Adobe Systems has started work to bring 3D to its Flash platform, and will preview the technology at the company’s upcoming developer conference in October.
A session titled “Flash Player 3D Future” will outline a future version of Flash that will be capable of playing 3D content, according to a program listing for the Adobe Max 2010 trade show, which will be held in Los Angeles Oct. 23-27.
The session will take “a deep dive into the next-generation 3D API coming in a future version of Flash Player,” according to the listing. The Flash Player is available as a browser plug-in that allows users to play games or view multimedia content. Google’s YouTube uses Flash for video distribution on its Web site.
The session is “going to be big,” said Thibault Imbert, a Flash product manager at Adobe in a blog entry.
“If you are into 3D development for games, augmented reality or just interactive stuff like Web sites, you just can’t miss the session,” Imbert wrote.
Adobe officials were unavailable for comment Friday on a release date for a 3D Flash Player. The company had closed for the day, according to a spokeswoman for A&R Edelman, Adobe’s public relations agency.
Adobe already offers tools for 3D animation in Flash, but the new platform could bring richer 3D experiences. This could be an important development as games and videos are increasingly produced in 3D.
At the Computex trade show last month, graphics chip company Nvidia demonstrated 3D video streaming live over the Internet using a video player based on Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.
Adobe has also engaged in a public spat with Apple, which does not support playback of Flash content on its iPhone and iPad devices. Apple prefers distributing video and multimedia content through the HTML5 standard, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs has publicly derided Flash for being buggy, slow and power hungry.
News Provider: PC World
Users of Google Chrome on Linux, Mac and Windows machines were automatically upgraded Thursday to a new browser version that addresses several security bugs and features a fully integrated Flash multimedia player for the first time. Google Vice President of Engineering Linus Upson believes browser users will benefit in several different ways from Chrome’s integration of Adobe Systems’ Flash technology for the web.
“When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player” as well as “automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism,” Upson wrote in a blog. “There will be no need to install Flash Player” or “manually download separate updates,” which “reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.”
Flash Player 10.1 Unleashed
Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 became available for desktops and notebooks on June 10. Among other things, the new version automatically shuts down content running in the player whenever the machine’s available memory runs low, Adobe Senior Engineering Director Paul Betlem wrote in a blog. Additionally, Flash Player apps will use significantly less CPU resources whenever the content is idle, consuming less power.
With Google Chrome’s integration of Adobe Flash, the two companies “have obviously done extra integration work here that other browser makers have not done,” said Al Hilwa, director of applications development software at IDC. “So outside of Chrome, people will get the standard Flash 10.1 plug-in.”
As an integral part of Chrome, Flash technology brings a lot of benefits, though realizing all of them fully may be a work in progress, Hilwa observed. “There is a potential reduction in complexity initially and potentially improved reliability and performance due to the combined testing and deeper integration,” Hilwa said. “In the long run, this type of integration is the only way to coordinate what the browser and the plug-in do together.”
Browsers don’t check Flash cookies or data storage when they tell users that their cookies and history have been deleted, Hilwa explained, because browser mechanisms don’t usually integrate with plug-in mechanisms. “With deeper integration of the two, they can potentially work in a concerted fashion to delete histories and cookies,” he said.
What’s more, Flash Player 10.1 is supposed to automatically manage stored data according to the private browsing settings in Chrome, Hilwa observed. “So when someone activates private browsing in Chrome, it is also activated in Flash Player,” he said.
HTML5 Versus Flash
Adobe’s collaboration with Google on Flash also extends to Android-powered mobile devices, with both companies seeing the benefits of working together to counter Apple’s Flash ban on iPhones, iPads and the iPod touch. Though Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stressed his preference for HTML5, which can help improve experiences for text-based content, some analysts don’t see HTML5 as a viable alternative to player-based technologies for designing rich, highly functional user experiences.
Still, Google sees the merit of harnessing the power of HTML5 in a browser that also fully integrates Flash. For example, Google’s Chrome development team has been working to incorporate a number of HTML5 features into Chrome, such as geolocation APIs, app cache, web sockets, and file drag and drop.
“For a taste of HTML5′s powerful features, try browsing through web sites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps,” wrote Chrome Product Manager Brian Rakowski in a blog.
