Adobe just announced the updated Flash Player penetration numbers. This includes the update on Flash Player update 3 (9.0.115.0) which went from 62% in March to 82% in June!

I admit that the 62% number both made me excited and made me nervous. 62% was way out of the norm even though our download and install data suggested the growth. Also, the data was gathered through a time-tested methodology for tracking Flash Player versions. When I got the 82% update I still felt relief followed by elation. This is a number that is consistent with the curve of 62% in 3 months.

But seriously, 82% in six months is fantastic. In our previous penetration models, that is where we expect our 9-month data to be. Besides the excitement this brings to me know that new features and security updates can penetrate fast, it is the knowlege that Flash Player cache, Hardware-scaled FullScreen, multi-core rendering, and H.264 are really out there at the levels that a lot of enterprises can make use of them. If you are developing for Flex 3, you can take full advantage of Flash Player 9 update 3 with 82% of users out there having the player.

Adobe’s announcement around SWF searchability was about using the power of the runtime as a replacement for the much less useful approach of parsing out static text and links from a SWF file. The parsing approach has been around for years, and if you are wondering if it was successful, ask any SEO expert what their opinion of Flash has been for the last few years.

Microsoft responded to the announcement saying their Silverlight content is searchable “too.” Their solution is the same as our old approach: search for strings in a static file. While I was expecting them to put an admirable spin on the solution that is available to them, I was not expecting them to believe that this approach is superior to runtime-enabled search.

No matter how elegant an application is, with all of its possible interactions and states it is a Rube Goldberg machine compared with the limited simplicity of plain HTML pages. Indexing the static content as Microsoft suggests is like trying to figure out what is going to happen with a Rube Goldberg machine by looking at a photo of all of the parts *before* they’ve been assembled. To really know what happens, you have to assemble the machine and let it run. That is what the version of Flash Player optimized for search engines does.

Indexing an RIA through the runtime means that you get the context of what text and links are being displayed at same point an application as well as knowing how hard or easy it was to get to that state. The real value though is that you get to do other runtime operations like load additional content.

One of the main ideas behind “web 2.0″ is data. Whether that is an RSS blog feed, a REST API query, or loading localized text, applications keep the interesting text separate from the application itself. Indexing the runtime means that you get static content, dynamic content and loaded content, which put another way, the search engine sees what the end-user sees.

While better than nothing, searching static content leaves the search engine with a disjointed view of the content because it lacks the ability to do dynamic operations like assembling a full URL from a base URL variable and a path variable. But as anyone that has done any level of SEO knows, indexing the right URL versus a close URL is the difference between customers finding your content and not.

As a final comment, I disliked Microsoft’s claim that XML makes an application inherently more searchable. For anyone writing a search engine that is parsing the file to find content, the difference between XML and an openly-documented binary tag structure is trivial. I especially dislike the claim since Silverlight 2 is moving to compiled DLLs that will actually obscure a lot of content.

Adobe just release a new version of Flash Player 10 beta (10.0.0.525). There are a few new things to talk about! In addition to the primary features, and all of the fixes and improvements requested by the community that made up the first beta, we’ve added a few more items that have repeatedly heard from customers about:

• limited fullScreen Keyboard support
• unloadAndStop
• Wmode support for Linux

Limited FullScreen keyboard access
Whether or not you want to make a game or a video player with keyboard shortcuts, the restriction of keyboard support in fullScreen has been an annoyance to a lot of developers. The restriction was placed there because of heightened possibilities of malicious attacks while in fullScreen mode such as password phishing.

In Flash Player 10 we are easing this restriction to allow non-printing keys to be used while in fullScreen. Non-printing keys are arrows, space, shift, tab and similar keys that can’t be used to provide private information. These keys are very important however to let users do many types of selection and gameplay inputs.

I’m looking forward to a whole new set of immersive games in Flash. I wish I just had more time to play them

unloadAndStop
Grant Skinner and several other in the community have rightly pointed out some issues Flash Player 9 has with unloading content where it remains accessible after unload and elements such as audio keep playing until the item is garbage collected. We’ve worked many members of the community to come up with a solution that knocks out the major issue.

Starting with Flash Player 10 you will now be able to use unloadAndStop to unload a loaded SWF and also remove references, stop audio and video and in every way possible just make it go away.

Wmode support for Linux
Starting last December, Adobe started shipping Linux Flash Player at the same time as Windows and Macintosh making it a first-class Flash Player. To continue that we needed to work on some areas of how Flash Player works with its hosting environment so that external factors like WMode support can also be consistent across the supported platforms. For more information on the Linux enhancements, read Mike Melanson’s blog post on the subject.

NOTE
If you have started developing SWF10 content, you will need to re-compile older SWF10 to work with the new player.

