Adobe updated its website with the details of the new CS5. The official unveiling event should start in less than 2 hours. The new CS5 will come in five different flavors, Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. Gone are Web Standard and Production Standard, but upgrades from any standard or premium edition of CS4 will cost the same price.

Flash Professional CS5 and Flash Catalyst CS5 are both included in all the editions of CS5 other than Design Standard. The Web Premium edition includes Flash Professional CS5, Flash Catalyst CS5, and Flash Builder CS5 along with new editions of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Fireworks, Contribute, and Acrobat Pro. Web Premium costs $1,799 while an upgrade starts from $599. The Master Collection on the other hand costs $2,599 and an upgrade starts from $899.

You can learn more about all the new CS5 at Adobe’s website.

Apple revealed its new iPhone OS 4.0 yesterday and along with it released a new beta SDK for developers. The new SDK came with a revised license agreement that prohibits linking to “Documented APIs through an intermediary or compatibility layer” - which is the method used by Flash CS5 to compile iPhone applications.

Though CS5 end-result iPhone applications compile into the same format as those made with Apple’s own XCode, Apple doesn’t want anyone to use any third party tool to make these applications, such tools include Flash CS5 and MonoTouch. Currently, it is very easy to tell if an application was made using Flash CS5 as the .app file can be searched for strings identifying the development toolkit.

This is a critical issue for Adobe and all Flash developers who hoped that they would be able to use their existing skills to create applications for the iPhone. Apple’s decision seems more like a personal feud against Adobe which has promoted Flash CS5 capability to compile iPhone applications as the primary feature of the new release. The ban cannot have come at a worse time as Adobe plans to unveil the new CS5 in four days.

The position of Adobe regarding this new development is not clear, they have issued a statement saying that they are aware of the new license language and that they still plan to continue develop the iPhone packager for Flash CS5. Even if Adobe releases Flash CS5 with this feature, that will not change the fact that Apple can easily identify the violating applications and reject them.

In theory it might be possible to translate Flash iPhone applications into native Object-C code and therefore avoiding the violation of the license agreement, but achieving that in practice is a different story.

Adobe is still going to unveil the new Flash CS5 and the rest of the CS5 suite in four days.

You can learn more about this on Daring Fireball and TechCrunch.

Flash has been receiving a lot of negative criticism lately in light of the release of Apple’s iPad and the increasing popularity of the video features of HTML5, but in opposition of this, Google recently announced that it is collaborating with Adobe to provide better integration between Google Chrome browser and the Flash Player as the latest version of the plugin will come from now on bundled with the Chrome and updates of the plugin will be pushed through the browser’s own auto-update feature. The usability of the Flash Player will also be improved as pages containing Flash movies will now be included in Chrome’s “sandbox”.

According to TechCrunch, these benefits will also extend to the upcoming Google Chrome OS.

This is good news for the Flash Platform as Google’s interest in continuing its support of the technology is a clear indication that the web still needs Flash.

You can learn more about this from Adobe’s website and the Chromium Blog.

Adobe announced that the official launch of CS5 is going to be April 12. The new version of the creative suite that includes Flash CS5 is to be unveiled at a global event to be webcast live on AdobeTV. You can learn more about the new features of CS5 and register for the launch event at Adobe CS5 Launch page.

Adobe unveiled in the recent Mobile World Congress the mobile version of AIR for the Android OS. Like its desktop counterpart, AIR on mobile devices would allow developers to create applications with access to the phone memory and other system attributes and which can be deployed easily on all mobile operating systems that support the runtime.

During the event demos of AIR were shown on the Motorola DROID, but the runtime would also be available for other operating systems such as Blackberry. The new Flash CS5 Professional will allow exporting a mobile application created into a native iPhone application or an AIR application for a mobile device making it very easy to deploy the same project on multiple platforms simultaneously.

You can read more about this and watch demo videos at the Flash Mobile Blog.

There still isn’t any official release date for Flash CS5 Professional – the tool that will enable developers to create native iPhone applications or AIR applications for mobile devices.

Apple announced yesterday it’s awaited tablet, the iPad, which runs on the iPhone OS and features a much more powerful processor. There was no mention as to whether or not the device would support Flash, but engadget reported that Flash cannot be displayed in the Safari browser of the iPad. This doesn’t come as a big surprise as the iPhone still currently does not support Flash at all. While this might be a big drawback for most consumers, Flash developers are not left completely without a solution as the new version of Flash CS5 will allow packaging Flash into native iPhone applications which will run on the iPad. However, it is very unlikely for the initial release of Flash CS5 to support any of the custom APIs for the iPad as opposed to the iPhone, but we can hope that Adobe takes that into consideration in later updates.

The iPad is expected to be released in March 2010, there is no release date for Flash CS5 yet.

Google has recently launched a beta feature for users of YouTube to allow them to view videos on YouTube directly using  HTML5 without the need to have the Flash Player installed. The feature is still in beta and will not work with monetized videos or videos with annotation. It is also not supported by all browsers yet.

If YouTube was to rely primarily on HTML5 instead of Flash then this would be a major loss for Flash technology as YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the Internet and one which has helped promote the use of Flash as the optimum method for delivering video on the Internet.

The movement towards HTML5 instead of Flash for delivered video is motivated by the will to rely on open web standards instead of relying on a proprietary 3rd party technology such as Flash. It also makes more sense to implement a video directly, the same way an image is embedded, instead of relying on a plug-in to do the job.

However, playing a video is a more interactive experience that needs additional navigation tools and may not be placed and played the same way an image is showed. This of course can still be achieved by using AJAX instead of Flash, but it will take a lot of time before such technologies can replace Flash video because the support of HTML5 is still buggy across different browsers. The consistency that the Flash Player provides is also a big advantage that will be very hard to duplicate using HTML5 and AJAX.

You can read more about this on TechCrunch. You can also try out the new HTML5 playback feature on YouTube through its TestTube page.

Earlier this month Adobe release the public beta of its upcoming AIR 2.0 SDK – codenamed Athena. The latest version of the SDK will enable you to create AIR applications with new features such as the support for mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities, multi-touch gestures, HTML5 & CSS3 support, and many other new features. You can learn more about Athena and download the SDK at Adobe Labs.

Adobe recently released version 3.5 of the Flex SDK, the freely available SDK for developing and deploying Flex applications. This is a minor update that fixes bugs and security issues, but it is still worth checking out by Flex developers. You can download the new SDK from Adobe’s website.

The recently released Google Nexus One phone runs Android 2.1 OS which has support for the Flash Player 10.1 in its browser. Unlike some previous Android devices, the Nexus One is also equipped with the fast Snapdragon processor. This should enable this phone to deliver a Flash experience on the go similar to what you can achieve on the desktop.

This could be the most interesting mobile phone for Flash developers at the moment, as the promised ability to export iPhone applications cannot still be seen before Flash CS5 is released. You can develop Flash applications for the Google Nexus One using your current Flash authoring tools.