The often-maligned Adobe Flash Player may not be Steve Jobs’ best friend anymore, but the developer still wants to be your neighbor — and with the final release of version 10.3, the player now finds a new home in your Mac System Preferences.
MacStories.net is reporting that Adobe’s Flash Player 10.3 is finally out of beta on Thursday, with a new download available on the company’s website. The most notable change with the new version is that Flash Player now takes up a bit of real estate in your System Preferences panel on the Mac, bringing a more Apple-like user experience for those of us with a distaste for the former Windows style.
While the addition of a System Preferences pane is the most visible change, developers also get plenty to be excited about as well, including Media Measurement, which “allows companies to check how their Flash content is distributed on a website, what the audience reach looks like, and other stats.” Acoustic echo cancellation is also on deck, bringing developers “noise suppression, voice activity detection and automatic compensation for various microphone input levels.”
If you’ve ever been frustrated by having to visit Adobe’s website to get the latest version and not being able to be notified when that blessed event actually occurs, automatic updates are now part of the Flash Player System Preferences pane under the Advanced tab. These can be shut off (which Adobe doesn’t recommend), and you can click the Check Now button anytime to see if there’s a new version as well.
Finally, Flash Player 10.3 “integrates control of local storage with the browser’s privacy settings” — for now with Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 8 (or higher, for Windows) and Google Chrome 11. The feature is promised for “a future release of Apple Safari.”
Ready to unleash the Flash goodness? Head over to Adobe’s website and download Flash Player 10.3 today. The 6.07MB Mac OS X version requires 10.4 or higher and an Intel processor and works with Safari, Firefox and Opera.
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(Image courtesy of MacStories.net)
First introduced at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, the folks behind AirStash have returned with some new superpowers for their pocketable wireless flash drive, including media streaming and WebDAV support.
Engadget is reporting that the creators of AirStash are back at CES 2011, and this time they’re showing off how much their little wireless flash drive has grown up in the year since it debuted. If you’re not familiar with AirStash, it’s a SD card reader that can be used as a standard USB storage device with computers, as well as a wireless, read-only file server for any Wi-Fi device — including the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
The AirStash hardware remains the same a year later, but the company is incorporating a number of requests from their users, including an HTML5 web app and a forthcoming native iOS app in order to bring in-app image browsing and media streaming to most every portable device — including HD video and even Apple’s DRM’ed content on iOS devices.
The cats behind AirStash claim that the device’s 600mAh battery is capable of streaming for “around five hours, regardless of the media type,” although Endgadget didn’t have time to put that to the test with the hustle and bustle of a busy CES. However, they were treated to a glimpse of an SD movie streaming from the AirStash unit to an iPad, both with the HTML5 web app as well as a native iPad app, both of which are promised for later this month.
Finally, AirStash was demonstrated with new WebDAV compatibility, pulling a Keynote file into the iPad via Wi-Fi from the flash drive. WebDAV promises to also allow the ability to make edits to the file and then save it back to the AirStash, which should be a pretty handy option for users on the go.
AirStash can be purchased directly from the company’s website for .99; the HTML5 web app and native iOS apps will be free, when available.
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(Image and video courtesy of Engadget)
(Image courtesy of Endgadget)
We all know about the ongoing scuffaw between Apple and Adobe in regard to the effects of Flash Player in web browsing. But today, Adobe’s CEO interestingly revealed that Adobe has a version of Flash Player in the works that’s actually being geared for the new MacBook Air.
A recent review of the MacBook Air from Ars Technica had made the note that the device’s battery takes a bit of a shellacking when one browses the Web with Flash Player installed on it. This led Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch to come to the conclusion that it takes more power to display Flash content than it actually does not to display it, and also claimed that HTML5 content along similar lines would use just as much or more power.
That said, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen made the note yesterday that in order to conserve battery, the key is hardware acceleration, and that Adobe has a version of Flash player in the works for the MacBook Air.
“When we have access to hardware acceleration, we’ve proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform.”
Back in mid-August, Adobe had released an updated version of Flash Player 10.1 to bring hardware acceleration to a variety of Mac models.
via MacRumors
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Mac users were treated to a final release of Mac OS X 10.6.5 this week, which addressed a number of issues including the squashing of more than 130 bugs. But did you realize that almost half of those bugs were caused by Adobe Flash?
9to5Mac is reporting that Apple’s latest Mac OS X 10.6.5 released on this week took on a number of issues related to image-processing operations, graphics performance, printing quirks and more, including more than 130 bug fixes — 42 percent of which are related to Adobe Flash.
Sure, we all like to bag on Adobe’s Flash technology, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs has famously excluded from iOS — but the fact remains that there’s a growing anti-Flash sentiment brewing as more and more web developers embrace the iOS-friendly (and open-source) HTML5, particularly for online video.
“There’s an anti-Flash backlash beginning, and it isn’t about Apple, it isn’t about Adobe (ADBE), it isn’t about HTML5, it isn’t about anything but buggy software, lousy performance and broken promises,” 9to5Mac notes.
TechCrunch also jumped into the fray: “So you’ll forgive me if when Kevin Lynch announces all these great-sounding things about Flash that are just around the corner, I’m highly skeptical. How long have we been promised Flash on mobile devices? 5 years? It’s still not where it needs to be. Hell, it’s not where it needs to be on the desktop.”
What it all appears to come down to is that everyone loves the idea of Flash — just not Flash itself. Is anyone at Adobe listening to these concerns?
Is it possible that Apple knew what it was doing when it excluded Adobe Flash from being preinstalled in the latest MacBook Air models? A new report claims that the controversial Flash technology can kill battery life on the slim new laptops by as much as two hours.
AppleInsider is reporting that leaving Adobe Flash off of your new MacBook Air can extend the battery life by as much as two hours. According to Ars Technica, one of the new models can happily surf the web via Safari for a full six hours without Adobe Flash installed — but once the same sites are visited with Flash active, the battery life drops by a full third, to only four hours.
“Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary,” wrote Chris Foreman after conducting the tests for Ars Technica. AppleInsider notes that without Flash installed, websites generally display static ads where the Flash content should be, “erasing the need for constant processing power demanded by the Flash plug-in’s rendering engine.”
The results likely come as no surprise to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has remained adamant about keeping Adobe Flash technology off of the company’s iOS devices, citing security issues as well as performance and most importantly, battery life.
Apple wasn’t the first to unbundle Adobe Flash from their computers — Microsoft made that move with the launch of Windows Vista in 2007, although AppleInsider notes this “was likely due to the company’s efforts to push its rival Silverlight plug-in.”
As a result, the audience for Flash-based content has dwindled, a particularly disturbing trend for publisher Adobe since Apple is selling far more iOS devices than they are Macs. Currently, the only way to play Flash content on an iOS device is through a third-party app such as Skyfire, which uses its own servers to convert Flash on the fly to HTML5 using Mobile Safari — but that method precludes interactive uses for Flash such as games.
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