After enduring months of scorn from Apple, Adobe Systems is set to begin a major effort to claim some of the mobile computing initiative for itself starting Monday night.

That's when the company plans to issue an all-but-finished beta of Flash Player 10.1, moving from demos and rhetoric to a more concrete answer to those who question the technology's relevance. Flash for Android phones will become final with Google's imminent release of Android 2.2, aka Froyo, and over coming months Flash 10.1 will spread to many other mobile operating systems.

"We're expecting really broad platform support over the next 12 to 18 months," said Anup Murarka, Adobe's director of technology strategy. "There may be a little bit of a slow start as these devices trickle out," he said, but a broader range expanding also to tablets, Netbooks, TVs, and set-top boxes will emerge for Christmas and at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Also due to get Flash Player 10.1 are Palm's WebOS, Research in Motion's BlackBerry OS, Nokia's Symbian, the MeeGo version of Linux from Intel and Nokia, and Windows Phone 7--though not at that operating system's debut, Murarka said. Many companies will pre-install Flash Player 10.1 on their phones through deals Adobe is hammering out, but in the case of Google, those with Froyo phones will be able to download it directly from the Android Market.

It's no surprise that Adobe's partner list omits one very important swath of the mobile device market: Apple's iOS, the operating system that powers not only the influential iPhone but also the new iPad and the iPod Touch. Adobe has been twice thwarted in its ambition to spread Flash there--first when Apple rejected it outright, and second when it blocked a more indirect Adobe effort to convert Flash applications into native iOS applications. Apple CEO Steve Jobs castigated Flash for being insecure, crash-inducing, and a relic from a bygone age of computing.

But the length of Adobe's list of supporters shows that the company still has a lot of clout. Adobe's ability to secure mobile device partners--and there are a number of chipmakers cooperating on Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, too--is reminiscent of an earlier age when Microsoft, not Apple, was the company whose power galvanized competitors. Then, Microsoft's rivals threw their collective weight behind Sun Microsystems' Java in the 1990s and behind Linux shortly afterward, in both cases helping to counterbalance if not vanquish Microsoft.

Battle lost, war not over
Jobs' complaints, documented in a very public letter, helped spur those trying to build a better Flash competitor out of Web standards built into browsers without plug-ins. That effort, even though Adobe supports it to a degree, poses a major competitive threat to Flash.

Adobe knows it lost the Apple battle, but it's not giving up the war.

"We work with Apple on the desktop, but we're not making any progress on the mobile side," Murarka said. What that means for Flash programmers who want their software on iOS devices: "Developers will have to absorb additional cost to do development for that platform."

The biggest point of counterattack against Apple will be simply support on other phones, a move Adobe believes will keep Flash relevant in the era in which smartphones are miniature general-purpose computers, albeit wimpier than your average laptop.

Apple's objections undermines Adobe's "multiscreen" ambition to let Flash programmers create a single application that adapts to many different systems. But even without its presence, Flash Player 10.1 for mobile extends Flash programmers' reach--to Android phones including the Motorola Droid, Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S, and HTC Evo, Incredible, and Desire, for starts.

"There is still an issue for content providers and application developers in targeting multiple mobile platforms (RIM, Symbian, Android). With Flash 10.1, they will at least have a common solution to target multiple non-Apple platforms plus desktop environments with one code base, one project, one skill-set, etc.," said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "They may still have to target Apple with a separate effort, but this is an improvement over the current much higher-cost situation, which is a different solution for each platform."

Now it will be up to Adobe and its Flash allies to back up their claims of performance, compatibility, and desirability. Adobe claims notable performance for technology derided as a CPU hog on full-fledged computers: "We can watch over three hours of video on a Nexus One, streamed over 3G," Murarka said, and casual games will run for four hours.

Adobe previously had offered a stripped down and not terribly successful Flash Lite for phones, but in November 2008 announced its intent to concentrate instead on a unified Flash Player for both computers and smartphones. The work was difficult, in part because Adobe had to rework Flash for devices lacking the relatively copious memory and processor power of a regular computer.

One helpful side effect, though, is that Flash Player 10.1 should consume less memory and processing power on desktop computers, too.

