Last night we released a new version of Flash Player (10.1.82). This includes support for H.264 video decoding via the GPU on Mac OS X. Code named Gala, this was previously available as a beta on Adobe Labs. So don’t hang around; go and grab the update :D You can get both standard and debug versions of the installer from here.

If you’re a developer and want to know more about the security updates in this release you can read more here.

Love Coffee? Love Flash? Love hanging with like minded individuals to shoot the breeze on technology and gadgets? Then why not combine all of this and join the Flash Platform Evangelists for a chat over a a free ‘cup of Joe’.

These meetups are informal and small, taking place at various coffee shops in Europe as we travel around. Maybe you have some questions about your favourite tools, or want to see your applications running on Android devices? ?

So come along and join myself and Mark Doherty for the first of the UK Flash Coffee events, kicking it off in London next week. Places are limited so be sure to sign up straight away if you want to attend. We have various prizes to raffle off one at each event so register, turn up and you could be leaving with more than a double shot non-caff soya mocha latte :p.

• Flash Coffee London – Wednesday 23rd June ?(register here)

The current locations we have planned are detailed below, but if you’d like us to hold a Flash Coffee event near you let us know (put the location in your comments) and we’ll see what we can do :)

• Flash Coffee Brighton
• Flash Coffee Manchester – Friday 9th July (register here)
• Flash Coffee Birmingham

Keep an eye on http://bit.ly/flcoffee for more dates. not only in the UK, but across the rest of Europe?.

If you missed out on any or all of the Build an app in a week web seminars that the EMEA Platform Evangelism team held last week, worry not. Below are all of the recordings for you to watch as many times as you wish. You don’t need any special software or app installed to view these beyond Flash Player.

The sessions are based around an application called EVA that the EMEA team are developing so you can get a real feel for how the Flash Platform designer to developer workflow can be leveraged to make creating rich engaging content easier.

• Erasing the designer-to-developer gap: Adding interactions to your design
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p90445619/
• Connecting your design to PHP services:
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p66013176/
• Connecting a web application to a J2EE back end using Flash Builder 4
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p20174257/
• Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p49752948/
• Going multiuser with P2P in Flash Player 10.1
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p93914495/
• Developing multiuser applications with LiveCycle services
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p53039407/
• Bringing web applications to the desktop with AIR 2
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p97751544/
• Code once and run on multiple mobile devices
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p24983267/
• Rapidly build, deploy, and maintain Internet apps with ColdFusion
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p57074073/

If you enjoy these then head over to the Adobe Flash Platform Events page and have a look at all of the other recordings.

Today is a great day. Flash Player 10.1 is finally released for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux! Head over to the Flash Player teams blog for more in-depth coverage of what’s included in this release as there are some really cool updates in there. Here are some of the cool new features in Flash Player 10.1 (see the full list here):

• Global error handler
• Globalization support
• Browser privacy mode
• Out-of-memory management
• Content protection
• Peer-assisted networking
• HTTP Dynamic Streaming
• Stream reconnect
• Smart seek
• Buffered stream catch-up
• Fast switch
• Microphone access
• Dynamic frame rate

Alternatively head over to the Flash Player page on Adobe.com and grab Flash Player 10.1 now!!!

Hot on the heels on the Platform Evangelist’s Developer Weeks here are another selection of webinars. These ones are focused on designing and developing for multiple screens utilizing the latest versions of Flash Player and AIR.

Going Multi-Screen with the Flash Platform

With the final releases of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 are just around the corner, we’d like to invite you to a series of free webinars introducing  the new multi-screen development capabilities of the Flash Platform. You will discover the exciting new features of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 and learn the best practices from leading industry experts on how to create and optimize web content, video, and applications across desktop and mobile.

The schedule is listed below. Be aware that if you’re in Europe these sessions are in Pacific Standard Time so you’ll need to adjust the times accordingly, (Here in the UK the early sessions are at 5:00pm BST and the later one is 9:00pm BST) . Alternatively you can just watch the recording once the sessions are over.

• Tuesday, June 22, 9AM – 10AM PST Best practices in optimizing web content for Flash Player 10.1
• Tuesday, June 22, 1PM – 2PM PST The quickest way to build cross-platform apps with AIR 2
• Wednesday, June 23, 9AM – 10AM PST Rich Internet App development with Flash Builder 4 for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2
• Thursday, June 24 9AM – 10AM PST Multi-screen web content development with Flash Pro CS5

To register, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/multiscreen

If you missed the announcement over the weekend, Adobe has released the Strobe Media Playback media player, based on the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). This is ideal for bloggers, small businesses and even enterprises who want to have the best web-based video experience on their site. Just download the player, embed it on your page, provide it with the location of your video and away you go.

