What exactly is Adobe trying to prove? First, they release a 64-bit version of CS4. Now they're showing 64-bit Linux users some love by releasing an alpha version of the Flash player for their OSes.

It's been a long time coming. For ages, users have been forced to use nspluginwrapper to enable the 32-bit Flash player in their browser. With the official alpha release from Adobe, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Adobe's increased attention to Linux may have something to do with the fact that nearly a quarter of all Firefox crashes on Linux systems are related to the Flash plugin.

Availability of the 64-bit version is yet another boost for Flash on Linux. Version 10 made significant strides in terms of performance and compatability.

Linux users can get their hands on the plugin from this page at Adobe Labs.

Since I've recently installed Vista Ultimate x64 on my workstation, I'm hopeful that Adobe will do the right thing and roll out a Windows version as well. The company has stated that next major release the plugin will feature 64-bit versions for all three major platforms.

[ via Ars Technica ]

If you're not a fan of Flash, you definitely don't want to check out Sprint's new Plug Into Now dashboard. If you dare to click through, you'll be treated with sensory overload, internet style. The page is a cornucopia of snippets of information, with one theme: Now. A computerized female voice periodically speaks, saying things like "13,628 letters are being mailed right now", or "8,971,000 workers are out sick right now".

The voice also invites you to click on the page, where you will find such treasures as a button that says Push Me, then when you push it, gleefully displays a message that the button doesn't do anything. The page has all sorts of running tallies, such as how many coffee cups are being manufactured at this instant, or the current population of the world.

As much as I feel like this dashboard is an abomination, it's hard not to explore it.

[via Daring Fireball]

Adobe is holding a developer conference this week, where the company plans to demonstrate a number of new technologies, including a version of Flash 10 that will run on devices with ARM processors, ranging from Windows Mobile phones to televisions and mobile internet devices.

Also on the docket:

• Adobe AIR 1.5 will be released, with support for WebKit and Flash Player 10
• An alpha version of Flash for 64-bit Linux systems will be released
• Preview versions of the latest versions of Adobe Flash Catalyst and Adobe Flex Builder will also be made available

Conspicuously absent from the announcements? Any word on a version of Flash 10 for the iPhone.

If you have a blog that gets a lot of comments, you might be finding that logging into your blog's administration panel to moderate comments has become a bit of a laborious process. If your blog runs on the WordPress platform and is self-managed, you might like to check out the Moderator plugin and associated Adobe Air desktop application.

The concept here is straightforward: install the plugin on your blog, then follow the instructions to install the Air application on your Windows or Mac machine. From there, you get a nice quick application from which to review comments and either approve, delete, or mark them as spam.

As the site currently warns, you might find a performance problem if your site has hundreds of unmoderated comments when installing Moderator. The easy and obvious work-around is to ensure that you are up-to-date in your moderating before installing the plugin.

While it's a fantastic start, I'm one of those insane people that runs a number of WordPress blogs, or at least caretake a few for friends. It would be wonderful if Morderator allowed you to monitor mulitple WordPress blogs and moderate comments for all of them from within one interface. You can change the site that you are aiming Moderator at, but support for multiple sites would be a great enhancement.

I was fully prepared for Flash Player 10 to be totally underwhelming, but it looks as though Adobe has gotten things right this time around.

After looking at the beta back in July, the new features - 3d effects, hardware acceleration, custom filters and effects - intrigued me. I also noted a slight improvement in performance on my workstation. You can view a full list of v10's features on Adobe's web site and try out some of them in an interactive demo.

The 3d draggable DVD case demo is interesting, but far from a perfect illustration of the new capabilities. Take a few seconds and flip it, and you'll notice the cover reappearing on the back and sometimes the bottom edge of the case. I don't doubt that the effects will improve with time, and it's still a promising start.

I'd like to see a more practical demo of the custom filters than what Adobe offers. Call me crazy, but I don't see much use in being able to watch a video clip with a mosaic or spherize filter applied. In the three months between the beta and final release, I expected a demo with a bit more impact.

What I didn't expect was Flash Player 10 actually making my MSI Wind and its piddly Atom CPU capable of finally watching stutter-free FLV clips on the web. Thanks to the new dynamic streaming quality of service abilities and the general performance enhancements, playback is silky smooth even on my underpowered netbook.

Overall, v10 is impressive, and reminds me how exciting Flash was when it first burst onto the scene. It's well worth the download.

