A mere week after Adobe Systems reported that it would be shedding nearly 700 employees or 9% of its total worldwide workforce, the company is releasing two highly anticipated new products that have been in the works for a while: Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.

People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience.

But first things first.

Both the new Flash Player for desktop browsers and the latest iteration of the rather popular cross-platform runtime environment for desktop apps were announced in the beginning of October and previewed at the recent Adobe MAX 2009 event (see video below). That means there aren’t too many surprises left with regards to what the upgraded versions bring, so we’ll just give you a quick run-down.

Both Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1:

- boast support for multi-touch and gestures (yes, you’d need a machine with a touch screen)
- include a global error handler, which enables devs to write a single handler to process all runtime errors
- (finally) support local microphone access, so you’ll no longer need to first pass through a server in order to record audio locally on both Flash Platform runtimes

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 now also leverages hardware decoding of H.264 video on Windows PCs, netbooks and mobile devices.

Want all that goodness on your mobile phone, too? Hold your horses: while a public beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Palm webOS is expected later this year, Google Android support is expected no sooner than early 2010, and support for Blackberry smartphones will likely take even more time to be added.

Also new in Adobe AIR 2.0 and worthy of a mention:

- Native process API: enables apps to communicate with native applications on local machines
- Mass storage device detection: plug in your Flip camera or that USB stick you got as a gift at the last conference you attended, and AIR 2 applications will be able to detect them
- Open document API: with it, AIR apps can ‘ask’ the OS what the default application is associated with files and function accordingly
- Improved socket support: think AIR-powered local servers and P2P apps
- Speedier WebKit: updated version that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities

(Original image via Ryan Stewart)

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We’ve confirmed with Adobe that the company is cutting 9 percent of its workforce, or 680 employees. Adobe filed an 8-K with the SEC today reporting the layoffs. Earlier today we heard multiple reports that layoffs were taking place at Adobe. There are also Tweets about the layoffs on Twitter. Last December, Adobe laid off 600 workers (or 8 percent of its staff) due to the recession.

A spokesperson for Adobe told us in a statement that “Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company’s three-year strategic priorities and the realities of the business environment, as well as to ensure its ability to continue investing in long-term growth opportunities.” In addition, after Adobe acquired Omniture, the company reduced Omniture’s workforce by 9 percent. According to today’s filing, the restructuring will cost Adobe between $65 and $71 million.

We’ve added the layoffs to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker. This has been sobering week in the technology world, as Electronic Arts and Sprint both announced significant layoffs in the past few days.

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With all of its SaaS offerings, Salesforce.com is consistently integrating with other forms of cutting edge technologies, such as Twitter, Box.net, and more to offer clients more diverse and appealing options. Today, the company is partnering with Adobe to offer the “Adobe Flash Builder,” off of Force.com, Salesforce’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications.

The new offering is meant to allow developers and IT departments to build cloud-based rich media applications off of Force.com. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to meet business needs.

Within the new offering, Adobe’s Flash Builder lets users build these cloud-based internet application that can be deployed to end-users via the browser though Adobe’s Flash Player or to the desktop through Adobe AIR.

The builder lets developers interactive UI features easily, such as drag and drop technology. Developers can also add data visualization
such as charts and dashboards for better management and monitoring of applications. The new builder is also integrated with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services that lets clients automatically synchronize data between the Force.com database and an desktop-based Adobe AIR local data store, allowing developers to build apps that easily connect between the browser and the desktop. A screenshot of a application built with the Adobe Flash Builder is posted below.

Salesforce recently upgraded its Force.com platform by launching Force.com Sites, an application that lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. In terms of the enterprise, this is a big coup for Adobe’s Flash platform, which faces competition from Microsof’s Silverlight product.

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Adobe is a big company, with a lots of products, but one of its strongest brands is Flash. So when Adobe contacted Envato, an Australian startup that operates a set of popular marketplaces for digital creative goods to change one of their marketplaces names, Envato had no choice. Envato operates a property called FlashDen, which sells Adobe Flash and Flex files like preloaders, galleries, site templates and utilities. Files are created and sold by a huge community of authors from all over the world.

Last week Adobe contacted Envato and asked Envato to change the name and URL of FlashDen so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. With little time, Envato changed the name from FlashDen to ActiveDen.

Seeing this change, we reached out to Collis Ta’eed, the CEO of Envato, and he mentioned that Envato received a letter from a law firm representing Adobe asking to change FlashDen’s name. Envato followed through, not wanting more legal problems with Adobe. Ta’eed also mentioned that “FlashDen” was filed as a trademark in Australia in January 2008 and entered on the Australian trademark register in August 2008. Envato is based in Melbourne, Australia.

