Now in the app store, Echofon 5 has several new features and enhancements.

Redesigned Compose View

The compose view has gotten an update with a cleaner look, and a draft manager. Whenever you exit out of the this view you’ll be asked if you want to save your tweet as a draft. You can save as many as you like and access them later. Also new is the ability to upload multiple photos.

Improved Scrolling Speed

We've put great effort into optimizing the most important aspects of Echofon – scrolling through the timeline. We think you’ll agree, it's snappier!

Black Theme

Back by popular demand, a true black theme. Great for late night tweeting. To turn it on, just go to Menu > Settings > Theme.

That’s Not All

We’ve made other small enhancements throughout the app, here are a few:

• Refined menu screen, with fast user switching.
• Quick tweet menu (activated by tapping an avatar in the timeline)
• Reply acts as “Reply All” by default.

Download Echofon for iPhone
Download Echofon Pro for iPhone

Adobe MAX is here, and we’ve got a lot of news to share. Today we’re releasing Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 — you can download the release starting at 9:00 PM Pacific today. As we announced previously, there are lots of new features in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, and one of the newest features that’s getting a lot of buzz is hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering through Stage 3D, which will be available on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions. It redefines what’s possible across the web. With up to 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2, developers can animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver cinematic, console-quality games both in browsers and in apps. And a production release with support for Stage 3D for mobile platforms including Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS is expected in an upcoming release. For more information about Stage 3D and to see some sample apps, check out the Stage 3D games on the Adobe Developer Center.

Additionally, we’re excited that “Proscenium,” a 3D framework technology preview, is available on Adobe Labs. Proscenium will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype experiences focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections. Check it out and let us know what you think.

We previously announced the availability of the Starling 2D framework for stunning hardware accelerated, fluid 2D graphics, and you can check out a new game developed using the Starling framework, Whack! from BxyB. There’s also new information for available for developing using 3D frameworks like Alternativa3D, Away3D, Flare3D, Mixamo, and Minko.

And lastly, we want to extend a welcome to our newest developers and colleagues from Nitobi, makers of PhoneGap, which will soon become part of the Adobe family. With all of our announcements today, we believe developers will benefit from a workflow that allows them to choose the right tool for the right job, and we’ll continue to keep driving innovation in Flash so you can push the edge of the envelope for immersive experiences online.

We’ve already seen some early previews of games and apps that will be available in market soon, and there are now over 10,000 AIR apps in mobile markets.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll create. And there’s more news to come tomorrow, so stay tuned. You can watch the second day MAX keynote streamed live at 10am PDT, and be sure to check out the Flash Platform Blog for the latest updates.

Tom Nguyen
Sr. Product Manager, Flash Player & AIR / @tomng

Customer feedback helps us evolve Flash so that we can help developers and designers push what’s possible for over a billion people on the web. Adobe Labs is an invaluable channel for us to engage with our community, and it’s where we share some of our early investigations, showcasing unsupported previews of experimental technologies. Some of these previews go on to become fully supported features or products, and others are phased out after we’ve had the opportunity to learn from them, allowing us to prioritize new product innovations.

In advance of releasing the next-generation Flash runtimes, Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, we want to share that we will soon be winding down our Labs preview of “Alchemy.”

We released Alchemy on Labs over two years ago as an experimental prototype that allowed developers to leverage C/C++ code in Flash Player and AIR. We have not updated the original Alchemy prototype, and while we noted from the beginning that it should not be relied upon for production content, we’ve received persistent requests from developers asking for official support in the Flash runtimes.

We’ve been listening and have decided to invest in creating an improved version of Alchemy, which we plan to release as part of a paid production offering for commercial development. We intend to make non-commercial use free of charge.

The production release will offer significantly better performance and productivity over the Labs prototype. By re-architecting major portions of the technology, we aim to enable code execution approaching native performance, scalable support for large code bases, full debugging support, up to 75% reduction in code size, and seamless integration with ActionScript – all while reaching virtually every connected computer on the web.

This new offering will be available with a future update to the Flash runtimes, and we are temporarily including the prototype in the initial releases of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. We continue to advise developers not to use the prototype for production content. Content created with the prototype for Flash Player 10.x and AIR 2.x will continue to work in future versions of Flash Player and AIR. The new production version of Alchemy will be needed to deliver Alchemy-enabled content that requires Flash Player 11 or AIR 3 and beyond.

In other Adobe Labs updates, we’re excited about today’s announcement that Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be available in early October. They introduce full GPU-accelerated graphics rendering with the new Stage 3D API previewed on Adobe Labs, providing 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2. Stage 3D takes the throttle off developer and designer creativity, enabling stunning content that can animate millions of objects with silky smooth 60 FPS rendering. Check out our announcement blog post to learn more about this and the other advanced new capabilities in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3.

