AnandTech have put the Flash Player 10.1 prelease through its paces. The bottom line is a massive improvement in video performance. CPU usage is greatly reduced and as a result playback much smoother.

This is great news for Flash developers and well, anyone who watches video online. Since nearly every Nvidia card is supported you will also be able to play Flash HD video on your smartphone.

You can now grab the prerelease of Flash Player 10.1 from Adobe labs. The main new feature is hardware acceleration, but don’t get too excited, this only works with H.264 video and is currently limited to the Windows plugin. The good news is that Adobe have focused on optimization, so your existing projects should benefit from a performance boost. Other highlights include multi-touch\gesture support and local microphone access.

The truly excellent Greensock tweening platform has hit another milestone in the form of its version 11 release. We have been using tweenMax exclusively for sometime now and can not recommend it enough. If you are still using tweener, or perhaps Adobes own offering, give Greensock a run and you will be amazed by the speed and flexibility of the platform.

New features include TweenNano: a ridiculously small (1.6k) tweening engine and TimelineLite\Max which make managing sequences and tweening groups mind numbingly simple.

The popular Flash stock site Flashden, has been ordered to remove Flash from their url and branding by the Adobe legal team (which I hope are not reading this blog). They have decided upon the rather awkward sounding Activeden.

Adobe have something of a tradition of aggressively protecting their apparent trademarks, even if the words are as common as “air” or “flash”. James Whittaker (freshAIRApps), Kelvin Luck (shAIR) and Geoff Stearns (flashObject) can all attest to this. Clearly the Adobe legal team has enough sway to make these sites change names – without much resistance.

Some of you will argue that Adobe has to do this, that is the only way to ensure the brand is not diluted. Its just a legal question that any large company would pursue. The problem is what all of these sites have in common is they were actively promoting Adobe brands. Flashden in particular is one of Adobe’s biggest evangelists, introducing more people to the Flash platform than any Adobe owned site could ever dream of.

Legal questions aside, these kind of actions do nothing for the goodwill of the very people who are looking to promote the technology. If Adobe can`t be more creative in enforcing these trademarks, many will soon become disillusioned with the company. Adobe must realise these seemingly ridiculous law suits are starting to make them look like the 800lb gorilla in the room.