Adobe Finally Adds GPU Accelerate To Flash Player Stable

It’s been years it seems that people have complained about the high CPU usage of flash on the Mac.

“Gala” has been in flash beta for some time now but with version 10.1.82.76 GPU acceleration is now active.

Hopefully this means Mac users can turn off flash block.

It’s been in Windows’ version of 10.1 since its been out.

GPU acceleration in flash has yet to come to Linux.

Adobe Released Flash 10.1

Adobe today has launched the next version of flash player. Flash 10.1 comes with speed improvements, GPU acceleration for the mac, and tons more of minor updates.

Download flash 10.1.

Read more at engadget.com.

Adobe “Loves” Apple, But Also Takes A Stab At Them

(c) 2010 Abobe. Image Credit: Adobe

Apparently Adobe loves Apple. Well no they really don’t. Adobe says they like HTML5, Open  Web, and even Apple but they don’t like restrictions. (Adobe its nothing about competition either). Adobe please fix flash on Linux/Mac and then we will love you. But even 10.1 doesn’t fix flash as much as it should. Sure its faster but it’s still a bigger hog then anything.

Apple Shows Off iPad Friendly Video Sites

Ah HTML5 how unlike Silverlight you are a true alternative to flash. With that a lot of company’s in the past few days have been jumping on the HTML5 video bandwagon. Now news websites like CNN are taking the plunge. Now ABC, and CBS have iPad apps, CNN just uses the web (it has an app but still). The more the merrier I say, can’t wait for more websites to offer compatibility.

Lastest Chrome Dev Forces Flash Player Integration

Google has pulled a fast one with its latest chrome dev build. The latest build 5.0.360.4 (.5 for linux) forces the install of flash player 10.1 beta. While this may seem as a good idea, I find it personally a major step backward and yet again Google dictating your experience.

No longer is Chrome the lightweight secure, robust browser anymore. Now it’s simply a browser that tailors to the needs of Abobe. On top of that Chrome will automatically update the flash player in Chrome. Which means if there is a bug in the new flash, or an exploit well then bye-bye your computer.

I can’t believe that Google has chosen this direction. I was not highly disturbed by the automatic roll-out of Buzz because I have a small footprint on Google. This however shows that Google is not doing what the end user wants, but rather what it and its partners want.

Sure if this was an opt-in thing it would be fine, but its now a requirement to run the browser. Sure you can deny the acceptance of the flash player when it installs but you really at the point don’t have a chance. Instead of extending HTML5 video progress, it shows that it wants to help Adobe in its troubles.

“We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:

- When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.

- Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.

- With Adobe’s help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome’s “sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.”

So has Google gone beyond its respectable limits yet again? Vote in the poll below.

Just how safe is Adobe’s Products? (Interview included)

Adobe…known for its PDF, its reader, its photoshop, its flash, and naturally its security holes.

So what is adobe doing to fix this, and what do they think needs to be done?

CNET TV has a interview with Brad Arkin Adobe’s director of product security and security.

Watch the video for the interview.

How To: Disable Flash Player In Your Web Browser

We all at some time have either needed or wanted to disable flash in our web browsers.

Either because it’s hogging to many resources, crashing to often, or consuming too much bandwidth.

Maybe you even need to disable it for a while due to a new security hole.

CNET TV has a video on How To: Disable Flash player in your web browser.

Steve Jobs Confirms Importance of HTML5 Over Flash

Steve Jobs - Courtesy Acaben on Flickr

Steve Jobs in a recent meeting with employees confirmed the importance of HTML5 over flash.

“Furthermore Jobs had a handful of choice words for Adobe, calling the company “lazy” and claiming that “Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.” -Engadget

In the meeting he also had some choice words with Google saying “Don’t be evil” Steve replied “BS” (highly unusual).

So in an earlier post I tried to show the importance of HTML 5, it is quite clear that Apple has the same mind frame as I do.

Adobe Reader 9.3 Announced

Adobe Reader 9.3 brings the following changes:

  • Enhanced security
  • Privileged Locations Improvements
  • Cross Domain Support
  • Warning Message and Dialog Improvements (A non-intrusive Yellow Message Bar (YMB) that doesn’t block workflows replaces many of the modal dialogs).
  • Multimedia Security

RESOLVED ISSUES

PDF Maker

  • Fixed an issue where PDFMaker was loading in Office 2010 with 9.x version of Acrobat.

Viewer

  • Fixed a 9.2 Snow Leopard out of memory and crash issue where the progress bar causes extreme performance problems when the progress bar of Acrobat gets refreshed a large number of times during an operation.
  • Fixed a 9.2 issue where closing PDF causing a Firefox crash when multiple profiles have been started. When there are multiple instances of Firefox.exe running with the profile option of –no-remote and user tries to close the instance that has a PDF document opened, the user gets “Memory could not be read” error.
  • Fixed a 9.2 issue where Reader loaded forms in the background but didn’t show the busy cursor.

Web Capture

  • Fixed a 9.2 issue where Web Capture sets check box values as checked by default. HTML tag for Checkbox “value” and State were not getting honored.

Collaboration

  • Fixed a 9.2 issue where a reviewer’s xml gets overwritten and comments are lost after a user exits and opens the PDF again in shared review, the previous comments were deleted.

Accessibility

  • Fixed an Adobe Reader 9.2 issue where it did  not trigger the speech synthesizer while clicking on any text fields of the customer PDF form (Jaws 11).

XPS conversion

  • Fixed a 9.1.3 issue where converting XPS file with the XPS2PDF Conversion plug-in yielded an incorrect page layout and missing items in the resulting PDF file.

Security

  • Fixed a 9.1.3 issue where Acrobat did not display the  Save As dialog when the user signs the PDF using digital signature; cannot sign using the Microsoft Base CSP.
  • Fixed a 9.1.2 issues where an error encountered while signing: “The Windows Cryptographic Service Provider reported an error. Error code 2148073504” after a number of digital signal signatures have been produced successfully.

3D

  • Fixed a 9.2 issue where importAnXFDF does not import 3D views properly when the XFDF contains views associated with a 3D annotation.

Annotations

  • Fixed a 9.1.3 issue where no comments can be viewed after saving a document with corrupt annotations. When user does a Save As operation on a PDF with corrupted annotations and then opens other documents in the same Acrobat session, then any annotations on these documents fail to display.

Printing

  • Fixed a 9.1.1 issue where files with large paper sizes are printed blank with the 7500 Xerox driver  when  ”choose paper source as PDF size” and “use custom size when needed” are both on.
  • Fixed a 9.1.1 issue where the output is clipped and printed with wrong orientation when printed using “Use custom paper size when needed” and “Choose Paper Source by PDF page size” as ON.

Forms

  • Fixed a 9.2 issue where when the user invokes web services from within a PDF that are protected using WS Security, the SOAP header in the SOAP request that sent from the server to the PDF doesn’t conform to the WSSE specification.
  • Fixed an issue in 9.2 where submitForm causes xml data to be attached as *.tmp when parameter oXML is used and cSubmitAs is set to ‘XML’. Customizing the XML data using oXML parameter and then calling submitForm to email the data caused the data to be attached with .tmp attachment rather than .xml attachment.

Full list of changes here.

Adobe Flash 10.1, and Air 2.0 Goes Into Beta