Adobe’s new strategic direction. http://t.co/GuVwzrhT Beyond the layoffs, the real news:

Moving forward, Adobe will offer customers the ability to make, manage, measure and monetize content and applications across all devices.  The company has long been the leader in content authoring solutions with its Adobe Creative Suite® product franchise. Its Digital Media growth strategy revolves around its recently announced Creative Cloud and will enable the company to rapidly deliver new product capabilities and services; penetrate untapped market segments; and increase overall engagement with customers.

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The HTML5 boom is coming. Fast. http://tinyurl.com/3w8xz3p Aided by Adobe Edge http://tinyurl.com/3djpdyn

After a slow start – and still controversy over exactly what format video will be supported in “HTML5″ – is the Flash era finally over?

Colleen Taylor writing for GigOm discusses recent data on HTML5 and how Apple’s position on HTML5 and Flash has – as I predicted several years back – pushed the adoption of HTML5.

As is often the case in business, where there’s a winner, there’s usually a loser. HTML5 could largely replace Abobe’s proprietary Flash technology. And HTML5′s swift ascent could render Flash irrelevant in short order. “I think the disappearance of Flash is closer than people think,” ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue said in a press release accompanying the data.

HTML5′s projected growth is all the more impressive considering that the actual standard is not officially expected to be completed until 2020 2014, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. But that won’t stop companies and independent engineers from developing and deploying HTML5 features now, ABI said.

Full HTML5 interoperability isn’t expected until 2014 but we’re already a long way in, and will get further thanks to, somewhat ironically, Adobe.  I’ve long advocated that Adobe were in the best position to create an HTML5 authoring tool, and indeed they have now shown one in Adobe Labs – Edge. AppleInsider has a first look at Edge.

[Update] One day later Flixmaster launched another HTML5 authoring tool

World’s First Full Screen HTML Player (that’s customizable) http://tinyurl.com/3ofqlqz Any unique Flash feature done in “HTML5″

I’ve long had a preference for open standards over those from a single vendor, and so I like seeing formerly “Flash Only” features being replicated in ever-smarter ‘HTML5′ players.

Until now, the lack of true fullscreen playback has been the biggest limitation of HTML5 over Flash video. Safari already offered a basic fullscreen option for HTML5 video players, but this was via a non-customizable QuickTime view that didn’t allow the player to be branded or to feature custom controls.

For the first time since we demoed our player last year, we can finally enjoy SublimeVideo’s HTML5 controls in glorious fullscreen.

Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year http://tinyurl.com/3kblbtf

Since HTML5 is the combination of a few new html tags (predominantly the audio, video and canvas tags) with JavaScript for the interaction, JavaScript is very important to the future of the web, web applications and a browser-based world.

What makes a language useful is some combination of the language’s expressiveness and the libraries and tools available. JavaScript clearly passed the expressiveness barrier a long time ago, even if the ceremony required for creating objects is distasteful. But recently, we’ve seen some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5. JavaScript may have been a perfectly adequate language in the past, but these changes (and a few others that I’ll point out) have made JavaScript a language that is essential for every developer to know. If there’s one language you need to learn in the next year, it’s JavaScript.

If this is your beat, the article is well worth reading.  If you’re not that technical, keep in mind that HTML5 is largely about JavaScript, which is getting faster and more flexible all the time!

Hype – HTML 5 Authoring tool. http://tumultco.com/hype/

New offering in the HTML 5 Authoring space – Hype.  Odd name but let’s get over that and hope it’s really “Substance”!

Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.

I have no experience with this, but point to it as a stepping stone to wider adoption of HTML 5.

HTML5 Adoption for Web Video Continues to Grow http://tinyurl.com/4cwhnaz

In the time that MeFeedia has been tracking H.264 for HTML5 video on the web, the numbers have grown from 10% in Jan 2010, to 63% in Feb 2011.  That’s a huge boost for H.264 as the message gets out. It’s not good news for WebM, which frankly is only going to take off if Google does something incredibly stupid like making YouTube WebM only. (I doubt it since they have a contract for H.264 versions with Apple, it would appear.)

MPEG-LA starts patent move on VP8 http://tinyurl.com/6eqphma

One of the things that has worried me about VP8/WebM is that Google has refused to indemnify users from patent issues. To me that’s a huge worry, and now MPEG-LA has started the process of establishing whether or not VP8 does (or does not) infringe any of its members’ patents.

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Flash (Finally) Cuts CPU Usage With Hardware Acceleration http://tinyurl.com/6cvxsvs

At (long) last Adobe have released CPU acceleration across all platforms, including Mac and Linux.

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By now it’s not news that Google has dropped H.264 support from the <video> tag in their Chrome Browser, ostensibly because WebM is “more open”, which is demonstrably a lie as they continue support for Flash in Chrome. (I have no problem with Google taking whatever actions it likes, but please don’t insult me by saying it’s because of “openness”.)

The important thing to remember is that this changes NOTHING! Not a single thing. No-one cares about WebM and more importantly, no-one should even consider WebM.

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Microsoft Has Seen The Light. & It’s Not Silverlight. http://tinyurl.com/32jyufv

My primary reasons for disliking Flash were that it was proprietary (only one vendor/source) and that it has horrendous performance on OS X (definitely improving but still bad). I disliked Silverlight for the first of those reasons: any development only comes from Microsoft.

Well, it seems that Microsoft have had a “shift of strategy” :

During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC),ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. And while he said that the technology has some “sweet spots” for media applications (presumably like Netflix, which uses Silverlight on the web), its role as a vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime appears to be over. “Our strategy has shifted,” is how Muglia put it.

Instead, as they made clear during PDC, Microsoft is putting their weight behind HTML5 going forward. Hallelujah.

Further convergence on a single standard. Now if we can get everyone on the same page for HTML5 audio and video, it would be a big step forward. (I’m looking at you Mozilla!)