Just now, Adobe announced its collaboration with Google and Yahoo! to enhance the searchability of SWF content by helping their spiders playback SWFs in the Adobe Flash Player runtime. This is going to be a really big announcement for Flash Player and for the community.

Searchability of any dynamic technology is a difficult task because of the ever-changing nature of the content. By running SWFs through the runtime the spiders will have access to the content as it is seen by end-users. Google and Yahoo! Search can then take the text and link data and add the relevance back to the hosting page. The search partners are implementing the logic to navigate the application and can also choose how to make use of the data that is returned by Flash Player.

For Flash content producers, nothing has to be done to take advantage of SWF searchability. All SWF content will be accessible as it will be running through Flash Player. We do expect that the SEO community will start to generate best practices over time as it becomes clear what will cause content to be more useful to spiders.

All of this is going on now! Google is already in progress with spidering SWF content through the new system. Over the next weeks and months, you should see some pretty significant impact on the indicies as SWF content is made a first-class citizen for searchability. For more information, take a look at our official FAQ on the Adobe Developer Connection.

I’ve seen some blog posts about the Mac uninstaller for Flash Player that is currently on Adobe Labs. Yep, it was BIIIIG (almost 40MB). There was a technical explanation for it, but let’s just say its been worked around and the mac uninstaller is now much smaller (1.3MB).

The reason I am blogging about this at all is because I was surprised by some other comments related to it. There were some fears that we might require an uninstaller when we ship the release version of Flash Player 10. I want to make sure people know that this would not be the case.

The reason for having the uninstaller, and asking that users uninstall Flash Player 9 before installing Flash Player 10 beta is that it is pre-release software. We want to make sure that the beta player installs properly.

When I was at Yahoo! engineers always talked about the approach to security as “belt and suspenders.” By having both keeping your pants up, you feel more assured that your pants are going to stay in their full upright and locked position. Our normal installer is the belt, the uninstaller is the suspenders. By the time we finish our testing process, we are comfortable with just the normal belt.

For these and other geek fashion tips, I hope you will join me for the next installment, “How Adobe Pixel Bender is like your favorite calculator wrist watch (if your watch had a multi-core Intel CPU in it)”

There has been a lot of great excitement around RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), especially because of the peer to peer (P2P) communication that is enabled in Flash Player 10 beta. This is a natural time to speculate about what cool applications you will build with new technology, so I’d like to give you some more information for you to work with.

Since I have been frequently been asked about details on this, a frequently asked questions format somehow seemed appropriate ;). For those that want to start working with RTMFP, make sure to read to the end, there is a goody for you!

Does Flash Player 10 beta support Peer to Peer (P2P) communication?
Flash Player 10 beta has new methods on the NetConnection and NetStream objects that allow communication through peer connections that are managed by a future Adobe server technology. The server will maintain a list of potential peers that can be connected to. If the NetConnection to the server is lost or closed, any peer connection that was initiated through the same NetConnection will also be closed.

How will I make a P2P connection through Flash Player 10 beta?
Connections from a SWF through a future Adobe server release will be assigned a temporary unique ID that is infeasible to guess or forge. Other SWFs connected to the same server can subscribe to the streams and events from that ID once the broadcasting SWF agrees to the connection.

On the server level, these IDs can be mapped to application-specific information such as presence. For a chat application, the ID can be linked to the nickname the user gave when connecting to the application. While the end-user may select the person that they want to chat with, Flash Player will use the ID to establish the connection with that user.

What can I send through the P2P connection?
In a similar way that you would stream local microphone and webcam media up to a server, you will also be able to stream it directly to another Flash Player client that has connected as a peer.

Through NetStream.send you can also send data which is useful for shared experiences in real-time applications. Any data format can be sent through this method though there are size limitations to the packet which may make certain data types less useful.

How does the peer connection work?
RTMFP UDP packets are sent directly from one Flash Player to another. The server translates the peer IDs to network addresses, and also assists in setting up the connection if one or both ends is behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) device. If UDP is blocked by a firewall or if RTMFP is blocked through a configuration of mms.cfg, the peer connection will not go through.

Can I choose between UDP and TCP?
No, RTMFP is a UDP-based protocol while RTMP is a TCP-based protocol. You will automatically use UDP by calling the methods that work over RTMFP.

Will RTMFP enable massive file-sharing applications through Flash Player 10 beta?
No. Large-scale file-sharing network applications rely on the ability to read from and write to the hard drive constantly to only load parts of files into memory when needed. In Flash Player 10 beta you can load files from the desktop to the Flash Player runtime, but the file would need to be loaded manually by the end-user and remain in memory for the entire time the file would be needed. The drain on system resources would make this style of application impractical.

Can I get started with RTMFP now?
While the support for RTMFP is built in to Flash Player 10 beta, there is no publicly available server technology to manage the connection process. If you would like to be considered for access to private beta programs around RTMFP, please send an email to fmsprerelease@adobe.com