Flash VJs, motion graphics artists, photography lovers, interactive Flash programmers, I’ve got plenty of good news for you. There’s a whirlwind of activity from Adobe Labs this week (I imagine Beaker’s head exploding), so let’s hit it all at once — the weekend could be the perfect time to grab this stuff, as Adobe Lab’s poor servers respond.
Flash 9 Player on Linux, Linux Live Video, Vista, Full-screen
Flash Player 9 for Linux: Earlier than expected, Adobe has unleashed its latest player for Linux. After being a second-class citizen for some time, this could mean that, in the wake of Adobe’s embrace of open source development, Linux is finally coming into its own.
This should be especially interesting for deploying live video input on Linux. For those of you who haven’t tried it, Processing’s video input support on Linux is a disaster; blame Sun for the shoddy state of their video drivers and Apple for only half-supporting QuickTime for Java in general and never porting it to Linux. Adobe’s own Mike Melanson promises Flash 9 will support Video4Linux, the one API that’s actually being actively developed. (See details of Flash 9 Linux development, follow-up on V4L.
Linux deployment just sounds like heaven to me when it comes to performance and installation work. Develop on Mac or Windows, then deploy on Linux — minus painful Windows licenses for each machine. The fact that potential Linux machines now includes Mac minis, Macbooks, and home-built PCs just makes this even better.
Linux isn’t the only platform getting Flash 9 love this week, though. Flash 9 Player has an update of its own, with support for Windows Vista (so you can stop whining about that), and finally, full-screen mode in browsers. I can’t wait to watch Strong Bad Emails— I mean, uh [insert something productive here] with this update. I’m guessing that’s what has been making Adobe Labs’ servers hurt all week. Flash 9 Player is still in beta, but I’ve installed it on my Mac and Windows machines without incident. It’s already a viable platform, even months from official release.
Links to the download and a new full-screen wiki at Adobe Labs
Product manager Emmy Huang has development details for full-screen mode and other portions of this update.
Developing for Flash: More Resources
Keith Peters, aka Bit-101, has more tips for those of you interested in using Flash:
Apollo Development Presentation: While generally out of the realm of CDMo, you can use Flash to build full-fledged cross-platform apps (see the new updater/authorize utility for Native Instruments’ music software, CDMu readers). This presentation by Mike Chambers makes it very real for us non-programmers here, and it looks truly cool. Custom Flash VJ app, anyone?
Recently, I covered free and open source resources for Flash development on Windows, but not on Mac. Keith Peters to the rescue; Steve Nelson has ported his ActionScript 3 templates from Windows to Mac:
Read through comments for more on how to develop on Mac. You can also use the beta AS3 patch for Flash 8 if you own that, but this gives you a free alternative — and more are coming.
Lightroom
Somehow you’ve survived this post without going into total link overload?
Fine, then. Take this:
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4.1