News Provider: Mark Long From News Factor Network
YouTube weighed in Wednesday on the question of whether HTML5 is ready to replace Flash Player as the preferred video-distribution vehicle for the web — an idea first proposed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in April. According to a new YouTube blog post, Adobe Flash currently provides the best platform for meeting the video-distribution requirements of the online service.
Though the video support built into HTML5 enables YouTube to deliver most of the service’s content and features to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, YouTube software engineer John Harding observed that HTML5 has substantial shortcomings.
“We’ve been excited about the HTML5 effort and video tag for quite a while now, and most YouTube videos can now be played via our HTML5 player,” Harding wrote in a blog. “This work has shown us that, while the video tag is a big step forward for open standards, the Adobe Flash platform will continue to play a critical role in video distribution.”
Flash Player Advantages
According to Harding, one of the drawbacks of HTML5 is that the next major revision of the HTML standard currently under development does not address video-streaming protocols. By contrast, Flash Player provides fine control over buffering as well as dynamic quality control, Harding wrote.
“Flash Player addresses these needs by letting applications manage the downloading and playback of video via ActionScript in conjunction with either HTTP or the RTMP video-streaming protocol,” Harding wrote.
Furthermore, Harding observed that Flash Player’s ability to combine application code and resources into a secure, efficient package has been instrumental in enabling YouTube videos to be embedded in other web sites. “While HTML5 adds sandboxing and message-passing functionality, Flash is the only mechanism most web sites allow for embedded content from other sites,” he wrote.
Other Flash Player advantages over HTML5 include the ability to enable the viewing of high-definition videos in full-screen mode, which Harding noted has not historically been possible with pure HTML.
“While most browsers have a full-screen mode, they do not allow JavaScript to initiate it, nor do they allow a small part of the page — such as a video player — to fill the screen,” Harding explained. “Flash Player provides robust, secure controls for enabling hardware-accelerated full-screen displays.”
Customer Experience Advice
Customer experience professionals also need to be aware of HTML5′s shortcomings when it comes to designing rich, highly functional user experiences, noted Ronald Rogowski, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.
The downside to using HTML5 right now “is that it could lead to inconsistent experiences across today’s browsers,” Rogowski cautioned in a blog. HTML5 also “compromises performance for graphics-heavy experiences, [and] will require that users download a browser that supports the technology,” he wrote.
One big advantage of Adobe Flash is that the technology is already ubiquitous. “Over 99 percent of all Internet users have downloaded it into their browsers, often to view video content,” noted Al Hilwa, director of application development software at IDC.
Rogowski sees a few places where HTML5 can help improve user experiences today, such as providing an improved experience for people with disabilities. At the moment, however, Rogowski doesn’t think HTML5 is a viable platform for delivering next-generation rich Internet content and functionality.
“Forrester recommends using HTML5 as a way to enhance text-based content experiences while looking to more established technologies like Flash and Silverlight to build high-functional applications,” Rogowski wrote.
News Provider : Mark Long From News Factor Network
HTML 5 – The new markup language for cyberspace. We are on the edge of next step of the internet evolution. As you know HTML is the core language of online world. Every basic thing on web development starts from HTML and its templates. HTML 5 is next major upgrade of HTML. But, stop that is not it. HTML 5 is making and breaking some major things on Web, So watch out…….
HTML 5 is the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. This new revision of HTML incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears. HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern websites.

Battle Begins Flash Vs HTML5 On iPad
Header, Footer, Navigation Menu and Main Content - These are the common parts of every webpage or website you see on your browser today. So here HTML5 Comes which has element for almost every common thing of modern websites. Here are Some new elements that are being introduced in HTML5
New Elements Added in HTML5 Forms
article, aside, audio, canvas, command, datalist, details, embed, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, keygen, mark, meter, nav, output, progress, rp, rt, ruby, section, source, summary, time, video
New Methods Added in HTML5 Forms
PUT and DELETE (Previously there was two : GET and POST)
To see more Additions and changes of HTML5. Please Visit Wikipedia Here
There are certain expectations of website interface today and modern web pages usually end up rehashing a lot of the same code to do navigation, searches and other functionality that every website has. HTML5 abstracts much of this functionality to save us time and bandwidth. New features include integration of video and audio without any java scripting or fancy tricks. You can also now pull off tricks like drag and drop interfaces, online document editing and much more without costly custom coding that may not be compatible across the board.

Youtube and HTML5
HTML5 has several goals which differentiate it from HTML4. Continue Reading »