We’re using the spirit of innovation behind Adobe Labs to change what people can do on the web, and technologies like Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will enable a new class of incredible immersive experiences. We have a lot more in store as we continue our work to enable millions of developers to reach over a billion people with stunning applications – from games and premium video to sophisticated, data-driven content. We look forward to sharing – and showing – more about the future at Adobe MAX next month.

Update – Nov 22, 2011: Starting with Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, content targeting Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 (i.e., content using SWF version 13 and above) will not support the experimental Alchemy prototype. Existing Alchemy experiments targeting Flash Player 10.x and AIR 2.x are unaffected. We’re continuing work on the new production version of Alchemy for next year that will allow developers to publish Alchemy-enabled content targeting Flash Player 11 or AIR 3 and beyond. And if you’re interested in Alchemy, we invite you to participate in our survey. We appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback!

 

We saw that there were some questions today related to Flash Player 10.3 support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7) related to hardware video acceleration. To avoid any more confusion, we wanted to clarify:

The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6).  The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration.  We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.

Today we are excited to announce the availability of the Adobe AIR 3 beta and the Adobe Flash Player 11 beta for desktop platforms on Adobe Labs.  AIR and Flash Player continue to drive innovation for rich, engaging digital experiences with new features for cross-device standalone application development and expressive rich internet applications, games, and videos in the browser.   Some of the features from the Flash Player Incubator, such as Stage 3D and 64-bit support, have been moved into this beta release. Developers can test and provide feedback on the new features, and should also focus on testing existing content for compatibility and stability.

Some of the features and performance enhancements included in the Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 betas:

•  Captive Runtime for AIR*: This popular feature from AIR for iOS will now be available on AIR for desktop.  Simplify the app installation process, reduce testing and certification cost by encapsulating the AIR runtime in your Windows, Mac and and Android apps.
• Native 64-bit support for Flash Player: Take advantage of new 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit Web browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
• Stage 3D graphics rendering: Stage 3D  (“Molehill) is a new method of 2D and 3D rendering and is supported with a new Stage3D API. The Stage3D API is a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices (desktop, mobile and tv). These new low-level APIs will provide 2D and 3D engine developers the flexibility to leverage GPU hardware acceleration for significant performance gains.  You can view examples on the Stage 3D page.
• H.264/AVC SW Encode for camera encoding: Higher compression efficiency and industry wide support for real-time communications and non-real-time broadcast scenarios, like webcasting, livecasting, etc.
• Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) support: Enables ActionScript programmers take advantage of fast parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data. Take existing data and integrate it with minimal or no modification into your ActionScript project.

We’re also pleased to announce a new public bugbase system where you can file bugs and feature requests for both Flash Player and AIR. The new bugbase is a public front end to our internal bugbase, which will improve tracking, communication, and responsiveness for issues and feature requests. The former bugbase will remain as read only, and we are in the process of transferring over all relevant issues and feature requests to the new system.

Finally, as 3D and security have been a topic of interest lately, I want to touch on a few points about how Adobe is bringing 3D to the Web in Flash Player and apps through AIR. Because two of our primary design goals were to ensure Stage 3D will run great on mobile devices without compromising security, the Stage 3D implementation exposes a specific set of GPU features, resulting in a small API surface, making it easier to secure. We also added restrictions that help mitigate many of the security concerns around accessing OpenGL. For instance, we limit the number of calls per frame, minimizing the risk of denial-of-service attacks. We also designed a simple shader language (AGAL – Adobe Graphics Assembly Language) with restrictions such as prohibiting loops or functions inside shaders. The simplicity of AGAL makes it also easy to verify and validate compared to the GLSL dialect that is used by other solutions like WebGL.

This first beta is a desktop release, and we’re hard at work on mobile, which will be coming soon. The runtimes team is looking forward to your feedback during the beta period, and the amazing experiences that will be delivered through Flash Player 11 and AIR 3!

To learn more about the Flash Player ...

To comply with Twitter's new OAuth requirement, all of the Echofon applications will ask users to re-authenticate their accounts.

This is Twitter's new security measure for all third party applications, and you have to re-authenticate to read or delete DMs via Echofon after July 1st, 2011.

Re-authenticating is easy - Update your Echofon to the latest version (see below), you will be prompted to do so when needed.

• Echofon iPhone version 4.0.9
• Echofon Firefox version 2.0.9
• Echofon Mac version 1.4.7

To learn more about Twitter's requirements and OAuth, please visit Twitter's blog post.

UPDATE 12:00PM 6/30/2011: The new permission level is now in effect. There are few minor issues regarding re-authenticating. If you get into re-authentication loop, here's some workaround:

Firefox: Please update to version 2.0.9, or re-start Firefox after you re-authorized Echofon.

iPhone/iPad/Mac: Deleting account then re-adding it will solve the issue.