Getting Flash Player 10.1 onto phones
Even though the code base is the same, there are differences between Flash Player 10.1 for mobile phones and for personal computers.

Here's a big one: with many phones, you can't just point your browser to a Web site and download the software you want.

Flash Player 10.1 for phones, therefore, will rely in part on distribution deals by which the software is preinstalled on phones or distributed via over-the-air updates.

"We are working with multiple OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to ship it presintalled on new devices," said Murarka, though he he said it was up to the companies in charge of the phones to announce such deals.

But don't be surprised to see them coming soon--the new Motorola Droid going on sale on Verizon's network, to be announced Wednesday, seems a likely candidate. "Expect additional news later this week with OEM-related news," Murarka said.

And though there's no deal to announce, he said Adobe is in talks with Samsung about bringing Flash to its Bada operating system.

Adobe likes the Android Market style of distribution, which helps Adobe manage Flash Player and doesn't require them to wait for a device manufacturing cycle. Also coming is a pop-up message that Web sites can show suggesting people install Flash, an experience drawn from personal computers.

But Adobe will work with others, too; for example, Palm will distribute Flash Player 10.1 through a system update, he said.

Programmers, too, will have to adjust to the new Flash Player 10.1. Many existing Web sites will work fine on mobile phones with Flash Player, Murarka said, but those that assume a person controls the application with a keyboard and mouse or that assume the user has a large screen could have troubles.

Consequently, Adobe encourages programmers to consider touch interfaces and other newer developments. Flash Player 10.1 includes support for multitouch, but an application will work differently controlled that way compared to more traditional interfaces.

To run on a phone, a relatively powerful processor is required. Adobe's official list includes ARM11, Cortex A8 and A9, Intel Atom, nVidia Tegra, and Qualcomm Snapdragon. The software can take advantage of processor sleep states to conserve power and of accelerometers to control screen orientation.

Such engineering work is necessary and important for a good experience, and Adobe has Moore's Law on its side: new devices will come with more memory, better graphics, brawnier processors, better displays. But that's in the future.

Today's challenge will be just getting Flash onto mobile devices and getting programmers to adjust their ways. With Flash Player 10.1, though, Adobe has something more than words to persuade others to sign up for Flash.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

It's taken Microsoft a long time to produce an IM app for the iPhone. Now it has, hours before Apple released the fourth version of its iPhone operating system, we might add.

Windows Live Messenger for iPhone has many of the features we'd expect to see in an IM app, plus other social networking and e-mail extras. One screen is devoted to Windows Live, for example, offering space to update your status, follow friends in your network, and change your profile picture. A small button also take you into your e-mail in-box.

In the chewy center of the app there's your buddy list, which lets you add (but not search for) friends. You can also select them for chatting, e-mailing, or profile-perusing.

A chat screen keeps tabs on your open conversations and helps you switch among them. Push notification, which came about in version 3.0 of the iPhone's operating system, pings you when you get a new chat, even if you've closed the app. You'll just need to have saved your password to get that started.

The last screen offers options for uploading photos and taking new ones in addition to viewing your online Windows Live gallery. Being able to caption photos and e-mail them along is a plus.

Still, there are features we'd like risen to the surface, and some we'd think should materialize. Getting into your profile and settings menu isn't obvious, for one (from the Social screen, tap your photo and then Profile). You can similarly sign out by going into the sub-menu for your online status after tapping your profile picture on the Social screen.

We'd also like to filter and reorder the buddy list and manage contacts.

Unfortunately, a now-it's-working-now-it's-not situation curtailed our deep hands-on testing, and we're still trying to contact Microsoft's iPhone development team to identify what went wrong. Despite triple checking credentials, logging off and signing back in, and reinstalling the app with some more reboots thrown in, the app persists in thinking we're named Someone on Windows Live, even though it uploaded our photos and knows who our friends are. As part of the strange dislocation between my account and the app, Windows Live Messenger for iPhone also let us invite a new friend, who subsequently doesn't see us online and gets an error message when trying to send an IM from the desktop.

We'll update this post when we hear more. In the meantime, we'll say that although Windows Live Messenger made a middling first impression, the free app is worth a try for heavy users of Microsoft's Messenger.

