Just as we did in Europe a couple of weeks ago, Lee Brimelow and I are doing a series of Flash get togethers in North America over the next couple of weeks. I will be talking about the roadmap for the Flash runtimes, and leading a discussion around recent development in the Flash world. Lee will be showing off some of the new stuff we are working on around gaming.

Here are the cities and dates:

We have just posted a new whitepaper on Adobe.com. The whitepaper, titled Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes lays out the 1 to 2 year roadmap for the Flash runtimes (primarily Adobe AIR and Flash Player). This includes information on specific planned releases, longer term player work, and supported platforms.

This is actually the third Flash platform white paper that we have released in the past week (Adobe’s view of Flex and its commitments to Flex in the future, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR security), and is a part of a larger process of trying to provide clear and open communications around our thinking and plans for the Flash platform.

If you follow me on twitter, then you may have noticed that I have been working on a white-paper laying out the roadmap and strategy for the Flash runtimes (Flash Player and Adobe AIR). The white-paper is going through internal review now, and should be available in the next 7 to 10 days.

As part of the release of the white-paper, I, along with Lee Brimelow, and Thibault Imbert will be spending two weeks in Europe meeting with the Flash community and laying out Adobe’s vision and strategy for the Flash runtimes. This will be a good opportunity to speak directly with Adobe, ask questions, and general discuss recent changes around the Flash Player.

I have worked with Flash and been part of the Flash community for about 12 or 13 years (over 10 of those with Macromedia and Adobe). Over that time there have been a lot of ups and down, but I think that the past couple of days have been some of the most difficult of my career. I wanted to make a post which will hopefully clarify some of the news from the past couple of days, and provide some more context around what is going on.

Yesterday was probably one of the most overwhelming days of my entire career. First, Adobe informed developers that we are going to stop developing the Flash Player for mobile browsers, then news came out that there were layoffs at Adobe, and finally, Adobe held a financial analyst meeting where we spelled out the Creative Cloud, and the fundamental strategic shift Adobe is making.

All of this news is a lot to digest at once, and I know that there are a lot of questions and concerns from the community about what all of this means. I am working on another blog post which will address this from the Flash community’s standpoint, but I wanted to make a quick post and debunk a rumor that has been going around about the future of Flash Professional.

As you have probably heard, Apple has updated the terms of their developer program license. In particular, section 3.3.1 has been revised and now allows developers to develop applications with a wider array of tools and technologies, including Flash CS5.

We have posted some more information on this on the Adobe Conversations blog. Speaking about the packager for iphone included in Flash CS5:

The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.

Well, as you may have noticed from my blog posts the past week or two, I have been playing around with Flash and Arduino. I have a ton of ideas and projects in mind, but wanted to start on something that wouldn’t be too overwhelming, and would give me a good opportunity to learn the basics. Well, I have finished my first project, and wanted to share it with everyone. It is a Flash / Arduino based speed detector with clients for Mac, Windows and Android based devices (via Adobe AIR 2.5 beta).

I am really excited about the FITC San Francisco Flash conference, coming up in about a month. First, it is a FITC conference which means all of the top Flash designers and developers in the world will be speaking and hanging out. But more significantly, it is FITC in SAN FRANCISCO, the first major Flash conference in San Francisco in quite a while. As you probably know San Francisco is the home to the Flash authoring and player teams, as well as some of the top creative agencies and developers in the world. This makes it an amazing opportunity to not only see some of the coolest stuff going on in Flash today, but also hang out with all of the people making it happen.

For today’s myth, I want to cover one that has its roots in some fundamental misunderstandings around video technologies. That is the idea that H.264 Video (deployed via the HTML5 video tag) will kill Flash. This is a more recent meme, which has spread with the growing awareness of the forthcoming HTML5, but is unfortunately based on some fundamental misunderstandings about Flash, video capabilities, and the web in general.

First, we need to clarify a few things. H.264 is a video codec and not a player. It is a way to encode video. In order to view an H.264 encoded video, an end user must load it into a player such as running in Flash Player, Quicktime or VLC. Flash Player is a full featured multimedia runtime which supports a wide range of multimedia formats including H.264 (as well as other video codecs). Developers can create Flash content that can load and play H.264 encoded video (as YouTube does).

Today I wanted to look at a more recent misperception around Flash. That is the idea that Flash cannot work on devices with touch screens. If you know your Flash history then you will probably find this a bit ironic, considering that Flash was originally created specifically for tablets with touch inputs. Regardless, lets take a closer look at this myth.

The myth began with the publishing of this article. I have already covered this topic in another post, but I wanted to address it again as it seems to have spread lately.