Thank you for a lot of feedback about new Echofon Firefox beta! Since many of you asked us to bring back old UI, we added "Panel Mode" which works like Echofon 1.x. This is how it looks:

Since Panel/Sidebar mode doesn't have a menubar, here's some tricks that you might want to use.

• Click selected tab to jump to unread point
• Tab key to next tab, Shift+Tab key to previous tab when the compose text box is focused
• Escape key to close Panel
• enter "@username" in awesome bar (location bar) to open user profile view

Here's complete changes in version 2.0 beta2:

• Added "Panel Mode" (works with Firefox 4 only for now)
• Added menubar on window mode with several keyboard shortcuts
• Added spell check and suggestion in the context menu of the compose text area
• Added "Popup tweet while Echofon window/sidebar is open" and "Always open a link in a new tab" option


• Echofon follows "Open new tab in background" settings to open links
• Click Photo View to open its original photo page
• Do not open Photo View if user clicks a photo URL (Photo View will be opened only by clicking thumbnail)
• Fixed an issue that unread border doesn't appear in certain case
• Fixed an issue of missing tweets
• Fixed an issue that retweet function doesn't work
• Fixed an issue that mute settings disappears after user restart Firefox
• Fixed an issue that default keyboard shortcut is conflicted with Firefox 4 on Windows
• Fixed several other minor issues

Download Echofon Firefox 2.0 beta

Today we are releasing a beta of the next major version of Echofon for Firefox. This update includes a redesigned interface, full Firefox 4 support, user streams support (coming soon, pending approval from Twitter) and many other features.

Echofon for Firefox is a Firefox extension that lets you easily browse Twitter while using your browser. This update brings it up to speed as a fully featured Twitter client.

New Design

This version has a newly design interface that can be used as a sidebar integrated into your browser window or in window mode which puts the app in a standalone window. In addition there are countless UI enhancements including inline photo preview and subtle unread tweet indicators.

New Features

We've added many of the great features present in Echofon for Mac and iOS to this version of Echofon for Firefox. You can mute clients, users and hashtags (mute settings sync between devices). Photo previews and photo popups make browsing media a joy. This version includes tabs for search (with trends, and saved search support) as well as lists. There is also a new conversation view and user view. View a user's tweets, lists, favorites, followers etc.

User Streams

We've built in support for user streams which allows you to view tweets immediately when they are posted without reloading. (Note: This feature is disabled for now, pending approval from Twitter)

Get it Now

Remember, this is a beta so things might not work or look perfectly, if you find a problem or have a suggestion, please let us know on Twitter (@echofon)!

Install Echofon for Firefox Public Beta

Photo Preview

We've just released version 1.4 of Echofon for Mac. This version brings the same inline photo/video preview that you've been enjoying on Echofon for iPad and iPhone to the Mac version.

Mute

We've also added support for Echofon's new mute feature to this version of Echofon for Mac. You can mute users, clients and hashtags. These items will be hidden from your timeline and you can add or remove them at any time.

Muted items are synced through the Echofon Push/Sync server so you'll have the same items available on any device where Echofon supports mute.

New Notification Settings

Notification settings have been simplified and the ability to disable unread counts has been added. Echofon still tracks and syncs unread tweets, but you can choose not to display the number.

Download directly from our website.

This entry explains recent issues regarding Echofon Japanese version.

[お知らせとお詫び]

日本時間3月6日より、コカ・コーラ パーク様とのタイアップキャンペーンを実施中ですが、その運用につき、以下２点問題があったことをお詫び申し上げます。

キャンペーンの内容ですが、これは、起動時の選択により背景色（テーマ）の変更および同社アカウントをフォローする、というもので、具体的には、起動時に

コカ・コーラ パーク1000万人会員達成記念！背景をコカ・コーラ パークのテーマに変更して、@CocaColaParkをフォローしますか

というメッセージを表示、「はい」を選択した方が対象となるというものでした。

問題は以下の２点です。

1. アド・フリーの有料バージョンでも上記メッセージが表示された

   有料版でも「いいえ」を選択することでアド・フリーとなると考えたのですが、メッセージを表示すること自体が広告であるとのご指摘を受け、日本時間６日にメッセージが表示されないバージョンをApp Storeに提出しました。

   ただし、App Storeから新しいバージョンのダウンロードが可能になるのは、アップル社に承認された後となり、それには数日〜１週間ほどかかると想定されます。その間はご迷惑をおかけすることをご容赦下さい。

2. 一旦変更した背景色（テーマ）をもとに戻す方法がわかりにくい

   ［メニュー］→［アカウントオプション］→［テーマ］で元の背景色（またはそれ以外）に変更可能です。

なお、上記２点は全てEchofonが決めたことであり、コカ・コーラ パーク様のご意向ではありません。ご迷惑をおかけしたユーザの皆様にお詫び申し上げます。