With the newer versions of WordPress there is a button to embed media.

Once clicked, all you have to do is enter in the Flash (swf) file URL, set the dimensions, hit ‘Insert’, and WordPress will do the rest.

It’s that easy. No plugins, no confusing code, just provide WordPress with the URL of the Flash swf file and it’ll write the code to embed the Flash file into your post.

As a bonus, the embed option also works with Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real Media if you need to embed those media files as well.

The deal would provide Force.com with an Adobe Flash Builder, which in turn allows for easier deployment of Flash applications on the cloud. The new environment would extend to Salesforce.com’s CRM apps as well. The collaboration would assist in building business applications and even desktop apps that run offline.

Salesforce.com is hoping with the new deal, Force.com will see a wider use. As it stands now, Force.com has approximately 63,000 clients, and over 120,000 apps.

The technical aspect of the deal will have Flash maintaining apps on the front end, with Saleforce.com’s programming language running the backend. ActionScript and MXML would be two languages utilized in development.

There have been many reactions to this deal. The most popular thought is that with this deal Force.com will be looked at more than just a CRM extension. Dave Gruber, an Adobe platform business manager explains, “The other big use case of this offering will be for the Salesforce.com installed base to add rich data visualization to their applications and extend those applications with richer workflow”

On the Force.com blog, Jon Mountjoy lists some of the new features of the Adobe Flash Builder:

- Online and offline data synchronization and management

- A local data store, letting you create apps that work even when they’re not connected

- When you do connect (hungry and parched), you can make use of the conflict resolution service to help sync the changes back to Force.com app.

- The IDE lets you compose the applications effortlessly too, and includes a gamut of user interface components for presenting, and visualizing your data – including charting and animation.

As of now the Adobe Flash Builder is being released as a ‘developer preview’. Meaning, that Force.com is wanting developers to get on there and explore some of it’s functionality. However, it is still not ready for producing work related apps.

To clear thing up, Kevin Towes, FMS Product Manager at Adobe, just posted the following information to the FlashMedia List:

STRATUS – this will always be ahead of the curve, providing a way to help us roll out new features that are in Flash player, before we can have a server offering. The service is and will remain as a free non-commercial service from Adobe. This service is not FMS, and has no ability for Server side scripting, or customization.

AFCS/LIVECYCLE COLLABORATION SERVICE – this will be a commercial option for customers interested in building a business that includes RTMFP. We introduced a pricing model, and it has support for the features found inside Stratus 1.0 (supporting Flash player 10.0). Key advantage with this service is the framework, which is an option for developers to get started, and leverage RTMFP to RTMP failover technology. You still will not have access to server side scripting, but there are lots of APIs in the framework to get you going. The goal for this service is to provide developers an option to bring this technology into your solution.

FLASH MEDIA SERVER – we have not announced any new version of FMS yet that will support RTMFP. We did hint yesterday that we’ll be updating FMS3.5 to version 3.5.3 later this year to support the new FP 10.1 features – and in a future version after that release – FMS may be one of your options to host a local service to build your own P2P applications – including introductions, and supporting server side programming.

Thanks Kevin, I think this clears things up somewhat.

Overview
I’m not quite sure where to start, but I’ll have a try:
Flash Player 10.1 can be labeled as a ‘real’ fully featured Flash Player for mobile. It contains a lot of optimisations as well as new APIs that are directly aimed at breaking open the mobile device market for Flash – I think it’s safe to say that the time for Flash on mobile has finally come.

Flash Lite was always somewhat of a watered down version of the real thing, and its install and launch process was not the most user friendly. Now that devices are becoming more powerful it’s possible to bring a real Flash Player to mobiles. This means that rather than being a standalone Player into which you load a SWF you will be able to access web pages with embedded SWFs as you normally would on your desktop.

Performance Improvements
The new Player contains a lot of features that take device constraints into consideration, for example it includes performance improvements such as rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations, in addition to hardware acceleration of graphics and video. Improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage, and rendering/scripting performance benefit PCs as well as mobile devices. Flash Player 10.1 is new in that way – it is no longer just a desktop player, nor is it specially developed for mobile. Instead it combines the two and contains optimisations for mobile device playback.

HTTP Streaming Support
In Flash Player 10.1, you will also be able to load video through HTTP Streaming, which lets you take a video and convert it into many fragments that Flash Player can download individually with the help of new components. These fragments can be stored on any web server and do not require specialized hardware. This solution provides a greater amount of random access to the video than progressive loading does.

Hardware Acceleration, Multi-touch and more
Thrown in with the mobile and Flash Player related news are a bunch of other items which directly affect Flash’s video features, such as hardware acceleration for pretty much any audio/video playback, without requiring fullscreen playback. Vector shapes and images can also use hardware acceleration, making mobile device playback in particular a lot smoother. The browser-based runtime leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization. New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities include support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience.

FMS 3.5.3
Improvements have also been announced to FMS which will see an update to 3.5.3 later this month. If a user loses the network connection or switches among different networks, Flash Media Server and Flash Player will renegotiate the stream while the video keeps playing from the buffer. When the connection is re-established, the new connection continues filling up the buffer right where it left off, meaning no interruption in the video experience. To give users even more control, Flash Player 10.1 lets them seek within the existing buffer without causing the player to rebuffer the video. This includes a new trailing buffer that keeps the video you’ve just watched in memory so that going back to see something you missed doesn’t mean having to wait.

RTMFP
Since RTMFP is ‘just’ the name of a new protocol I think it flies under the radar of a lot of tech blogs as well as Flash Developers. But let me assure you that it could be one of the most disruptive new features for Flash Player yet. We already know that there will be a bunch of sessions at Adobe MAX covering RTFMP, and we’ve also heard this morning about a new feature within RTFMP called groups. This will allow you to send P2P based messages to a specific group of people within a Flash Player P2P mesh, and it will open the door for a lot of real-time collaborative applications. The implications of RTFMP for live video broadcasts (amongst other things) are huge and we saw some sneak peaks of that at MAX last year. Keep your eye on RTMFP, it’ll be huge.

New Releases
There is more to report than that such as the release of ColdFusion 9, the release and rebranding of Adobe Flash Collaboration Service to Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service (pricing for it has also been announced) plus public beta drops for Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.
You can see a full list of Adobe Press Releases here – and this is likely to grow over the next few days…

To wet your appetite a bit, Fabio has prepared a video comparison demo which shows just what can be done with the right encoding parameters and some clever pre-processing. In his demo, Fabio has taken a music video from YouTube (original bitrate ~2MBit/sec) and re-encoded it at a mere 500 Kbit/sec. If you expect the re-encoded, low bitrate content to be of lower quality then think again.

And to find you how this was achieved and what technical tricks made me watch and listen to an entire Bjork video without complaints then you just need to get yourself down to LA for Adobe MAX 2009, and more specifically to Room 506 on 5th October at 2:00 pm. If nothing else you can enjoy Fabio’s trademark Italian accent – but trust me when I say that Fabio’s talk will not be the only item on the agenda to look forward to.