If you work with colors on a Mac, you'll probably love Mondrianum. It combines the functionality of Adobe's popular color-theme creation community, Kuler, with the native color pickers of Mac OS X. When you open the color picker window in the apps you normally use -- everything from Textedit on up to Coda and Photoshop -- Mondrianum will be right there alongside the color wheel and the crayon picker.

Mondrianum lets you access Kuler themes right from the picker window, allowing you to choose an appropriate palette for the project you're working on. It integrates so seamlessly, it feels like it should have been there all along. If you checked out Mondrianum when it was still in version 1, your copy is about expire. Download version 2, which now works on both Tiger and Leopard, and responds to some changes in the Kuler API.

Adobe has announced that there is a known clickjacking vulnerability in the current Flash player. If you're looking to protect yourself, there are two possible remedies.

Adobe has a workaround posted on their web site. Visit the Flash player settings panel and click always deny on the global privacy settings.

Firefox users would do well to install the NoScript addon, which has updated clickjacking defenses. "ClearClick" protection was added in version 1.8.2, but is now enabled by default. It's designed to prevent user with UI elements that are not visible. In layman's terms, it should keep you from clicking on a button that you didn't know was there.

[via Hackademix]

Earlier this month, Adobe announced that they would be holding a streaming webcast to officially introduce Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) to the public. Adobe calls CS4 its "biggest software release to date," but then, they claim that with every version (I think CS3 was its "largest release ever" or something to that effect).

Having had the opportunity to play around with some of the CS4 betas, I will say that the jump in magnitude from CS3 to CS4 is much more substantial than what we saw with CS2 to CS3. Performance is snappier and it is easier to complete tasks, but really, what makes CS4 a worthy upgrade is that the product line is much more integrated. The Macromedia acquisition came mid-release cycle, and while product integration wasn't a complete hack job -- they did a really good job with Flash -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and suite integration with Flash was far from perfect.

Individual applications have all received a bevy of new features and innovations. Searching throughout a project or document for meta-data has been greatly enhanced, for instance. Adobe AIR has also been integrated across applications, meaning plugin developers can potentially take advantage of the AIR platform for easy in-program access to outside data (a la Adobe's Kuler app and its integration with Photoshop and Illustrator).

CS4 will be available in 64-bit builds for Windows users (Mac users have to wait until CS5 to get 64-bit Photoshop love), but both platform take advantage of GPU acceleration.

Like its predecessors, the 13 CS4 point releases can be purchased individually, or in one of six bundled suites: Design Standard CS4, Design Premium CS4, Web Standard CS4, Web Premium CS4, Production Premium CS4 and the Master Collection, which at $2499 US, pretty much gets you everything Adobe offers.

Unfortunately, the insanely complicated upgrade structure is still around too. Pricing starts at $599 for the Premium suite upgrades, but price depends on components owned, time purchased, etc., so check with your Adobe dealer or retailer for exact information.

Adobe stuff doesn't come cheap, but for those of us who rely on its products to do our creative work, the updates and new features in CS4 look to worth the price. CS4 will ship in October for Windows and OS X.

Note, announce, not release, as some other tech news sites have erroneously reported. On September 23, 2008, Adobe will be formally announcing Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

Adobe will be streaming the announcement and you can sign-up to receive a reminder message (or a handy iCal or Outlook entry) at adobe.istreamplanet.com.

Back in May, Adobe released some beta versions of a few of the titles in its CS4 lineup. Beta versions of Flash and Photoshop CS4 have also been floating around, though they have been officially restricted to a small subset of beta testers.

For Windows users, the big news with CS4 will be available in both 32 and 64-bit versions. This means that if you are running a 64-bit version of Vista, a program like Photoshop can access more memory. Sadly, for Mac users, despite having a 64-bit OS in Leopard, we won't be seeing 64-bit versions of Photoshop until CS5.

Having briefly played with the Fireworks and Dreamweaver CS4 betas, it is evident that Adobe has gone to great lengths to better integrate the Macromedia-acquired applications into the Adobe fold. I have also been able to play around with the next Photoshop release, code-named "Stonehenge" and let's just say it is impressive.

I purely speculating here, but I would imagine that CS4 will drop sometime in October. So Adobe fans, start saving those pennies now!

I understand that Photoshop is a great program. I'm willing to concede that there's really no comparable software for the professional user. What I just don't get is why the average user thinks 1) they need Photoshop and 2) they need to pirate it.

A few years ago, no one came in and asked me "Can you put Photoshop on my computer?" Most users hadn't even heard of the program. Now the perception from the public seems to be that if you want to edit photos at all, you've got to have Photoshop to do it - and that you might as well just steal it.

