Adobe pins Flash's future on 3D

Adobe Flash's clock is ticking, and not in a good way. Apple wants it dead, Microsoft is about to make life for it much less comfortable with Windows 8, and Google supports it, but only to get under Apple's skin. The better that browsers and authoring tools that support HTML5 get, the smaller the remaining market space for Flash becomes.

For Flash to remain viable, Adobe has to position it for applications that can't be done well, or at all, with HTML5. It appears that Adobe has decided to focus on 3D applications with Version 11 of Adobe's Flash Player and Version 3 of Adobe AIR, both of which are scheduled for release in early October. Flash 11 has a new GPU-accelerated 3D API called Stage 3D, which should dramatically improve 2D and 3D rendering rates on devices with compatible hardware. Adobe claims that, compared with the current Flash Player's capability to render thousands of non z-buffered triangles at 30 Hz, Flash 11 will be able to render hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles at 60 Hz.

Flash is currently very popular for browser-based casual games, but Adobe wants Flash 11 to be used for far more graphically-intensive games, and has signed up EA Interactive, Ubisoft and Zygna to support the new capabilities in their games. The problem, as Wired's Webmonkey site points out, is that WebGL can provide at least the same level of 3D performance in browsers without plug-ins, and WebGL is an industry standard. However, Internet Explorer currently doesn't support WebGL at all, and other browsers have widely varying WebGL performance.

So, Adobe may be able to carve out a niche with Flash for 3D applications, but it's hard to see it as anything more than temporary. Browser developers will be improving their WebGL performance in parallel with increasing their HTML5 compliance. The real test will be how many developers successfully market games written with Stage 3D.

Flash 10.1 works well on Android 2.2 (Update: Not so fast!)

The first real-world tests are coming in, and Flash 10.1 seems to work quite well on Android 2.2 (FroYo), which Google has started pushing to its Nexus One smartphones. Engadget has gotten its hands on a video posted by the BBC that demonstrates Flash 10.1 running on a Nexus One vs. Flash Lite running on an HTC Desire. They're both 1GHz Snapdragon platforms, so while it's not an exact comparison, it's pretty close. The second demonstration, that starts around 1:35 into the video, clearly shows that Flash 10.1 performs much better than Flash Lite.

Update: TechCrunch reported that PocketNow did side-by-side testing of an iPhone, Nexus One with Android 2.2 and the Flash 10.1 application, and HTC's HD2, and found that Flash's performance on Android is a mixed bag. For pages where you're playing a single video or game, Flash's performance is very good, but when you intermix Flash ads, banners and videos onto a single web page, as you see all over the web, the performance is awful. In Adobe's defense, its Flash plug-in is still in beta, and it could improve its performance by the time it ships. However, as of today, Flash is likely to slow down your browsing experience considerably.

Adobe: Saying and doing are two different things

Recently, Adobe executives were quoted saying that the company will not put any additional effort into its Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler, and that its focus will be on providing the best possible experience on Android and other mobile platforms. I'd suggested that approach in a blog post several weeks ago. Today, however, Adobe has launched an advertising campaign and published a full-page ad in the Washington Post with an open letter from the company's founders chastising Apple for its actions.

It seems clear that Adobe doesn't really know what it wants to do. If the company is truly focusing all its efforts on Android and other platforms, why is it launching an anti-Apple advertising campaign? The ad in the Washington Post certainly wasn't intended to influence Apple--the last time I checked, Apple's headquarters were still in Cupertino. Adobe's ad is intended to influence the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department in their preliminary investigations of Apple.

If Adobe can't get Flash working on other platforms and is therefore desperate to get onto the iPhone and iPad, that's a problem with Adobe's own engineering team, not an issue for the U.S. Government. Adobe has missed a series of self-announced release dates for Flash 10 on a variety of mobile platforms. Apple's actions haven't helped things for them, of course, but Adobe has painted itself into this particular corner. Also, we don't know the details of the discussions between Apple and Adobe; the companies have been talking about porting Flash to the iPhone OS since the release of the original iPhone, and we don't know how much of the current situation is the result of bad blood that arose in those negotiations.

Adobe has lobbyists who can try to convince the FTC and Justice Department to take action against Apple (if there are any legal grounds for them to do so.) However, according to NPD Group, Android is now beating the iPhone in new U.S. consumer sales, and Verizon has confirmed that an Android tablet is right around the corner. That's where Adobe should be focusing its attention, and it should be sending consistent messages, both externally and internally.

Google to open source VP8?

NewTeeVee is reporting that Google will announce plans to make On2's VP8 codec open source as early as next month's Google I/O developers' conference. The move is no big surprise, and it's likely to dramatically increase adoption of VP8, which On2 claims is significantly more bandwidth-efficient than H.264. Adobe Flash currently doesn't support VP8, although given Adobe and Google's closer partnership, future support is likely. NewTeeVee reports that both Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox will add VP8 support once Google makes its announcement.

VP8 could provide an alternative to H.264 for developers and content providers who are concerned about future changes in MPEG LA's licensing policies, and to Ogg Theora for those who believe that Theora requires significantly more bandwidth than H.264 for the same level of quality. (Google is also helping to fund an implementation of Ogg Theora for ARM processors.)

The bottom line is that VP8 and Ogg Theora would provide a solid base of royalty-free alternative video codecs, in much the same way as PNG served as a royalty-free alternative to GIF.