I guess the main takeaway here is that if you are trying to help Adobe build its ecosystem of apps around Flash, don’t try to communicate that by including the word Flash in the name of your site.

Envato currently operates five “marketplaces” including ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle, VideoHive and now ActiveDen.

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Adobe’s Flash product has obviously been an integral part of the web for many years now. But it still has a major weakness when it comes search engines and complexity. While Adobe and others have been working on solutions to make Flash-based website more Google-friendly, they’re still nowhere near as crawl-able as regular HTML-based pages. FluidHTML or “Fhtml” is a new server-side markup language that hopes to merge Flash-like functionality with the easier-to-use HTML language.

Obviously, trying to create what would essentially have to be a new web standard is no small task. But the group behind Fhtml thinks they have a shot to do it because Flash is so widely used by millions of sites on the web who want a better visual appearance than HTML can offer. Aside from just Flash, Fhtml is also going up against Silverlight another Adobe framework, Flex. But Fhtml claims to be not only simpler than both Flash and Silverlight, but more powerful than Flex.

Another downside to Flex, Silverlight, and Flash is that they all must be compiled. Fhtml, like HTML, does not need to be. This makes it a lot easier to edit on the fly. And because all of those are more complex, they often require a special developer with just those skills to create a site using those technologies, Fhtml promises to be much simpler. And because it’s server side, the company says that Java developers, PHP developers, Ruby developers, .NET developers and Python developers can all write Fhtml in their native language.

Today on stage, FluidHTML CEO Michael Collette and Founder Jim Kremens prototyped the Southeby’s (one current partner) website in FluidHTML. They also showed a Hulu media player made in Fhtml. They’re looking for $1 to $2 million in funding in October.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.

Q: How does this compare with HTML 5?

MC: I expect HTML 5 is a big leap forward, but what happens after that?

JK: And HTML 5 won’t be fully implemented until 2014.

Q: What has Adobe said about it?

MC: We haven’t spoken to them. (Laughs)

Q: Making Flash searchable is a big plus, but getting developers to switch their language is tough, how do you deal with that?

JK: The product is free to developers. And we think it opens them up to be more creative than HTML, while not having to deal with some difficulties of Flash.

MC: It runs at the full speed of Flash too.

Q: What’s the business?

MC: We charge a low fee to publishers.

Q: Have vast is the object library?

MC: It’s extensible, which is great. Developers will expand it beyond what it is now. And an open API in January.

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We were plagued all day today at the TechCrunch offices with a faulty Yammer Air app. Updates weren’t working or were seriously delayed, and most of us just moved over to the web version to get reliable service. We rely heavily on Yammer to communicate asynchronously across our very distributed team (three continents). I didn’t realize how heavily until today when the service wasn’t working properly.

I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem - it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.

Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.

We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery.

In the meantime, we all downloaded Gabble, a native OSX Yammer client, and everything is smooth sailing again.

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We suspect Business Catalyst, the company behind e-commerce software suite GoodBarry, went a little early with the news on its own website, but that’s a boon for tech business reporters awake at this time of day. Turns out Adobe Systems has agreed to acquire the part American, part Australian company for an undisclosed amount.

Details are scarce since there’s no press release or official word from Adobe yet, but Business Catalyst has published a couple of Q&A on its website that shed a minimal amount of light on the agreement. From what we can gather at this point despite the vague wording used for the announcement, there won’t be too many changes at Business Catalyst as the products, partner agreements, team, pricing, etc. should remain largely unchanged. GoodBarry, on the other hand, being merely a Business Catalyst brand set up for their retail operations, will be gradually phased out and morphed into the Business Catalyst offering:

Most importantly, we’ll be refocusing our marketing and sales efforts on the web professional market (via businesscatalyst.com), as opposed to web-savvy DIYers such as you. In other words, this means that eventually we will cease “retail” operations and focus on our wholesale operations, and we will only be selling subscriptions to our software via our partner and reseller network.

As a result, the GoodBarry brand as such will cease to exist as of the 1st of October 2009, although the company says changes for customer will be mostly cosmetical (the billing and branding will be all Business Catalyst as of the aforementioned date).

The most important question however is why Adobe bought Business Catalyst in the first place and what its intentions are with the company in the near future. We’ve contacted the company for more clarity on that but in the meantime here’s what we know.

