Flash Penetration: The Truth

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Last week I posted an item questioning Adobe’s claim that “Flash content reaches 99.0% of Internet viewers”. I made the argument on a number of grounds but the bottom line was that the figure just seemed unbelievable when you factor in the number of Linux users and other Flash haters (joke) as well as all those brand new users who haven’t got around to installing yet.

The post was picked up on Slashdot and generated a lot of comment mostly from anti-Flash zealots and those who thought I was questioning the maths rather than the methodology (a survey commissioned by Adobe based on a small panel of opt-in users who were asked whether they could see various items of plug-in content complete with player download dialogs!).

However there was one particularly useful response…

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99% Flash Player Penetration – Too Good to be True?

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Adobe makes much of the fact that its Flash player has become” the world’s most pervasive software platform” bridging the worlds of PC, Mac and Linux. Nowadays this claim is generally taken as read but ultimately it depends on the ubiquity of the Flash player as advertised on the Adobe site.

But should the claims be taken at face value?

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Acrobat, Flash and iPaper

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

In my last digital design column in the latest issue of the magazine I take a look at the long history of “iPaper”. It’s essentially the story of the holy grail for designers: a format that manages to combine the design strengths and reading experience of paper with the unbeatable advantages offered by the internet – universal, instant and effectively free publishing and delivery.

Back in my first column, 150 issues previously, I had thought it was obvious what format would come to fill this role: the web-optimised PDF. And, as the most common document format on the web after HTML and with semi-integrated playback in most browsers, to an extent it does. Generally though, despite all its other strengths, PDF has failed miserably in its web ambitions. 

So is there an alternative?

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Adobe CS4 – First Thoughts

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Now that the dust has cleared on the launch of Acrobat 9 thoughts naturally turn to Adobe’s next major release Creative Suite 4. So what might we expect to see?

Well the launch of Acrobat 9 might well give us a very strong clue. The Acrobat applications are focussed on the business/office productivity market, but the introduction of new PDF capabilities gives the CS teams something to work with. And with Acrobat 9 that’s an understatement…

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Acrobat 9 goes Flash

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Yesterday Adobe officially announced the launch of its latest Acrobat 9 so what are my first impressions?

I was invited down to London a month or so ago to the press briefing and it was clear that Adobe considers this a major release. And after the pitiful version 8 it really can’t help but shine.

The feature that Adobe was stressing is the new ability to handle Flash – but just how significant is this development? And come to that – just how new is it? And how welcome?

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