Busy very early morning – 7 AM! – for Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch.
During his keynote at the AjaxWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., Lynch unveiled version 1.5 of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), codenamed Cosmo; Ichabod, a technology that helps search engines index Flash-based content and an upcoming HTML 5 video tag.
First, Cosmo is expected in the next few weeks and will include SquirrelFish JavaScript virtual machine into the Webkit HTML engine, support for new languages and Flash Player 10 integration amongst others. Adobe also clarified its mobile strategy with AIR being the client of choice for desktops and smartphones and Flash Lite for entry-level phones.
“Flash is very ressource intensive. So you need a powerful mobile phone like a smartphone to run it. But ultimately, we are looking to merge Flash Lite and AIR”, confirms James Ward, a Flash/Flex technical evangelist at Adobe.
In his talk in front of a standing room, Lynch also mentioned the Ichabod technology, a name inspired by the fictional character Ichabod Crane.
“Unlike HTML, search engines like Google or Yahoo, can not read inside SWF files used by the Flash player to read its content. What we announced a few months ago is that we are working with Google and Yahoo in a technology that will allow them to execute the SWF file, push buttons, etc… to read its content and add it to their index”, explains the Adobe evangelist.
Finally, Lynch pointed to the upcoming release of some open source code associated with HTML 5′s video tag that let developers put videos on a Web page easily. Find and early implementation here by Mike Chambers, principal product manager for developer relations for Adobe AIR.
“Although the HTML 5 tag makes it easy to add a video on a Web page, it doesn’t specify the video format or where to play it. Our code, which will be a mix of HTML and Javascript, will specify to run the video using the Flash player which is ubiquitous on desktops today”, adds James Ward.
Hi Jean-Baptiste,
Thanks for chatting with me today. Let me clarify the first quote since it doesn’t quite capture what I was saying. Flash content by nature of it’s interactivity can be more resource intensive than HTML. Flash Lite today runs on nearly any device profile. But Flash content usually has to be created specifically for Flash Lite for it to work well on mobile devices. Adobe intends to get Adobe AIR and Flash Player onto mobile devices and allow developers building Flash content for the web and desktop to reuse that content on those mobiles devices.
-James
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