'Angry Birds' is Flash's latest 'endorser'

With Apple discouraging users from using it and Microsoft showing signs of snubbing it, Adobe's Flash multimedia software just got a flock of potential endorsers: Angry Birds. A new version of the immensely popular video game buit on Adobe's Flash Player 11 was previewed at this week's launch of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. "While Rovio has worked with several technologies from native development on mobile devices to HTML, this new Flash Player version of Angry Birds will further broaden the game’s reach and help Rovio gain a wider audience for its content," Adobe said in a blog post. The latest version was also built using the Starling framework, an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of GPU hardware accelerated 2D/3D APIs. A separate article on tech site CNET quoted Andrew Stalbow, general manager of Rovio's North American operations, as saying the new version is due "in the next few months." Stalbow added this will let the company reach more people than the 400 million people who have downloaded the game. "Our goal is to deliver Angry Birds to every device, platform, and person around the world," Stalbow said. Stalbow said Flash 11's "Molehill" interface, which lets programmers tap into a computing device's graphical processing unit (GPU), is used in a new Angry Birds game engine. Adobe's latest potential gain comes as Apple Inc. is discouraging its users from using Flash in Mac OS X, and Microsoft is turning to HTML5 in its upcoming operating system Windows 8. — TJD, GMA News