I didn’t realize until Renaun blogged it that the Flex 4.1 SDK includes Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. One of the biggest pains for me during the beta period was copying over files and folders to merge the 4.0 SDK with AIR and Flash Player so I could do development in Flash Builder. I didn’t know they were doing a 4.1 that included both of the new runtimes.

That means you can grab the Flex 4.1 SDK, and using Flash Builder 4 you can add it to your list of SDKs and start taking advantage of the new APIs including multi-touch, geolocation, and socket server. As Renaun mentioned, make sure you target Flash Player 10.1 or above in your project when you’re selecting the new SDK or you won’t be able to use the new APIs.

Flash on!

Last week I presented at the Front Range PHP User Group on getting started with Flex and PHP. It was a really awesome group and I had a great time presenting. Thanks guys for having me and for sticking around for drinks afterwards. If you were at the meeting (or just want to take a look) I just posted my slides as well as my demos from the event. The slides are embedded below and you can grab the demos from my DropBox account. There isn’t much documentation on the demos, but hopefully they’re semi-helpful.

If you’re a citizen of the Internet, you probably know that the World Cup kicked off today. If you follow me on Twitter you know I’m not a huge soccer fan, but I am a fan of global events like this so I’ll definitely be keeping it on in the background. I may even be hitting one of the local bars at some point to drink way too early and watch. But mostly I’ll be watching it online and ESPN3 has all of the world cup action streaming along with stats, info, and anything else you could ask for. And it’s all powered by Flash.

My colleague, Jens Loeffler has a great writeup on the app and the experience. It’s all powered by the Flash Platform and Flash Media Server. You get multiple audio channels (so you can listen in Spanish, which I think is the best way to listen to goals being scored) as well as picture-in-picture and real time highlights that appear along the timeline so you can go back and see the cool moments. It’s a really great showcase of Flash and how the whole platform comes together to provide an excellent viewing experience.

Flash on soccer fans!

It’s looking like FITC San Francisco is going to be awesome. The speaker lineup is bomber and the diversity of the sessions means that there’s going to be something for everyone. Plus the fact that we’re down in San Fran means you’ll get to see a lot of Adobeans in the halls. I’m going to be doing a talk on Geolocation and Mapping with the Flash Platform, a more in-depth version of what I did at Flash and the City.

The early bird tickets are available for one more day so definitely register soon and lock it in. You can spend the extra money on beer.

When I did my video of various bits of Flash content running on the Nexus One, the overwhelming theme that kept coming up was battery life. I know battery life is something that both users and Flash developers are curious about. Flash provides access to a wealth of rich content. Video, games, and animation are all things that are much more processor intensive than rendering static images and text. In general, Flash content’s impact on battery life is comparable to other similar multimedia technologies. Where Flash really shines though, is that it uses the same amount of battery as other technologies, while providing a much richer experience with significantly better performance.

With all of the questions I wanted to provide some numbers about battery life but didn’t think that my rudimentary tests would be very good so I asked Vinay Ramani, the group product manager for mobile runtimes if his team had any data. These are very early initial tests but I thought they were worth sharing. You’ll be seeing more in-depth stress tests from us soon but hopefully these early numbers give you an idea of the fairly small impact that Flash Player in the browser has on battery life.

These are pretty close to clean-room tests. The team hooked up the meters and performed each test under a strict set of conditions:

• Wi-Fi – off
• 3G – on
• OTA Push – off
• Volume – on, at one notch
• Bluetooth – off
• Only browser is loaded, nothing else
• 3G, lying flat on a table

Also, keep in mind that this is ALL done in software. Hardware acceleration is coming down the road but we wanted to make sure that this thing ran lean and mean in software without hardware acceleration at first. We also have ways that developers can control how SWF content loads on their pages so they can give certain SWF files priority and the Flash Player will give those a higher percentage of the resources. This should result in a smoother browsing experience.

Video

Video is probably the thing I get asked the most about with respect to battery life and it’s a good thing to compare because since both Flash Player and the Nexus One’s native player support H.264 you can get a good feel for how the battery life stacks up between native H.264 and H.264 video played through Flash Player. The team used the same YouTube video, one encoded at H.264 baseline level 2.1 at 30 fps with a resolution of 480 x 270. They did two sets of tests, one was on full brightness and the other was on half brightness. Then they just kept playing the video over and over again.

On full brightness, the Nexus One without Flash Player got 3 hours and 45 minutes. Playing the video through Flash Player gave a battery life of 3 hours and 8 minutes. Not a big dropoff. At half brightness it was even better. The Nexus One without Flash got 3 hours 56 minutes and the Flash version got 3 hours and 31 minutes. Just a 10.5% change, which isn’t bad at all considering everything Flash Player does.

Gaming

As you can see from the Flash/non-Flash tests, video is pretty intensive no matter what. What was even better was the battery life around games. There wasn’t a good way to test non-Flash versus Flash, but the team took a couple of popular Flash games, Tic-Tac-Toe and Alchemist, and played them until the battery died.

