Photo: Adobe

Adobe’s had a very busy few months, releasing the critically lauded Creative Suite 5. But the big news has been around the future of Adobe’s Flash platform, with a certain high-profile tech leader saying the service is past its prime. Nevertheless, Adobe press on releasing Flash Player 10.1 for PC, with Android and other smartphones to follow soon behind, in addition to making some very bold predictions about the future of Flash.

PC gets to play first

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is available on PC, Mac and Linux right now, with the Android version due to follow sometime in June and expansion to other mobile phone platforms a little later, too. Adobe description of its later player reads: ‘Flash Player 10.1 includes numerous media quality improvements and is ready to take advantage of upcoming media delivery technologies to provide new ways to deliver rich media experiences and create new business models’.

Bold predictions

Adobe also predicted that Adobe Flash 10.1 (and beyond, of course) would be available on over 250 million mobile phones come 2012. How’s that for a bold claim? In addition, the company’s soothsayers predict that 53 per cent of all smartphones sold in calendar year 2012 will have Adobe Flash built in. Confidence or hubris?

The question, really, is what is the probability of this? Given historical data, the chances are surprisingly fair. Adobe has entrenched market share and a massive chunk of the online video player market. Though Jobs has decreed flash a dying platform, users are clearly clamouring for it on their mobile phones. Furthermore, the prediction that H.264 as a stand-alone format will completely replace Flash’s .flv format is as yet unseen.

What do you think? Is Flash, with its historically resource intensive operability a good fit for mobile phones or is this overkill for a dying platform?

Photo: Matthew Yohe / Wikimedia Commons

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the guest of honour at this year’s All Things Digital conference – D8 for short since it is the eighth such event – giving a lengthy interview with Walt Mossberg and then briefly taking questions from the audience thereafter. Given Apple’s recent history, it’s no surprise he had a few tasty soundbites on everything from Google Android, to AT&T and even Adobe Flash.

On Google and Android

Mossberg asked Jobs if he felt Eric Schmidt and Google entering the smartphone business was a form of betrayal to that relationship to which Jobs responded, ‘My sex life is pretty good’, drawing huge laughs from the crowd. Clearly Apple’s growing conflict with Google is a sore point for Steve Jobs who, one imagines, formed a very close relationship with Eric Schmidt while Schmidt was on the Apple board. Steve’s answer deflects the Google Android question somewhat, but we get the sentiment.

On AT&T

Photo: AT&T

Many have felt that AT&T and its struggling network were one of the only areas where the iPhone was not stellar in the US, to which Jobs gave two vastly differing opinions. He first acknowledged that ‘AT&T took a big leap’ for Apple in supporting them when it was unclear if Apple could crack into the smartphone market at all. But in answering an audience question regarding the inability to make calls, Jobs joked it gets worse before it gets better and, judging by the current situation, it should get a whole lot better soon. Stinging? You bet.

On Adobe Flash

When asked about Adobe Flash, Jobs responded by saying Apple has always been in favour of technologies on the up, implying Flash as a platform was not that. He said: ‘Flash looks like it had its day but it’s waning, and HTML5 looks like it’s coming up.’ People thought the omission of Flash in favour of HTML5 would hold Apple back, but Jobs pretty much squashed those fears, saying the company was selling an iPad every three seconds since the launch of device. Remarkable.

Circles, circles, circles

Photo: Apple

What came across in this interview with Mossberg was that Jobs and Apple try concern themselves as little as possible with what the competition do, and rather focus on making the best possible product. Apple is winning with the iPhone, but Google Android has clearly become a legitimate competitor. AT&T were a great enabler, but the time for bad service appears to be coming to an end. And the omission of Adobe Flash is clearly not slowing iPad sales. Like the strategy or not, to Jobs credit, this all seems very good for business.

Photo: Adobe

On the heels of releasing the potentially revolutionary Adobe Creative Suite 5, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has announced the delay of Flash 10.1 for some smartphones.

Second half of 2010

Narayen has been on the interview trail promoting the company’s latest major software release, but in answering questions relating to all things Adobe, he revealed Flash 10.1 for mobile phones had been delayed. The BlackBerry, Android and WebOS versions of Flash were originally scheduled for the first half of 2010, but are now set to be released in the second half.

It’s just business

Photo: BlackBerry

When asked about the touchy Apple issue, Narayen sadly didn’t have the colourful words Lee Brimelow had for Apple’s recent anti-flash crusade. Instead he said Apple’s decision to not support flash is more business-related than it is a technological issue and that it would ‘hurt consumers’ more than anything else. In this regard, consumers would decide with their wallets whether or not – without using these words – they wanted a gimped device or not.

Creative Suite 5

Adobe Creative Suite 5 is the most exciting release in the company’s recent history, with a small handful of features that could end up being game changers. The one that caught our – and most other people’s attention – was the content-aware fill, which automatically filled images with appropriate content when you removed something from them.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 is the company’s creativity tools bundle that contains its flagship Photoshop application, as well as other creativity tools like Illustrator and After Effects. Prior to this recent release, Adobe came under some fire for what seemed like a period of Photoshop stagnation, with critics lamenting the once revolutionary company for taking tiny iterative leaps as opposed to the massive jumps they were once known for. This latest release, in due time, will confirm whether Adobe’s gotten its luster back.