UPDATE: And its official. Click here.

Remember how Steve Jobs loathed Adobe Flash because it was not suitable for mobile devices despite Adobe claiming it was? Well, it turns out the late Apple CEO was right. A forthcoming announcement received by ZDNet reveals that Adobe will cease development of Flash Player on new mobile devices, OS or browsers. Adobe however, will continue to support existing platforms and versions by providing bug fixes and security updates.

With Flash out of the picture for mobile devices, Adobe will invest heavily in HTML5, which of course is already backed up by Apple for their mobile devices.

[Via ZDNet]

Adobe is trying to tap the increasing tablet market by introducing touch enabled apps. Coined as Adobe Touch Apps, there are total six touch apps that are optimized for tablet. First up is their flagship product, Adobe Photoshop Touch. Specially built for tablets, users can use simple finger gestures to edit and apply professional effects. There is a tablet-exclusive Scribble Selection Tool that allows users to easily extract objects in an image by scribbling on what to keep and what to remove. Additionally, the app helps users quickly find images, share creations, and view comments through integration with Facebook and Google Search. Using the syncing capabilities that are a component of Adobe Creative Cloud, files can be opened in Adobe Photoshop.

The next app is Adobe Collage that helps creatives capture and refine ideas and concepts by allowing them to combine inspirational images, drawings, text and Creative Suite files into modern, conceptual mood boards. Another app is Adobe Debut that allows users to present designs to clients and stakeholders virtually anywhere.

The other apps in the family are Adobe Ideas, Adobe Kuler and Adobe Proto. You can watch Adobe Touch Apps in action here.

Pricing and Availability
Adobe Touch Apps will be available for Android devices in November 2011. Adobe expects to make an announcement regarding iOS availability in early 2012. Adobe Ideas is already available for the iPad. Introductory pricing is US$9.99 for each app. Access to the file viewing, sharing and transfer functionality of Adobe Creative Cloud is included in the price of each Adobe Touch App. Details regarding pricing of the Adobe Creative Cloud and its expanded capabilities around applications, services and community will be announced in November 2011.

Adobe today released a new version of its Flash Player for desktops and Android devices. The Flash Player 10.3 promises to improve stability, enhance security and privacy protection that now allows to clear up local storage from browsers’ privacy settings.

Additionally, the desktop version also gets couple of new features like media measurement to track video analytics for developers and acoustic echo cancellation that will help users experience higher quality audio even without using a headset.

Adobe at the Adobe’s MAX conference today unwrapped the latest version of the AIR platform. The cross-platform runtime will now support Blackberry’s Tablet OS and TVs in addition to OSes like Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. Samsung will be the first manufacturer to ship the AIR runtime in their SmartTVs.

Adobe also confirmed that with the AIR 2.5, they’re also rolling out Adobe InMarket – an App Store for AIR apps. AIR app developers will now have a one-stop shop to distribute and sell their apps.

Adobe AIR allows developers to create apps from tools like Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder and Flex and deploy it across a number of platforms.

The PC version and the SDK for all three OSes are available from today.

Press Release

After months of beta testing and release candidates, Adobe has finally released Flash 10.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux OSes. The new update brings a lot of things like improved performance, H.264 video decoding, multi-touch support, better power management and Mac-specific updates.

The Mac version is now a Cocoa app that takes advantages of Cocoa, Core Audio for sound, core graphics for printing support, double-buffered OpenGL context for improved full screen playback efficiency and more.

The Android version of Flash will be released later this month.

Adobe has also released Adobe AIR 2 runtime for download.

Adobe Flash 10.1
Adobe AIR 2

[Via Yahoo]

With the turmoil going on between Apple and Adobe, this should come as a respite for the Flash software maker. At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Zedomax stumbled upon a prototype Android tablet at the Adobe booth. The prototype seemed to run Android OS 2.1 but more importantly, ran Adobe’s Flash and Air. The site
claims that both Adobe’s technologies worked “flawlessly” and were “totally impressed by how it ran”.

We’re not sure how the Flash-enabled tablet would behave if we multi-tasked extensively but it’s good to hear that non-iPad users will be able to enjoy Flash and Air content in the near future.

[Via Engadget]

UPDATE: Adobe CEO responds.

Apple CEO, Steve Jobs has posted his thoughts on Adobe Flash, which lists down six simple reasons “Why Apple doesn’t allow Flash”. The post goes down highlighting the flaws in Adobe’s Flash but the most important reason Jobs claims that using Flash to develop iPhone OS apps “ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.” How we are not sure but it will be interesting to see Adobe’s reply on this one. To sum it up, Jobs says that Flash was created for a computer and mice and not optimized for the touch interface, which Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad boasts of.

You can read Steve Jobs’ letter here and an interesting analysis of his letter over here.

Adobe held a small event in Mumbai unveiling its latest Creative Suite 5 (CS5). The newest version concentrates on interactivity, performance and maximizing the created content to be deployed on a number of media and platforms. It includes a new app, Flash Catalyst that tends to allow designers to quickly transform their Photoshop and Illustrator artwork into interactive user experiences. The suite comes in five different editions – CS5 Master Collection including all the fifteen applications; CS5 Design Premium, CS5 Web Premium, CS5 Production Premium and CS5 Design Standard.

There are around 250 new features across the whole suite. To name a few, you’ll find better support for digital publishing in InDesign CS5; Refine Edge, Content-Aware Fill, Puppet Warp, Wet Paint in Photoshop CS5; Rotobrush in After Effects and more.

Adobe has also made sure that developers and designers try to achieve faster with utmost accuracy. Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects are now 64-bit native applications, have Nvidia CUDA support etc.

The suite will ship from April 30 at US$2599 for Master Collection CS5, US$1899 for CS5 Design Premium, US$1799 for CS5 Web Premium, US$1699 for CS5 Production Premium and US$1299 for CS5 Design Standard. The Indian price of Master Collection will be around Rs. 135,000.

Adobe is hosting a webcast that will start at 9.30AM IST. Interested users can head over here.

Product Page

Apple may downplay Flash by not supporting it but Adobe claims iPhone and iPod touch users think otherwise. According to their in-house data and visits to Adobe.com, more than 7m attempts to download flash were initiated by iPhone / iPod touch users in December alone. This number is more than double than what Adobe experienced during June 2009.

It will be interesting to see if Apple succumbs to consumer demand or continues to turn it down citing security reasons.

Strategy Analytics predicts Flash will be found in more than 250m devices by 2012.

[SFGate via Macenstein]

Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and even the recently announced iPad excel as far as web surfing is concerned but it’s an indigestible fact that all these revolutionary devices do not have Adobe Flash support. Now with the launch of iPad, Adobe has responded to bring Flash support albeit by way of apps only.

Flash developers can use Flash technology to create iPhone, iPad apps using the Flash Pro CS5. As said before, this will allow devs to make Flash apps and games but playing flash content on a website still rests on Apple to enable flash support.

There is no word when Flash Pro CS5 will be available to all developers but Adobe is taking requests from devs to enroll them in the pre-release.

[Adobe via Slashgear]