Adobe is clearly determined to match Microsoft Silverlight all the way and has made a number of announcements regarding new versions of its Flash player.

To begin with Adobe have now released the Flash Player 9 update 3 which adds support for H.264 standard video as seen in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. With new hardware acceleration and multi-processor support, and new associated Media Server options, this promises to lift the ceiling for web video quality and to match Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0's handling.

Announcements regarding Microsoft's Flash-killer Silverlight player are certainly coming thick and fast.

The media-oriented Silverlight 1.0 beta went live back in May at the MIX 07 conference but most of the talk was about the imminent launch of the next 1.1 player which would add .NET support for advanced programmability. Now Microsoft has begun talking about what's going to be in Silverlight 2.0...

Well it had to happen. With Microsoft pushing Silverlight on the basis of its superior video handling, Adobe had to respond. And rather than waiting for the next release of the CS apps it's updated the existing Flash Player 9 ...

Tom Arah examines what the recent Flash-based developments mean for the future.

Amazingly, the Flash SWF format’s rise to dominance began with its ability to embed simple, cartoon-style vector animations into HTML web pages to give them a bit of a lift...

Tom Arah weighs up whether Microsoft’s new HD Photo format is good news or bad.

You might think that Microsoft’s recent announcement of its new continuous tone bitmap format, Windows Media Photo – since renamed HD Photo - would be greeted with universal acclaim...

Tom Arah investigates Google’s acquisition of SketchUp and what it might mean for browser-based 3D.

I've long been a big fan of a little program created by @Last Software called SketchUp which is designed to make producing 3D models as easy as 2D drawing – “3D for everyone” as their mission statement puts it...