Adobe continues the Flash fight with 10.3 beta

From CNET News.com: Revving the Flash Player development engine as fast as possible, Adobe Systems has issued a beta of version 10.3 that lets programmers use a variety of new audio tools.

Those audio possibilities could be very useful for those writing Net-based voice communication software. Features include canceling noise and echoes, detecting when a person has started or stopped speaking, and correcting microphone volume levels to even out speech loudness, Flash product manager Thibault Imbert said in a blog post late yesterday.

More broadly, though, the software embodies Adobe's push to keep Flash competitive. The browser plug-in is, if not fighting for its life, in a much less secure position than in years past when programmers could safely assume virtually all browsers had the plug-in installed.

Even as Adobe seeks to make Flash--and a close relative, AIR--a foundation for software that runs on a wide variety of computing devices, the technology faces two big challenges. First are mobile devices, which can lack the processing horsepower and memory to handle Flash and which in the case of Apple's iOS bans Flash altogether. Second is a maturing suite of Web standards that increasingly can handle many programming tasks that previously required Flash--including on those mobile devices that lack Flash.

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