Recent Stories with tag adobe

Compared to the news from Haiti, the local stories feel a little trivial. But it's been a week of being overtaken by events.

Symetra's IPO got off well, and Starbucks got some mojo back, but the stock market as a whole had a terrible week. (Why? Bank trouble in big China.) Amazon announced developers can start writing Kindle apps. Adobe made tangential news when YouTube started using a non-Flash HTML5 video player. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has learned how to do life-saving things with stem cells from umbilical cord blood. For some reason I didn't know that bankruptcy-filing Taco Del Mar was headquartered in West Seattle.

Seattle's 9.2 percent unemployment is bad, but less than Washington's overall 9.5 percent unemployment.

Seattle Bubble reports that the state's chief economist says if real estate will rebound, it won't be until 2011. Commercial real estate would take longer. Arun Raha also pointed out that the problem with losing our smaller regional and community banks is that they provide credit to small businesses--small businesses that we're counting on create new jobs. Regulators seized Seattle's Evergreen Bank ($482 million in assets) on Friday and sold it to Umpqua Bank in Oregon.... (more)

If you own an iPhone, you've run up against the downside of dominant market share. Local software company Adobe is responsible for Flash, which, besides being a terrific way to annoy site visitors as they wait for landing pages to load or as they scramble to turn down music that blares suddenly, has become the default way to display animation and video on the internet.

But Apple has so far refused to allow Flash to play in the iPhone's Safari browser. They have their reasons. Adobe has responded to the more technical variety, but perhaps sensing that Apple wouldn't be happy with anything less than iFlash, they have been hammering and sawing on Flash CS5. (They're foregoing a public beta, in fact, to roll out the software faster.)

CS5 contains a packager that "will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app," reports the Washington Post. (A Hulu app, that's what that means! Or it should. Get on that, Hulu. Oh, good.)

But the delay has already given Adobe (and Microsoft's Silverlight, for that matter) a competitor they weren't looking for.

Yesterday YouTube announced it's supporting HTML5 video players, which (currently) work in Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer. Today it's Vimeo. ReadWriteWeb explains that, "An HTML5 video player will allow videos to be viewed without Adobe's Flashplayer plug-in, videos will load faster and developers will be able to build all kinds of other intriguing features into a media delivery scheme based on the next version of HTML."

You can sign up for an experimental HTML5 video player here.

I am not backing a particular horse here--my hope is simply to maximize the streaming video I can watch via iPhone, as a way of paying AT&T back for their unlimited data plan pricing. Flash, HTML5--I just want to play Lawrence of Arabia in high rotation until a data center buckles.