Flash Moves Closer to The Software Graveyard as Unity Drops Support For The Dying Platform

Oh, Flash. Remember when there was still a little reason to believe that it wasn’t a dying medium? When the angry Android masses swore up and down that the absence of Flash would be the death of iOS… only for Adobe to kill their Android effort after just a year?

The shambling corpse of Flash takes another punch to the face today, with game engine Unity announcing plans to drop support.

For the unfamiliar, Unity is a pretty friggin’ awesome game development engine, used in releases like Rovio’s Bad Piggies, Temple Run 2, and a host of other games. It was used  pretty heavily to build the Augmented Reality TARDIS project, as well.

One year ago, Unity began work on a feature that allowed developers to export their Unity projects to a Flash SWF file. While the company plans to keep Flash support around until the next major Unity release, the only work they’ll be putting into it moving forward is bug fixes.

Unity CEO David Helgason has a full post on his reasoning here, and his three-part logic is pretty straightforward:

Unity doesn’t see Adobe as being committed to Flash anymore

With things like mobile support and Adobe’s crazy Flash revenue sharing requirements being announced and then quickly abandoned, Developers have seemingly stopped trusting Flash.

Developers seem to be moving away from Flash, so Unity would rather focus on improving their own web player, which has suddenly found its footing amongst Facebook developers

As you might expect, the comments on the Unity post have turned into a bit of a war zone, with much of the heat thrown by those who somehow haven’t moved on since the summer of 1999.

It’s been fun, Flash. We had some good times on Newgrounds back in the day. You’re still my favorite platform for video playback until HTML5 gets its W3C wings. But it’s sleep time soon, okay? [Source]

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Sony Releases a $2,000 Pair of Binoculars. Apart From Recording at 1080p, Sony's DEV-50V Also Record in 3D [Video]

Fancy yourself as the James Bond of astronomy? Here’s the super spy tech right here for you. Sony’s new DEV-50V, the next-gen successor to the DEV-5 Digital Recording Binoculars, packs in some Q-like gadgetry, with super zooming right up to 25 times and even 3D video recording thrown in. You won’t be bird watching with these.

The Sony DEV-50V packs in dual Exmor R CMOS sensors – like the ones you’d find in Sony’s top of the line cameras – which shoot 20.4-megapixel still images and full HD, 3D video at 60 frames per second. It’s also perfect for watching back 3D clips – when coupled up with the dual OLED viewfinders, playing back your stereoscopic videos through the binoculars shouldn’t give you a headache like some other 3D gizmos will.

Sony’s super binoculars also help you out if you don’t have the most steady of hands at high zoom thanks to the active optical SteadyShot, and they’re also water and dust resistant, which makes them perfect for any budding David Attenborough types out in the wild. The Sony DEV-50V binocs are set to hit American stores in June for $2,000 (A cool £1,310) but we’ll let you know as soon as we find out when they’re out over here.

Fancy these binoculars for your next spy mission or are you looking for something cheaper? Let us know what you think in the comments below. [Source]

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A Study Shows That The Most Reliable Windows PC is a MacBook Pro With Boot Camp

Here’s something that should embarrass Microsoft’s OEM partners: The most reliable Windows PC in the world wasn’t even designed to run on Windows. ZDNet reports that a new study from PC efficiency software vendor Soluto has used “data from its massive online database of PC crashes, hangs, and performance metrics to identify the 10 most reliable Windows PCs you can buy today.” The study found that the 13-inch Retina-equipped MacBook Pro with Boot Camp installed is “at the top of the list.” 

Other reliable PCs include the Acer Aspire E1-571, the Dell XPS 13, the Dell Vostro 3560, the Acer Aspire V3-771 and Apple’s 15-inch Retina-equipped MacBook Pro. Taken all together, then, Apple computers account for 33% of the six most reliable Windows PCs in the world while no PCs produced by the world’s leading vendor HP even crack the top 10. [Source]

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