Multinetwork IM apps like Beejive IM, Meebo, and Fring are other iPhone chatting alternatives.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

On the heels of the latest Opera beta debuting last week, the stable version of Opera has been updated to incorporate several security fixes. Available for Windows and Mac, Opera 10.54 includes five security-related repairs, but the company has only fully disclosed the nature of one of them. In addition to the security repairs, the Mac version received multiple non-security bug fixes.

The one security fix that Opera disclosed information about concerns a hole it had rated "extremely severe." The bug was actually on Windows systems that allowed font handling to be used as an exploit vector. Microsoft issued a patch for the hole, but for users who haven't patched it yet, Opera has released their own fix that prevents the browser from being used to exploit it.

For the other four fixes, only their severity was released. There was one of each at extremely severe, highly severe, moderately severe, and less severe. Opera spokesman Thomas Ford explained that this was because of responsible disclosure practices, contingent upon agreements with each individual security researcher, and that other browser publishers may not have yet had time to patch their browsers.

Updates to the Mac version now force the browser to remove older versions before installing, which ensures a cleaner installation, and fixes multiple errors including the browser stealing window focus and premature shutdowns. The company also states that scrolling on a MacBook trackpad should be three times faster in this version.

The Windows changelog, and Mac changelog are available at the Opera Web site.

With all the iOS 4 news today, both good and bad, you may not have seen the major update to one of the most popular games at the iTunes App Store. Angry Birds just received a bunch of new tweaks including 15 new levels, a new theme, enhancements to the interface menus, and new golden egg levels.

The press release we received mentioned that both Angry Birds (for iPhone) and Angry Birds HD (for iPad) were updated to 1.3.3, but at the time of this writing, only the iPhone version seems to have updated in the iTunes Store. With the iOS 4 update launching today, we think iTunes may be a bit sluggish, but this free update to Angry Birds will be worth checking back for iPad users when the traffic has slowed down a bit.

Apple's iOS 4 was released today ahead of the launch of the iPhone 4, which becomes available June 24. iPhone users can update to the latest OS via iTunes, but some features will not be available for the iPhone 3G and the update is not available at all for the original iPhone. iOS 4 will not be available on the iPad until this fall.

Apple says there are more than 100 new features in iOS 4, but the most notable tweaks include multitasking, with handy controls for switching apps; home screen folders that you can name by category for easy access to similar apps; a unified e-mail in-box so you no longer need to switch among accounts; and many more. Check out our slideshow for iOS 4.

64-bit versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux now are in widespread use, and software for the operating systems is following suit. So it may seem a bit backward that Adobe withdrew its only 64-bit version of Flash Player.

But don't take the disappearance of Adobe Labs' experimental 64-bit Flash Player for Linux as a sign of things to come. Moving its widely used browser plug-in beyond the 32-bit era is a "top priority," said Tom Nguyen, Adobe's Flash Player product manager, on Saturday.

However, Adobe isn't committing itself publicly to a delivery schedule. And if it doesn't move with some alacrity, it risks inflicting broken Web sites on computer users who do make the 64-bit shift with their browsers.

Plenty of people would be perfectly happy to see Flash fade from the Web, ranging from those who resent how it enables intrusive advertisements to those who are actively working to reproduce much of Flash's abilities in Web standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). But there are also innumerable people who rely on Flash for online games, interactive charts, video streaming, and other uses. Those who switch to a 64-bit browser without a suitable version of Flash could find the Web doesn't work as they expect.

Making the 64-bit transition has been a long, grinding process for the mainstream computing industry, starting from the lowest levels of computing hardware and now moving through software. On personal computers, it began with processors--first from AMD, then from Intel. Operating systems were next to come along. Linux, with its technically savvy user base, made an early transition from 32-bit to 64-bit, and Apple made much of its 64-bit Mac OS X move with version 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. The larger population of Windows users have moved more slowly, but PCs running 64-bit Windows became commonplace with Windows Vista.

64 bits or bust
What does 64 bits get you? Mostly, the capacity for more than 4GB of memory in a computer or for a computing process, and in some cases, better performance. For memory-hungry chores such as video editing, a 64-bit machine is a necessity, but even with more mainstream computers running modern operating systems, it's useful.