Tic-Tac-Toe lasted 6 hours and 49 minutes while the device could play Alchemist on the Nexus One for 7 hours and 7 minutes. While they aren’t intense 3D games, that’s pretty spectacular battery life and this was on full screen brightness. If you’re a game developer you can be sure that people playing your Flash game are going to be able to play it for a loooong time.

Animation

Let’s also quickly talk about HTML5 and Flash Player on mobile devices both in terms of performance and battery life. The team used the exploding balls test from Cameron Adams and tested the Canvas versions and the Flash versions. This one is a little tricky because part of the impact on battery life is how many CPU cycles are being used. And the higher the frame rate, the more CPU content is going to use. So it’s tough to compare HTML5 and Flash content directly because right now HTML5 content just doesn’t run very well on devices. The canvas example runs at 6.7 frames per second while the Flash version runs at about 24 frames per second. The difference between those ends up being minimal even though Flash has so many more frames per second. With the canvas test you get about 3.1 hours of battery life and with Flash Player you get 2.9 hours of battery life. A difference of about 12 minutes. We’re going to be doing some more exact tests around this where we equalize frames per second, so you should see some dramatic improvements once the test can be normalized.

This is just a sample of some of the early numbers that we’re getting. As I said, we’ll have some more detailed tests soon, but this should show that the hit for running richer content isn’t as big as one would think. The teams have done an absolutely phenomenal job of creating a runtime that performs on par with the desktop player and doesn’t sacrifice much at all in the way of battery life. If you’re a Flash developer, the exact same things that got you excited about Flash Player on the desktop now apply to mobile devices. The mobile world is your oyster Flashers.

Now Flash on.

I gave a presentation on Mapping and Geolocation with the Flash Platform today at Flash and the City. Below I’ve embedded the slides and you can download the PDF here. When I get some downtime today I’ll be uploading my demos as well.

Thanks to everyone who stuck out the preso on Flash Builder for Dreamweaver CS5 users. Clearly this isn’t my month for demos. I’ve uploaded the slides as well as the (working) source code. There are two directories: the Flex directory, which includes the source code for the Flex projects, and the html directory, which includes the HTML code.

It’s got examples for using ExternalInterface, the Flex/AJAX Bridge, and FlashVars. You can grab it here.

On Friday I gave the Keynote at Flash Camp Seattle and as part of that keynote I tried to show off Flash Player 10.1 running on Nexus One. Unfortunately the demo didn’t go well and it got some attention around the web. I’ve had a great experience with Flash on my Nexus One but in this case I was running an interim Flash Player build, one I probably should not have installed, and one that I definitely should not have used for any public demos

After I saw Jeff’s blog post, I sat down, upgraded my Flash Player, and went through and tested some of the sites I use on a regular basis. The experience was fantastic. Everything from the Eco Zoo to the NHL video site runs almost flawlessly. While it won’t make up for my mistake at Flash Camp, I recorded a video so people could see an experience that will be much closer to the final experience with Flash Player on Android.

It’s been cool to see so many Flash sites work on mobile devices. However because there is such a variety of Flash content out on the web, it’s important to understand that not all of it is going to run on devices like the Nexus One, both because of lower hardware capabilities of devices and because of user interface design.

A lot of people are clearly interested in Flash Player on mobile devices. It’s a big issue, and I feel terrible that my unpreparedness ended up being a strike against Flash on mobile devices. We’ll be releasing a public version of Flash Player 10.1 at Google I/O and would love to hear how your Flash sites perform. You can always submit issues by using the open Flash Player bug base.

Kevin Lynch had a Q&A With Brady Forest today at Web 2.0 Expo and addressed a lot of topics including HTML5. As an Adobe employee, I’m kind of excited about what we’ll be able to do with HTML5. Who knows more about drawing APIs and interactive web content than Adobe? Now that HTML5 has started to coalesce a little bit, I think you’ll see us bring a lot of that knowledge to bear as we do build tools that target HTML5. You’ll see some of the early thoughts around that on our Design and Web blog so if you’re interested in that, I encourage you to subscribe.

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Click to play

But just as HTML5 evolves, Flash is going to evolve as well and there are a lot of cool plans for the next generation of the Flash Platform. I think it’s a pretty exciting time to be a web developer no matter which technology you choose.

At Web 2.0 Expo this year in the Adobe booth we’re showing off some devices and tablets running Android with full Flash Player and AIR on them.

It runs Adobe’s Flash and Air apps flawlessly. That was the first time I saw Adobe’s Air apps running on a tablet and totally impressed by how it ran. And now I can understand why Apple wants to ban Flash and other Adobe products completely from their iPhones and iPads, because it’s rather incredible technology.

It’s been a bit of a long haul, but we’re really close to putting the runtimes in your hands so you can see it for yourself.