Adobe's Snap.svg software, a JavaScript library for Web browsers that automates various vector-graphics tasks such as animation, is something of a substitute for tasks Web developers might in the past have used Flash for.

Eight years after Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion, in part for its Flash technology that vanquished the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, the company has released an open-source project called Snap.svg designed to bring some Flash-like characteristics to the Web.

Flash is slowly being squeezed off the Web -- at least newer parts of it -- by the fact that it doesn't run on mobile devices and that browser developers are starting to banish plug-ins. Adobe has redirected a lot of its staffing accordingly to Web standards that work in browsers without plug-ins, and SVG is one such standard.

Adobe announced Snap.js Wednesday at the HTML5 Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

Adobe was a founder and major supporter of SVG back before it lost out to Flash a decade ago. So in a way, the Snap.svg project is retro as well as forward-looking. Like Mozilla's Shumway, it could help fil... [Read more]

DxO Optics Pro 9 (click to enlarge)

DxO Labs announced its new Optics Pro 9 software Wednesday, an update the company believes does a better job stripping out noise than rivals such as Adobe Photoshop and Apple Aperture.

The software's Probabilistic Raw Image Enhancement, or Prime, takes more time than other noise-reduction algorithms, but it can detect finer details and accurate color amidst the noise speckles that afflict digital photos taken at high ISO sensitivity settings. DxO said the technology goes a full stop beyond the competition, meaning that it could cut noise from a photo taken at ISO 12,800 as well as a rival software can handle a shot at ISO 6,400. Check below to see one example of the noise reduction in action.

Here's how Frederic Guichard, DxO Labs' chief scientific officer, describes Prime:

In contrast to the usual approach of finding a better compromise between image quality and execution speed, we have created a tool whose sole purpose is to obtain the best image quality possible. For each pixel, more than a thousand neighboring pixels are analyzed. This vast exploration allows DxO Optics Pro to identify similar data that can serve to reconstruct image information. Several minutes may be required to do this, but this pr... [Read more]