Info Pioneer

T he Adobe Flash platform saw significant improvements today with the launch of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2. According to a blog post from Adobe’s Flash team, the new Flash Player 10.1 features improved performance, power management and video features. The player has also been given new multi-touch and private browsing functionality. The overall viewing experience for Mac users has been fine-tuned as well. The new Flash player should deliver an altogether smoother, higher-quality experience for web video, with better buffering, peer-to-peer video and online streaming video. Adobe also says more details on Flash 10.1 for mobile devices will be announced later this month, but we’re not holding our breath for fantastic iPhone news. As for AIR , this product was released two years ago and hasn’t seen a major update until now. AIR 2 improves overall performance and HTML support while reducing memory usage. AIR 2 also includes some new APIs for developers.

S teve Jobs has just posted a long open letter on Flash , listing all the reasons why Apple has decided not to support it on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The letter is a clear, sober, in-depth view in all of Flash’s defects from Apple’s point of view, and while we’re sure it will be dissected over and over in the upcoming days (especially the part about Flash not being open), you have to admire its frankness. In short, Steve Jobs claims Flash drains the battery of mobile devices; it’s not very good for multi-touch operation, and its performance, reliability and security are all shoddy. It’s also a proprietary system, and while Jobs admits that their mobile OS is also proprietary, he claims that web standards should be open, like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Most importantly Apple doesn’t want “a third party layer of software (to) come between the platform and the developer.” Finally, Jobs concludes, Flash is a relic. “Flash was created during the PC era –- for PCs and mice,” he says,...