Adobe launches Flash Player 11 and AIR3.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Adobe announced its Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 releases, which it said will enable “the next generation of immersive application experiences across devices and platforms including Android, Apple iOS (via AIR), BlackBerry Tablet OS, Mac OS, Windows, connected TVs and other platforms.”

Adobe is positioning Flash/AIR as a tool for developers to create cross-platform content and apps, against a backdrop of growing support for HTML5 as a tool to do the same.

In a statement, the company said that “dozens of new features…allow developers to deliver a new class of gaming and premium video experiences, as well as sophisticated, data-driven applications with back-end systems integration across devices, including iPhone and iPad via AIR.”

Likely to be of interest to mobile developers will be “AIR Native Extensions,” which will enable apps built with the Adobe technology to access device features including vibration control, magnetometers, light sensors, dual-screens, NFC and others. This will also enable developers to more deeply integrate AIR apps with “other business software.”

The update includes support for accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, which can enable “1,000 times faster rendering performance” over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2. Currently this is in a “pre-release” stage for mobile devices, with Adobe stating that “a production release for mobile platforms is expected in the near future.”

Developers can also package the AIR runtime with applications, in order to simplify the installation process for platforms including Android, Windows and Mac OS, in addition to iOS. This will remove the need for AIR to be installed separately, as is currently the case.

Mobile social gaming company GREE said that it will become “one of the first companies to adopt the latest version of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.” It said that “starting this fall,” it will begin formally offering the AIR 3 plugin to its development partners, enabling them to “easily embed the functions provided by the GREE SDK into AIR-based applications.”

The technologies will be publicly available early next month. Flash Builder and Flex, the company’s open-source framework for building mobile, web and desktop apps, will offer support for the new features in an upcoming release “before the end of the year.”

Adobe MAX 2010 :Snapshot of Flash enable devices

At Adobe MAX 2010, Diana Helander takes us to the Device Bar and showcases the breadth of devices that are running Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.5.

Adobe confirms PDF zero-day, plans rush patch - Computerworld

Adobe confirms PDF zero-day, plans rush patch - Computerworld

Computerworld - Adobe today said it would issue an emergency patch the week of Aug. 16 to fix a critical flaw in its Reader and Acrobat software.

The bug was disclosed by researcher Charlie Miller at last month's Black Hat security conference when he demonstrated how the open-source BitBlaze toolkit could be used to boost bug-hunting productivity 10-fold.

Miller, an analyst with Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators, is well-known for finding vulnerabilities in Adobe's popular Reader PDF viewer. Last March, Miller showed how a simple fuzzing tool could root out scores of potential bugs in Reader, Microsoft Office, Apple's Preview and other software.

According to a paper Miller published after the Black Hat conference (download PDF), and others, the bug is in Reader's and Acrobat's font parsing.

"This can be exploited to corrupt memory via a PDF file containing a specially-crafted TrueType font," stated Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia in anadvisory published Wednesday. "Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code."

Today, Adobe announced it would release a rush, or "out-of-band" security update during the week of Aug. 16-20. Adobe issues its quarterly security updates for Reader and Acrobat on Tuesdays, and has shipped emergency fixes on that same day of the week. If the company continues the practice, it would most likely deliver the out-of-band patch on Aug. 17.

Adobe hinted that the out-of-band update will include fixes for vulnerabilities other than the one Miller uncovered. The company also said it would still ship its next regularly-scheduled quarterly update on Oct. 12.

Although the Adobe vulnerability shares traits with the one currently being used to "jailbreak" Apple's iOS mobile operating system -- both involve font parsing errors -- they're not linked, Miller said.

"Its just a coincidence that they are both bugs in the way programs parse fonts in PDFs," Miller said in an e-mail reply to questions.

The vulnerability exploited by the JailbreakMe software is in Apple's PDF viewer, dubbed Preview, not in Adobe's Reader, a fact that Adobe tried to make clear yesterday. "Not all PDF-related vulnerabilities are automatically Adobe vulnerabilities," argued Brad Arkin, Adobe's head of security and privacy, pointing out that the formerly proprietary PDF was issued as an open standard in 2008.

Adobe has issued several out-of-band updates this year for Reader. Adobe last released an emergency Reader update in late June when it moved up the already-scheduled July 13 fixes by two weeks to deal with a bug hackers were already exploiting. It also rushed a Reader fix to customers in February.

The push to come up with a fix for the latest Reader zero-day will not affect work on the next major upgrade to the program, Adobe said today. Reader 10, which should ship for Windows before the end of the year, is to include"sandboxing" technology to isolate malicious PDF documents -- such as the kind that might leverage Miller's vulnerability -- so that they can't infect the PC.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Adobe confirms PDF zero-day, plans rush patch (infoworld.com)
• Adobe prepares for out of band critical patch (v3.co.uk)

  

Flash Abobe Games on the Palm Pre

It has been a long ride since adobe showed up this video games test on the Palm Pre. I was wondering when Flash will come to webos devices.  Related posts:

http://www.everythingpre.com/forum/palm-pre/flash-10-1-mobile-new-high-performance-features-will-support-landscape-view-26580.html

Flash Adobe 10.1 for Mobile will support landscape view and low battery consumption

New High Performance Features
Completely redesigned and optimized for mobile, Flash Player 10.1 delivers new interaction methods with support for mobile-specific input models. Support for accelerometer allows users to view Flash content in landscape and portrait mode. With Smart Zooming, users can scale content to full screen mode delivering immersive application-like experiences from a Web page. Performance optimization work with virtually all major mobile silicon and platform vendors makes efficient use of CPU and battery performance.

The new Smart Rendering feature ensures that Flash content is running only when it becomes visible on the screen, further reducing CPU and battery consumption. With Sleep Mode, Flash Player automatically slows down when the device transitions into screen saver mode. Advanced Out-of-Memory Management allows the player to effectively handle non-optimized content that consumes excessive resources, while automatic memory reduction decreases content usage of RAM by up to 50 percent. Flash Player pauses automatically when events occur such as incoming phone calls or switching from the browser to other device functions. Once users switch back to the browser, Flash Player resumes where it paused.


Flash Player 10.1 was also released to mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months.


What are HP/Palm waiting for release it to the Palm smartphones?