Business Catalyst / GoodBarry provides tools that help web designers set up online businesses for their clients with minimal cost and effort and no programming skills required, combining website content management, e-commerce features, e-mail marketing, business analytics and basic CRM tools into one system.

Adobe evidently offers a wide range of tools for web professionals, but in the near future does not plan to integrate Business Catalyst’s products into its own offering, although they are clearly looking to hosted services to deliver websites and online businesses more and more. There will be an initial transit period, but with regards to what will happen after that both companies remain mum and mention only that they are currently in ‘planning stages’ and will provide more information in the following weeks.

We’ll update if and when we hear more.

On a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Business Catalyst CEO and Founder Bardia Housman sold a company. In 1997, he co-founded Start (start.com.au), Australia’s first free e-mail service provider, which in two years became the largest trafficked website in Australia as measured by Hitwise. In December 1999, Looksmart was acquired Start.

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With online video hosting still in a rather embryonic phase, it’s only natural for Adobe Systems to lead innovation in the space by making it possible for users to upload and share motion pictures with friends and family online. Well, that would have been a good story lead five years ago, and then some. But please forgive my sarcasm for Adobe is lauding the new support for video on its Photoshop.com property today as if it were remarkably cutting-edge.

With the newly added video upload capabilities, Photoshop.com users can now upload videos up to 200MB in size through their browsers, or up to 2GB through the Adobe AIR Uploader in most file formats. The videos can subsequently be viewed directly on Photoshop.com (like this one). All Photoshop.com users receive 2GB of free storage.

Since Photoshop.com is (obviously) mostly known for its smooth photo-editing features, there doesn’t appear to be an option to edit videos yet, although I suspect these capabilities will be added soon enough.

Adobe is also debuting a Group Albums feature in Photoshop.com today, enabling users to group specific photos and videos together into one album and easily share that with your friends or relatives.

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I expect many of you already were aware of this, but I can imagine at least some of you aren’t yet, so here goes: apparently you can lift the usage restrictions from Adobe PDF files by simply forwarding them as attachments to your Gmail account and opening them in HTML mode right from your inbox. That way, you can copy whatever the ’secured’ PDF contains to a text editing program and do whatever you want with it.

For your reference: PDFs (Portable Document Format) can be encrypted so that a password is needed to view or edit its content, and they can also contain embedded DRM restrictions that provide further controls that limit copying, editing or printing.

Turns out the “View in HTML” feature in Gmail can display an HTML version of the encrypted file, stripping out the restrictions. Part of the layout might be lost in the process, but the text can easily be extracted with a simple copy/paste command. In case the original PDF file had printing restrictions, those are stripped as well.

I searched a bit for similar reports and found this article, dated April 2006, which was one of the first to discover the trick. The same blog later updated readers on the situation, stating Google crippled the security circumvention so that DRMed PDF files could no longer be opened in HTML mode, but a quick test with a secured file just worked fine right here and now. (Update: apparently, it doesn’t always work)

I don’t know about you, but this’ll save me some trouble next time someone sends me an encrypted Adobe PDF file that I’d like to copy or edit. Unless it’s illegal, in which case this post doesn’t exist.

(Via @Toon)

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Adobe has rolled out two new open source initiatives aimed specifically towards developers for media companies and publishers. Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework lets developers build more robust, feature-rich media players optimized specifically for the Adobe Flash Platform. The second initiative, the Text Layout Framework (TLF), will help developers create sophisticated typography capabilities to Web applications.

OSMF basically lets developers easily build media players for the Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe says the structure of OSMF lets developers leverage plug-ins for advertising, reporting metrics and content delivery along with standard video player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming. The OSMF source code and software components are available under the Mozilla Public License. Adobe is also partnering with content delivery service Akamai to create a cohesive standard to support Adobe media players that support Flash.

TLF lets developers layout text on web applications with support for complex languages, bidirectional text, multi-columns and other advanced typographical features and controls. TLF is an ActionScript library built on top of the text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 software. Similar to OSMF, TLF is available as open source under the Mozilla Public License.

Adobe’s product manager for Flash, Tom Barclay, says that these new initiatives are mainly targeted towards media companies who want to leverage typography technologies and rich media players off of the Flash and Adobe AIR platforms. The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe’s GlobeReader are both powered by TLF, and leverage the typography features of the open source code. Barclay says that Adobe saw an opportunity to open code to Flash applications that could prove to make interactive rich media applications. In the past, Adobe has also opened up the Flex Platform and launched the Open Screen Project.

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