“flash player”
19 Mar 2008
Finally, some concrete news on the Flash Player for iPhone front: according to the Wall Street Journal, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced in a conference call to investors that Adobe has begun work on a Flash Player that is suitable for the Apple iPhone.
It looks like Adobe is building the "product in the middle" that Steve Jobs is looking for. Let's hope Apple cooperates by adding the Flash Player to Safari on the iPhone.
It should be easier to find out what version of the Flash Player a user is running. I also often feel the need to check the player version myself while developing. So, for a while now I thought it would be cool to have a simple site that told you your Flash Player Version and maybe also offered some helpful links too. Today, when a burst blood vessel in my finger from too much typing stopped me from working on Singularity, I thought I could at least create that site with one hand.
So here it is: playerversion.com.
Recently, I gave a talk titled Web '07 - Web '08 at the Christmas charity dinner (linking to the Google cache as the original site appears to be down at the moment) organized by Sussex Geek Dinners. It was a lighthearted tour through the highlights of Web '07 and a look ahead to Web '08* with predictions by myself and some of my friends.
In my predictions for 2008, I talked about how we will be seeing more RIAs in 2008 -- both from Adobe and third parties -- how Silverlight is not going to have a widespread impact (although is definitely something to keep an eye on for 2009/10 and the competition is going to give Adobe a welcome push in the right direction), how mobile Flash is going to move away from Flash Lite to full-scale Flash playback on devices and how we're going to see Flash on the iPhone, how sometimes-connected applications and web/desktop hybrid applications are going to gain importance with AIR, Google Gears, etc., and how real-time 3D in Flash is going to change the aesthetics of the web.
Adobe released several new web applications this year and many more are on the way.
In a relatively short timeframe, Adobe acquired an online word processor, created a cool color tool, released a free document sharing tool and announced online versions of Photoshop and Premiere.
Now you might think that this is simply Adobe's latest attempt to grow the company by entering waters previously traversed by the likes of Google and Yahoo! But I feel that there's more to it. Specifically, there is one important advantage that having popular web applications will give Adobe: a new avenue for increasing the rate of Flash Player penetration.
Writing about secure passwords in Buzzword got me thinking about the state of security and user trust in Flash (and Flex)-based Rich Internet Applications in general. After giving it some thought, I concluded that we have a little more work to do if users are to be expected to have the same sort of trust in Flash-based RIAs as they do for JavaScript and HTML-based applications and web sites.
The key security issue I see with Flash applications, especially those that deal with sensitive information, is that the user has no way of knowing whether or not the application is communicating their sensitive data over a secure connection.