Adobe announced recently that has canceled its plans to release a public beta of Flash CS5 before the end of this year in hope of delivering a more fine tuned final product sometime next year. I am like the majority of other Flash users disappointed as I was looking forward to try out the new features of Flash CS5, especially the tools for creating Flash iPhone applications using the IDE. It is unknown if there would be a public beta release of Flash CS5 now before its official release in 2010.

On a more positive note, Lee Brimelow posted a video showing some of the new features of Flash CS5 including on-stage video playback and cue point creation tools, new Flash file open uncompressed format, code snippets, custom class code hints, Flash Builder integration, and the new TLF text format. You can view the video at GotoAndLearn.com.

Flash CS5 is expected to be released in the first half of 2010.

Adobe released today the beta editions of Adobe Air 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1, the next two major releases for both technologies. The most major feature added to both is the support for multi-touch input – which, however, cannot be used without having a device that support multi-touch such HP TouchSmart or a Dell Latitude XT2 running Windows 7. The FAQs say that you should be able to interact with the gestures of the multi-touch pads of Macbook Pros, but I couldn’t get mine to work with the samples available online.

Other additions to AIR 2.0 include support for the detection of mass storage devices, access to raw microphone data, the ability to open a file with its default application and other new improvements. These editions are going to help increase the popularity of using the Adobe AIR platform for creating cross-platform desktop applications with online functionality.

The new release of Flash Player 10.1 is meant to be the first step for creating a consistent Flash experience across desktop and mobile platforms, however, the beta for this edition of the player is now only available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. Though not available for mobile phones yet, but this player should be the one to properly allow the use of AS3 on mobile devices.

You can check out the demos by visiting the links above and check out sample movies to showcase the capability of the new players. I test Adobe AIR 2.0 on my Macbook Pro and it seems to work just fine.

In addition to its efforts to appear on the iPhone and Android, Adobe has announced in a recent developers conference its cooperation with RIM to bring the full Flash Player to the Blackberry platform.

According to Comscore there are more than 14 million blackberry devices out there and Adobe believes this to be a serious market to tap into.

In addition to the announcement of the full Flash Player, Adobe also announced its intention to Adobe Air and Flex Mobile platform for Blackberry, making RIM the first hardware manufacturer to publicly announce its support of these two new mobile technologies from Adobe.

You can learn more about this announcement at the official Flash Mobile Blog.

This is probably the biggest Flash announcement of the year, Adobe announced that Flash developers will finally be able to create iPhone-compatible Flash games. The next version of the Flash authoring tool, Flash CS5, will have a feature to export AS3 projects to native iPhone applications. This feature does not mean that the iPhone will be able to understand Flash files or that its Safari browser will be capable of running Flash movies, but it means that Flash developers will be able to use Flash CS5 to make native iPhone applications and games by using their existing ActionScript 3.0 skills.

Flash CS5 iPhone applications will have some restrictions such as the inability to use the camera or the copy-and-paste features, but will have the majority of other features including SQLite. Developers will still have to acquire an Apple Developer’s License to be able to sell their applications on the App Store.

This is a truly amazing step forward for Adobe and it will help make Flash developers have a new medium to distribute their content. The beta of Flash CS5 is expected to be released by the end of the 2009.

You can learn more about this, watch a demo video and download sample iPhone applications at http://Adobe.com/iPhone . You can learn more about the restrictions of Flash iPhone Application from the Flash Mobile Blog.

Adobe recently announced a new set of services to support developers of the Flash Platform and help them distribute and monetize any Flash widgets and applications.

Using the new distribution service, developers of Flash widgets can use Adobe technologies to make it easy to share these widgets online across popular social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Widgets could also be used to link to alternative editions of the widgets like a Flash Lite version, an Adobe AIR version, or an iPhone app version of the widget.

The whole system would be managed through Gigya that offers an online portal that will allow users to track the number of downloads and performance of the widget. Gigya also offers a number of paid distribution methods which developers can use to promote their widgets and applications on the web.

The services will also include in the future a number of features for helping developers easily integrate social features from Facebook and MySpace in their actual widgets.

You can learn more about Flash Platform Services from Adobe’s website.

[via TechCrunch]

Adobe Labs released yesterday a beta AS3 Class called Squiggly that operates as a spell check engine for Flash Player 10 movies and Adobe AIR projects. The spell-check engine will underline wrongly spelled words and will show suggested corrections in the right-click context menu.

Squiggly could be used in with Flash Professional or Flash Builder, but currently the class relies on Flex UI components to underline the text, however, developers may write their own UI interface to be able to use Squiggly without relying on any Flex component. You can learn more about Squiggly and download it for free from this link.

Flash Magazine is reporting that Adobe showed a sneak peak of the upcoming version of Flash CS codenamed “Viper” Flash Professional CS5  at the Flash on the Beach conference. Features of this new release include:

• Integration of Flash Builder (i.e. Flex Builder) – Viper will be able to directly open and export Flash Builder.
• Simplified coding methods including ready-made code snippets for quickly adding functionality to Flash projects. For example, it will be possible to drag and drop a code snippet to program an object to move around the stage using the keyboard arrows.
• The ActionScript editor will show auto-completion hints for custom classes.
• Text Layout Framework will be supported through the Text Panel.
• The Deco-Brush will be improved.

You read more about these new features and check screen shots of these new features at the Flash Magazine.

You can down a 180Mb video of the session via this link – courtesy of Jon MacDonald.

Earlier this week at FTIC Adobe showed a snap shot of its roadmap for mobile devices for next year. Included in the roadmap is Flash Lite 4, which is expected to be released only for low-end mobile phones and feature phones. This new of Flash Lite should be the first version to support ActionScript 3.0.

Adobe also plans on rolling out Flash Player 10 for more powerful smart phones such as those running Android. This version of the Player should be able to run all Flash movies running on normal desktops and should also include features such as hardware acceleration.

Air Mobile should also come out in 2010. This should come out as a standalone player that will enable running mobile applications.

The year 2010 should be interesting for Flash mobile developers. The support of ActionScript 3.0 in Flash Lite should finally make it possible for us to leave ActionScript 2.0 for good and enjoy the goodness of AS3 on all mobile devices.

You can learn more about this at Dan young’s blog and Scott Janousek’s blog.

The Adobe Flash Platform Blog reports that the initial release of Snow Leopard comes with an old version of the Flash Player. Users of this new Mac OS are advised to upgrade to the latest version here.

[via FlashForum]

According the Flash Mobile Blog, the number of downloads of the Adobe Mobile Packager has finally reached a 100,000 successful downloads. While a significant milestone for Adobe, this number doesn’t mean that there are a 100,000 active developers or that there are a 100,000 applications that were made through the packager.

The Adobe Mobile Packager is a Windows-only tool used by developers to wrap up their Flash Lite files in a format that allows the end user to check for and download the latest version of the Flash Lite player before running the file, therefore avoiding version incompatibility issues.

However, Flash Lite continues to be irrelevant in today’s market for a various number of reasons, including the unfriendliness of the user experience on most Symbian and Windows phones, the wide disparity in capabilities of supported phones, the failure of the Nokia Ovi Store, and  many others. Until the full Flash Player 10 is supported on Android, Adobe might as well just suspend all its mobile operations.