The need for a 64-bit browser is less clear, though. Even with people doing ever more with browsers and with browser architectures that split computing processes up into separate memory compartments, 4GB goes a long way, and a 32-bit browser runs fine on a 64-bit operating system. "A 64-bit browser doesn't necessarily make the Web better or faster than an otherwise identical 32-bit browser," Nguyen said.

Here's one reason for 64-bit browsers, though: Apple said its Safari browser got a 50 percent performance boost running Web-based JavaScript programs when it made the 64-bit jump with Safari 4 in 2009. That's only one aspect of browser performance, but it's an important one.

Overall, from Adobe's perspective, it doesn't matter why people move to 64-bit browsers, only whether they are--and the likelihood is increasing that they will. One important milestone 64-bit Firefox, is expected later this year, and Microsoft's IE already is available in a 64-bit version. Google engineers have begun work on 64-bit Chrome, and that browser has Flash built in.

Adobe knows what's at stake. "As more people are using 64-bit operating systems, more will be moving to use 64-bit browsers, and it's important that they have the best possible Web experience," Nguyen said. "We are actively working on the release of a native 64-bit Flash Player for the desktop, and we will provide native support for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux 64-bit platforms in an upcoming major release of Flash Player."

Adobe has been willing to commit to some Flash developments, such as building support for Google's WebM video-streaming technology into Flash Player and putting it into the hands of a billion people within a year. But Nguyen didn't commit to a time for 64-bit Flash Player.

Gone, but not forgotten
Adobe answered Linux user demands for a 64-bit Flash Player with a pre-release version of the plug-in. But with the release of Flash Player 10.1 earlier this month, Adobe withdrew that product.

Why? "We have temporarily closed the Labs program of Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux, as we are making significant architectural changes to the 64-bit Linux Flash Player and additional security enhancements," Adobe said of the change.

What stands in the way of 64-bit Flash's return, and not just for Linux? Nguyen says it's not the core of the engine, but rather the supporting software:

The issue that comes to mind when going from 32-bit to 64-bit--the actual size of memory addresses--was addressed by our engineers some time ago. The main issue has been libraries. Flash Player relies on many code libraries for functionality like audio and video playback or hardware acceleration. If a library that Flash Player depends on isn't available in 64-bit, we need to rewrite code for new libraries. Flash Player is used to create powerful, beautiful apps and content, but it can also play back a wide array of media, from video clips back to Flash Player 6 to, say, the latest and greatest H.264 HD video streaming live with hardware acceleration. To do so natively in 64-bit, all of the many library dependencies must be available or rewritten for 64-bit. For example, on Mac OS X, we rewrote code that used the older Carbon libraries, which were 32-bit only, to instead use modern Cocoa libraries. Except for compatibility code we include for non-Cocoa browsers, Flash Player 10.1 is now fully rewritten for Cocoa, setting the stage for a 64-bit Flash Player.

That Mac situation is a sore point. Explaining why Apple banned Flash from the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, CEO Steve Jobs castigated Flash for being insecure, crash-inducing, and a relic from a bygone age of computing.

Flash Player 10.1 answers some of those criticisms, for example with inclusion of multitouch support and the hardware acceleration for some Mac tasks. Hardware acceleration for decoding H.264 video, though, still doesn't exist for the Mac except in an experimental version of Flash Player called Gala.

Out of sync
Apple and Adobe are not in sync when it comes to Flash. After Adobe shipped 10.1, Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.4, which included Flash Player 10.0.45.2, though apparently those who had the newer version weren't downgraded, Nguyen said. To be fair, though, coordinating release schedules for complicated, heavily tested software isn't easy.

Safari is unusual in that it's been a 64-bit browser since Apple released version 4 in 2009. Plug-ins typically must match the browser they're plugged into when it comes to 32-bit or 64-bit designs, but Safari solves the problem with a compatibility later that accommodates 32-bit Flash, Nguyen said.

There are a lot of other browsers to reckon with, though, besides Safari. And Adobe may not have committed to a ship date, but the company sees the writing on the 32-bit wall.

"We expect 64-bit to be in wide use," Nguyen said, "and Flash Player will take advantage of native 64-bit."

Originally posted at Deep Tech