But why? Most users don't need even half of the functionality in Photoshop, and there are plenty of great editors that are easy to use, less hard on computer resources, and completely free.

Clear your conscience and try one of these alternatives!

Adobe just added new video content to its AIR-based Media Player, but it all pretty much sucks in one form or another. The Adobe Media Player is a slick media browser that can play and subscribe to videos from the web, and it also provides somewhat high-resolution content from Adobe's media partners such as MTVN and Comedy Central.

Despite the fact that the player is very visually appealing and easy to navigate, it's just not that useful. It's possible to use any regular, free browser such as Firefox to watch online video content, allowing web-travelers to avoid the installation of an extra app. As a result, the main reason for installing the app (unless you really, really like the subscription feature) is to watch the 25,000+ videos provided by Adobe.

And that's exactly what's wrong here. Adobe's video library is still weak, and most good of the good TV shows aren't full episodes but rather short clips. Furthermore, the full videos Adobe is adding aren't current TV hits like Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Instead, Adobe partnered with CBS and Sony to add tons of clips and a few movies/episodes from old stuff like Men in Black, Jerry Maguire, The Love Boat, Beverly Hilly 90210, Family Ties, and even The Price is Right. They might as well call the app something to the tune of Adobe Senior TV On Demand.

Sure, Adobe has the money to keep it up and running, but why bother if the company isn't bringing its best to the table? Why not partner with Hulu and create an official, fully functional Hulu AIR app instead?

It may seem illogical to tie Meebo to a desktop app, but that's exactly what's going on here. Meebone uses Adobe AIR to bring Meebo's services to your desktop through a dedicated app, but it's still in beta. So if you're down to try it, keep in mind that you'll probably encounter some problems... just like we did.

When attempting to login to AIM, Meebone was confused by a space in one of our user names. Other IM clients and services -- even Meebo itself -- aren't usually bothered by spaces. But that was our only major issue with the AIR-based app. And we're hoping it will be fixed before Meebone graduates from beta.

We tested the app with Google Talk and AIM accounts. Each logged-in successfully, brought up buddy lists, etc, etc. In other words, it introduced a basic Meebo set-up to our desktop, and we liked it. Just barely, but we did like it even though it sort of defeats the purpose of Meebo itself.

[via Adobe Air Marketplace]

Adobe Reader 9 is out, and while the latest version of Adobe's popular PDF reader offers faster launch speeds and native support for Flash content, it still takes forever to run Adobe Reader on some computer systems. If you've ever come across an unexpected PDF link on the web, you know what we mean.

While there are plenty of alternative PDF readers (some of our favorites include Foxit and Sumatra), if you want an application that can handle pretty much any PDF file in existence, you're still best off running Adobe Reader, even if it has a ton of features you'll never need. Fortunately, there's a stripped down version of Adobe Reader called Adobe Reader Lite.

Adobe Reader Lite is maintained by a third party developer and isn't officially supported by Adobe. But version 9 was released last week, hot on the heels of Adobe Reader 9. AR Lite contains all of the basic functions you'd need from Adobe Reader, but none of the extra junk like autorun, desktop shortcuts, or some of the less frequently used plugins.

[via gHacks]

FreshAIRApps is, as its name would suggest, a directory of new Adobe AIR applications. As AIR has grown in popularity, we've started following the site more closely to see what's new in the AIR world. The only comparable site out there at the moment is Adobe's own AIR showcase. Because FreshAIRApps is such a great resource, it surprised us to hear reports that Adobe is upset with the site's owner over his use of the "Adobe® AIR™" trademark.

According to a message on the front page of FreshAIRApps, the site will continue as RefreshingApps.com, with the purpose of promoting the work of the developer community, not promoting Adobe. The site's owner says that the move caused him financial loss. No word from Adobe, although the message claims that the company's community evangelists think FreshAIRApps is good promotion for AIR.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Download Squad originally told you about the Adobe Flash beta in May, and yesterday Adobe announced further updates to "Astro." So what do you have to look forward to?

From a viewer's standpoint, there are several new features of interest. Tops among them: advanced 3d effects - that's right, Flash now supports shaders. Web gamers rejoice, because this no doubt means a whole new era of addictive browser-based gaming.

Sound APIs have been refined as well, which should provide a boost not only for games, but also for streaming media applications. Also along these lines, Flash 10 support dynamic bitrate adjustments. Translation: it'll adapt to crappy network conditions automatically so that your video doesn't get all choppy.