OSMF simplifies the development of media players by allowing developers to assemble components to create high-quality, full-featured video playback experiences. This open framework enables development focused on web-based video monetization, with lower costs and faster turnaround.

You can download the player here. Once unzipped to a folder on your web server you can open up the test page – versions for Flash Player 10 and 10.1 are included – and you should see something similar to the screenshot below. Obviously you’ll need Flash Player 10.1 to view the Flash 10.1 version but you can grab the latest release candidate of Flash Player 10.1 here.

Configuring the player is easy and you have access to all of the functionality supported by OSMF including

• Progressive download
• RTMP streaming
• Live streaming
• HTTP dynamic streaming
• Content protection with Flash Access 2.0.

The great thing is that the interface can be controlled through HTML embed tags, including control of the player dimensions, setting auto start and auto hide behaviour, full screen support, and much more. You can read more about Strobe Media Playback and OSMF over on Adobe Labs.

Now that CS5 is available, the EMEA Evangelism team will be holding an Online Developer Week from 7th June – 10th June where we’ll be covering the entire design, develop and deploy workflow by building an application using Illustrator and Photoshop CS5 along side the Flash Platform suite of tools.

We’ll be focusing on Flash Builder, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst and Flex 4 as well as the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 runtimes. Starting with designs from Photoshop and Illustrator and each day adding more functionality to our application so that by the end of the week we will have a fully functioning solution on multiple devices. In the process we’ll also be looking at P2P in relation to Flash Player 10.1 as well as how to link up your application to server technologies like LiveCycle, Java and PHP.

My particular session is on creating components in Flash CS5 Professional and integrating them in to the application via Flash Builder, so if you’re interested in the new designer / developer workflow between Flash Professional CS5 and Flash Builder, and how you can harness both to create flexible component solutions then this session will be of interest. Actually all of the sessions are worth attending so be sure to sign up for the rest as you won’t be disappointed :p.

The full schedule is below and you can register HERE. Don’t delay as this will be an exceptional week of CS5 / Flash Platform goodness.

Schedule:

June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones (that’s me of course)
June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn
Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

I’m going to keep this short and sweet as the title pretty much sums it all up. Today I start a new chapter in my career as a Flash Platform Evangelist at Adobe. I’m super stoked about this and I’m both excited and honoured to be working with such a high calibre of individuals both on a professional and personal level.

I’ll be doing a follow up post about my first week as an Evangelist (well in a week obviously :p), but I wanted to celebrate this great opportunity by letting all my friends and peers know. I’d have done this announcement sooner but I’ve been sworn to secrecy for a rather long time – feels good to be able to shout it from the rafters at last :D

Go Team! :D

Yesterday at MAX 2009 in Los Angeles Adobe announced that the next version of Flash Professional (CS5) will include the ability to export content created by it for deployment on the iPhone.

What it does mean is that if you’re a Flash / ActionScript developer you can develop applications, games etc for the iPhone and iPod Touch without the need to learn Objective-C. Before we get ahead of ourselves this doesn’t mean that the iPhone supports Flash content – that “issue” hasn’t be resolved at this point.

Adobe Labs has a section on developing applications for the iPhone – you can even sign up for a future public beta. Below are links to the current apps built with Flash CS5 prerelease – including a person favourite of mine “Just Letters” by my good Friend Stefan Richter

Who knows, this could be the dawn of even greater games and applications on the App Store now that the Flashers are coming to the party :p

Well it seems that another department in the BBC needs to update their Flash detection scripts. I’m not going to highlight every instance of failing Flash detection scripts around the global but as I had already posted about BBC Radio 1′s Flash Player 10 issues I thought I’d mention this in the hope that it gets resolved sooner rather than later.

I’m not going to dwell on the fact it says Macromedia as well. I would assume this is an easy fix as all of the BBCs content is served via a CMS so under that assumption if it is changed / updated in one script it should propagate through the entire site – although I have been to quite a few other pages on the BBC site and viewed Flash content so it may not be as simple as one would think.

For those interested here is the actual page on the BBC site: BBC News Magazine – How smart are you?

I’ve mailed a few people I know at the BBC so hopefully those that need to know will get on the case shortly. I’ll update this post as I hear more.