Adobe’s new Flash player

Adobe is releasing a new version of its popular Flash Player to take on increasing competition.



Flash Player 10 will have many new applications which will enhance the experience of rich internet applications. Though Flash player still dominates desktops, Microsoft’s Silverlight application and Sun’s JavaFX RIA platform are attracting much attention these days.



The new Flash player will have improved custom filters and effects apart from the new Adobe Pixel Bender. It can be combined with Adobe’s Flex development platform for building applications.



It is believed that Flash Player is present on more than 98 per cent of computers used to access the Internet.



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Ask.com on buy spree



Search site Ask.com is taking over popular websites Dictio-nary.com and Thesaurus.com, which are run by Lexico.



Ask, which is slowly expanding its terrain in the search business, hopes to get more than 145 million users every month after these acquisitions. It is the refurbished version of Ask Jeeves which was launched in 1996. Though it has its loyal users, Ask.com has not been able to be on the same league as Google and Yahoo.



The search site had decided to buy the two popular websites after an attempt by Answers Corp to buy them out failed to happen.



It is believed that Ask.com would improve the user experience of the two sites by adding images and video clips.



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Computer everywhere



Gates sees computers everywhere Microsoft chairman Bill Gates foresees a future when there will be computers everywhere you touch.



His dazzling visi-on of the future was outlined at the Microsoft’s annual CEO Summit in Redmond in the United States.



What excited him most was Micro-soft’s new tabletop Surface computer which has a touch screen interface.



Promising a vertical version soon, Gates said that such computers would soon fill up all available surfaces, so to say, including walls, pillars and desks. "All of them will eventually have a low-cost screen display capability in both the office and the home," Gates said.

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