Specialist for Rich Internet Applications and UI-Design

A very exciting and promising project called Lightspark has reached beta-stadium. Lightspark is a 3rd-party implementation of Adobe's Flash Player, written by Alessandro Pignotti and entirely created from scratch using the open specification of the Flash-format SWF. No reverse-engineering was done. It is being said, that even hardware-acceleration is supported using OpenGL. Lightspark is claimed to be compatible to ActionScript3 and Flash Player version 9. Its goal is to provide a faster, stable and more open version of Adobe's Flash Player. Sounds really exciting to me so far! ... read the full article

What most people miss-understand is: It's not the Flash Player which is supposed to be "open" or not. It's the Flash/SWF specification, which is open. The Player is not and no-one said that it is. Think of it like this: HTML is based on an open specification made by the W3C. Browsers interpret HTML in order to provide web content. Flash is based on an open specification made by Adobe. Flash Players can interpret SWF in order to provide web content. The fact that Adobe's Flash Player is the most spread doesn't make Flash a "bad" technology. Some years ago, the Internet Explorer was the ... read the full article

Ok, hands down. Sooner or later, Flash will not be relevant to the WWW anymore. Flash videos will be replaced by <video> while animations will use <canvas> and <audio> in HTML5. There are a few things Flash can do, but HTML5 cannot, like: Webcam support Binary sockets (not web-sockets!) But these features will sooner or later be covered by HTML as well, so there is no need for Flash anymore on the web. But what about the Desktop? As I already stated, Flash could become the next-gen Java-replacement for Desktop applications. The reason why I think so is simple ... read the full article

I am currently writing my diploma thesis at the University of Ulm on performance issues regarding Rich Internet Application technologies like Adobe Flash/Flex, JavaFX, Silverlight and various JavaScript solutions. I started back in December when I first noticed that Adobe's Flash Player seriously has some performance issues. It always was by far the slowest of all technologies. Today, I retried some of my self-written benchmarks using the new Flash Player 10.1 RC4 and I was absolutely blown away. The new version is so fast, it's absolutely incredible. I am not done yet with my thesis unti ... read the full article

I think, I already mentioned that I really like Adobe's products for creating animations and rich internet applications, which are namely Flash Professional, Flash Builder, Catalyst and Illustrator. What I don't like is the target platform: The Flash Player. So, after all these debates about Flash, isn't it time to simply drop the Flash Player and add an additional compiler option for Flash Builder and Flash Professional? Yes, you guessed right. I am talking about HTML5 deployment. Wouldn't it be great if one could build rich internet applications using technologies like ActionScript3 and MXML ... read the full article