One of our resident gurus and an all-around great guy, Tinic Uro from the Flash Player engineering team, has posted a great break down of the new Pixel Bender technology that will be introduced in the upcoming Flash Player 10 “Astro” release. If you’re not familiar, Pixel Bender is a new technology shared across some of the upcoming Creative Suite tools as well as the Flash Player which allows developers to write high-end filters and effects using the Pixel Bender language and tool kit. Using the .pbj files, Flash/Flex developers will be able to incorporate their own custom effects into the SWF projects which will get rendered in real time by the Flash Player 10.

There is still some mystery around .pbj files, i.e. the file format is neither documented nor is it clear what exactly it contains. While I can’t offer documentation on the file format at this time (although that will happen eventually) what I can offer is an assembler and disassembler I quickly hacked together. I am mostly using for this my own debugging purposes. For those who want to tweak Pixel Bender in Flash to the max this is a really good way to go.

Read here.

When major corporations and small businesses alike need to promote their most important products with high-end, engaging user experiences that combine multiple media formats with dynamic data and motion graphics they must make tough decisions on which rich client technologies they should bet their business on.

Like so many other companies, Microsoft chooses Flash. Can you blame them?

[via Serge Jespers, Ben Forta, and Ted Patrick]

I’ve been playing around with Photoshop Express again, now that it supports importing from my Flickr feed. What an awesome application! It was built with Flex and ActionScript 3.0 and it’s extremely impressive.

One of it’s features is the ability to create a really cool slideshow gallery that you can embed on your blog, like so…

I tried doing my first 30-second video for 30onAIR but I wasn’t able to get my Flash Player 10 beta quick feature overview under 1 min 30 secs.

Quickly learn what some of the new features in the recently released Flash Player 10 beta.

Several people asked me for the link to one of the sites that I showed in our keynote in the Flashforward track at Macworld Expo this morning.

The site in question, a fullscreen panorama example, was found on the Adobe Labs wiki page for Flash Player 9 here.

The example that I showed, which is extremely cool, was the Papervision3D AS3 Panorama created by Carlos Ulloa.

Aral Balkan (and others) pointed out that the Nintendo Wii now supports Flash Player 7 via their release of the Opera browser for Nintendo Wii, currently in beta (trial version) and planned for final release in March of 2007 (press release).

WiiNintendo.net offers web design guidelines for the Wii browser

So, to summarize the Flash presence on modern gaming systems:
- Nintendo Wii [check]
- Playstation 3 [check]
- Playstation Portable (PSP) [check]
- Xbox 360 (special embedded version developed by MSFT) [check]

I don’t think the Nintendo DS Lite has Flash, though it does have an Opera Browser.

Pretty cool, eh?

I was recently chatting with a few Flash developers who had no idea that we had recently released an update to Flash Player 9 which added, among other things, support for going fullscreen with your Flash content (from the browser).

Tracy Stampfli has written an overview of the new feature for the Adobe Developer Center. Check it out to learn more about this cool new feature (with sample files!).

[read the article]

After a few recent conversations with customers, it occurred to me that many Flash users aren’t aware that the Flash Player 8 has surpassed the 90% mark worldwide.

Adobe recently released updated Player penetration statistics as of September 2006. You’ll also notice that Flash Player 9 is being adopted even faster than Flash Player 8’s record-setting adoption (around 36% as of September 2006).

I’m not sure if anyone has (or could) done an official study, but I’d bet money that Flash Player 8 was the fastest-adopted single piece of software in the history of the Internet. Awesome…

Ryan Stewart has posted an interview on blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart with Mike Melanson, the lead engineer for the Linux version of the Flash Player, expected to be released in early 2007. In the interview, Ryan asks Mike about the feedback he gets on his popular blog, Penguin.SWF, picking APIs, and supporting the many Linux distros.

I imagine (or rather hope) there is a large base of Linux users patiently following the blog, understanding that this development takes time, and that it’s fortunate that Adobe is treating Linux as a first-class operating system in supporting the Flash platform.

Check out the interview here.

We have recently released security updates to the Flash Player. If you are using Flash 8 or Flash MX 2004 you can get updaters for the test movie player here.

Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Flash Player that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system. A malicious SWF must be loaded in Flash Player by the user for an attacker to exploit these vulnerabilities. Users are recommended to update to the most current version of Flash Player available for their platform.

Read the full details in the security bulletin:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/security/security_zone/apsb06-03.html