Adobe's CS5 Launch: They didn't remove the iPhone reference

Adobe launched Creative Suite 5 this morning, and they left in the reference to their Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler in their presentation on Flash, even stating that applications built with it would be accepted in the iTunes App Store. As you probably know, as of last week, Apple won't accept cross-compiled applications into the App Store. Adobe should have pulled the reference from their announcement, but they prerecorded the presentations some time ago and would have had to reshoot or re-edit the Flash segment over the weekend, and chose not to do so. In any event, there was no "miracle" agreement between Apple and Adobe over the weekend, and applications built using the Flash cross-compiler won't be accepted by Apple.

As for the announcement itself, it went much faster and was much smoother than the CS4 launch presentation. The downside is that the presenters were required to talk at high speed in order to present the new features of their products in the limited time available. It also seems to me (although I could be wrong) that the CS5 bundles are significantly more expensive than the CS4 or previous versions, both in full and upgrade pricing. CS4 wasn't a wildly successful upgrade to CS3, and we're still feeling the effects of the recession. CS5 adoption may be a lot slower than Adobe would like.

Wowza: Smart, very smart

Streaming Media Magazine has an article about everyone's favorite semi-obscene new site, Chatroulette. According to the article, the developer of the site, Andrey Ternovsky, a 17-year old Russian high schooler, built the site as an experiment. It uses the peer-to-peer connection feature in Adobe's Flash Player 10 to make a direct connection between compatible clients, but that feature only works when both clients are running Flash 10 or above, so he needed a media server to provide a fallback option.

Ternovsky ruled out Adobe's Flash Media Server because of cost and complexity, as well as the open-source Red5 server because of its complexity. He settled on Wowza's Media Server, but because he was a high school student without money, he installed a bootleg copy with a cracked serial number. However, it kept crashing, so he decided to contact Wowza tech support. An engineer by the name of Charlie sent him a patch to get the server running, but then something else crashed, and Charlie provided another patch--four in all, until Chatroulette was good to go.

Note two very important things here: First, Wowza didn't ask Ternovsky for his serial number, and second, Charlie wasn't just any tech support engineer; he was Charlie Good, Wowza's CTO and co-founder. Good must have figured out fairly early on that Ternovsky was using a pirated version of Media Server, but he helped him because he was intrigued by the project. Between 200 and 300 emails were passed between Ternovsky and Good before everything was working.

Chatroulette now gets one million visitors a day, and the Wowza Media Server is handling approximately half of those sessions. As a result of Good's decision to help out Ternovsky, Wowza improved its server, proved that it can stand up to heavy loads, and is getting priceless publicity. None of this would have happened if someone at Wowza had said "We won't support you unless you buy the server." That would have been the end of it. For those companies that require a support contract before they'll answer the telephone, they'd do well to learn a lesson from this.

What's the right tablet operating system?

Yesterday, everyone who watched the Academy Awards in the U.S. saw the first TV commercial for the iPad. Today, Adobe and HP released a video showing Adobe Flash and Air running on HP's Windows 7-based tablet. Tablets haven't been this popular since Moses, but I have a sense that we may be going in the wrong direction.

This is turning into a "Goldilocks" situation: Scaling up the iPhone operating system for the iPad is too little, but scaling down Windows 7 for the HP Slate is too much. Both approaches have a big benefit, in that the hundreds of thousands of applications that work on the two respective operating systems will run on their respective tablets--just not well. In the case of the iPad, scaling up iPhone applications for the bigger screen will lead to some clumsy user interface compromises. As for Windows 7, it's going to be very tempting for software developers to add a flimsy tablet layer to their existing applications and call them tablet applications, again with severely compromised user interfaces.

So, what's my crazy tablet OS suggestion? A few weeks ago, I bought a Zune HD. (Let the snickering commence.) The Zune HD user interface is the basis for Windows Phone 7 Series, and it actually works very well with touch input. (The keyboard sucks, but I think that cramming an onscreen keyboard into the Zune HD took things a little too far.) The visual and kinesthetic metaphors in the Zune HD are worlds better than layering a touch interface onto Windows 7.

Microsoft's Courier concept may tie into this as well, but Courier is very heavily dependent on its two-screen design; many of its user interface metaphors wouldn't map well into a single-screen tablet. I'd be very excited to see a Zune HD-like user interface on a tablet, and I think that it would give Apple a serious run for its money.

Silverlight: In at Netflix, out at Major League Baseball

Not long ago, I noted that Netflix has adopted Microsoft's Silverlight as its streaming media platform for Apple's Macintosh, but today, Major League Baseball announced that it has switched from Silverlight to Adobe Flash for its live and on-demand video streams, starting in 2009 and for at least the next two years. This comes after the National Football League chose Flash earlier this year to stream its games, including the interactive multi-camera player used by both NFL.com and NBC. Neither MLB nor the NFL pointed to technical deficiencies in Silverlight as the reason that they adopted Flash, and Major League Baseball's statement that it was adopting Flash "for the next two years" indicates that the reason for the switch may have been based on business, not technical, reasons, and could be revisited down the road.

CNN Can't Count

I just tried to play a video on the CNN website, and got this message:

This CNN.com feature is optimized for Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher.

You are currently using Flash Player 10

Hmm, 10 is higher than 8, isn't it?