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...

Microsoft has finally officially released its free HD Photo plug-ins for Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

I wrote about HD Photo a while back when it was first announced and after my initial doubts - why on earth would we want a JPEG replacement? - I was won round by the flexibility of the specification...