Adobe’s Flash Player has never performed as well in Mac OS X as it does on Windows-running PCs. The traditionally poor performance of Adobe’s plugin on the Mac has led many iPhone and iPad users to support Apple’s decision to keep Flash off of its mobile devices. While the upcoming Flash 10.1 does boast some significant performance improvements over its predecessors, the performance is still pretty terrible compared to h.264, which has access to hardware-accelerated video decoding via the GPUs in Macs.

(Read the rest of the article via tuaw Apple throws Adobe a bone — on the Mac.)

Will Apple start to allow Flash on the iPhone? Maybe?

Google is a huge advocate of web standards. Their search business model depends on an open and indexable internet. Perhaps they feel that the Adobe Flash 10.1 Player finally meets the minimum standards for a good net citizen? Or perhaps they have much less controller over the Nexus One, than Apple has over the iPhone and this is a concession to HTC? Both questions are speculation at this point. What isn’t speculation is that Apple has a worthy competitor to it’s iPhone and it runs Flash.

Check out the full article at Macworld UK

• Bookmarking in a browser or social website
• Sending links via email or instant messenger
• Finding specific content with the major search engines
• Utilizing browser history and reload buttons

Check it out at http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

Check out the article at Down the Foxhole

This article contains excerpts from Search Engine Optimization for Flash, which dispels the myth that SWF-based websites won’t show up in a web search by demonstrating exactly what you can do to make your site fully searchable. You’ll learn best practices for using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—as well as SWFObject—for building sites with SWF content that will stand tall in search rankings.

Check out the article in its entirety at Adobe’s Developer connection.

You’ve never done a flash ad! Don’t panic, It’s easy. You just need to know what questions to ask.What do you need to ask?

Things to ask about:

• Sizes
• File Size Max
• Max Ad Length “Running Time”
• Flash Player Versions
• Click Tag Information
• Backups?

Sizes

This is the dimensions of the ads. Some of the most common sizes are as follows.

• 468px by 60px – Banner
• 728px by 90px – Leaderboard
• 300px by 250px – Story
• 160px by 600px – Tower

These are examples and are not applicable to every vendor.

File Size Max

All vendors have a Max File Size they will accept from advertisers. This could be anywhere from 30k to 100k. Ask the vendor what their specs are before you start working. This out of all the tips listed is the most important to you the designer. If you build an awesome ad and discover that you will have the rethink the direction you used because your 20k over the spec. That is the quickest way to turn an ad your proud of into ad you wouldn’t claim if someone paid you too.

Max Ad Length “Running Time”

This refers to the amount of time an ad take to run through its message before repeating. The Microsoft ad network suggests 15 seconds. I never try to go longer than 10 seconds because a viewers attention on the web can be measured in nanoseconds.

Flash Player Versions

Flash has been around for a while now and is up to plugin version 10. If you look at the flash plug-in penetration chart. You can see that the 7, 8 and 9 versions of the Flash Plug-In have penetration rates well into 90 percent. Personally I export for version 8 of the plug-in. Flash 8 was the version that introduced a lot of filters and layering effects. It gives you a lot of creative options and the ability to make custom effects with actionscript. Also having a 98.7 penetration rate doesn’t hurt.

Click Tag Information

In most cases the destination URL is not hard coded into the ad.

Enter the click tag.

The click tag is a bit of code “shown below” that allows the vendor to track the amount of times the ad is clicked and allows the ad server to dynamically tell the browser where to go. This is done for simplicity sake and gives greater flexibility when serving ads. As an example you could use the below bit of Actionscript attached to an invisible button.


on (release) {
if (clickTAG.substr(0,5)=="http:" || clickTAG.substr(0,6) == "https:") {
getURL (clickTAG, "_blank");
}
}


Backups?

As hard as it is to believe some people don’t have flash installed or they are on a iPhone. Many vendors require gif or jpeg backups that will be served if the viewer doesn’t have flash.

Dear Adobe

Post your questions/gripes/praise and vote other comments up or down.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

To read the whole post. Click Here.

Written by Samuel in Website Building

It’s recently occurred to me that I’ve been doing Flash sites now for 10 years and have seen it come a long way since Flash 4, where I first cut my teeth on Actionscript, tweening, and pixel fonts. Over the years, I’ve seen and done many projects, some of which utilized Flash in very useful ways, while others had no business using it. Sometimes, a Flash implementation hurt the company, detracted from the site’s purpose, and had poor results (all the while costing them more to build the site in the frst place). So in a world where too many companies want Flash websites and too few designers use Flash very well, here is a brief list of places that Flash currently does not belong (with very few exceptions):

(Via wakeuplater.com.)