evangelist Lee Brimelow has posted some images of well-known sites that break if Adobe Flash is not enabled. His point: if Apple’s iPad does not support Flash, none of these sites will work correctly.

While true in the short term, I do not think this is an effective line of argument. 

Let’s presume that you

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A year of blogging: another crazy year in tech

At this time of year I allow myself a little introspection. Why do I write this blog? In part because I enjoy it; in part because it lets me write what I want to write, rather than what someone will commission; in part because I need to be visible on the Internet as an individual,

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Google Gears out, HTML 5 in: what this means for offline web apps

I was interested to read that Google is abandoning Gears in favour of HTML 5.

While that makes sense, it is a hassle for developers who have developed for Gears, since there are differences between features such as HTML 5 local storage and Gears LocalServer. The Gears API was tidy and effective so in some ways

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PDC day two: Silverlight 4 and a free laptop

There were two big themes at PDC in Los Angeles today. One was the Silverlight 4 beta, the subject of the most impressive section at the keynote. The other was the announcement of free laptops for every attendee – aside from press and government. It is remarkable how a generous gift can change the atmosphere.

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Web advertising goes outside: digital signage using force.com and Media RSS

In the last 10 years or so video advertising screens have replaced static posters in busy public places like the London Underground. This is known in the trade as digital signage or Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising; and I was interested to speak to a company at the recent Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2 launch

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The Sneak Peeks at Adobe MAX 09

I was looking for a list of the Sneak Peeks shown at last week’s Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. I couldn’t find one quickly, so here is mine. Note that these are billed as experimental features that may never ship.

Thin client gaming: this is a kind of application virtualisation. We saw a 3D game

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Adobe’s chameleon Flash shows its enterprise colours

Duane Nickull is Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe and co-author of Web 2.0 Architectures which I reviewed recently. He is also Duane Chaos of grunge band 22nd Century and entertained us at the Adobe MAX party last night in Los Angeles.

It’s appropriate that he works for Adobe, whose Flash runtime has parallel chameleon characteristics. Most

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