Blackberry Playbook SDK Beta 2
A new release of the SDK for the Playbook has been released. This one contains support for Flash Builder Burrito so now you leverage the Flex Hero framework for mobile development. And don't forget, get your AIR apps for the Playbook into the AppWorld store in order to get yourself a free Playbook.
http://devblog.blackberry.com/2010/12/blackberry-tablet-os-sdk-adobe-air/
Renaun shares a little more detail on getting the SDK running with Burrito:
http://renaun.com/blog/2010/12/update-to-playbook-sdk-provides-flash-builder-burrito-plugin/
Tips From NFB Interactive
The NFB has been on a roll with a number of successful and high profile interactive projects lately such as Out the Window and David Suzuki's Test Tube. In the name of knowledge sharing the NFB interactive team has shared "a list of 10 things to remember when looking to produce cross-platform media."
http://blog.nfb.ca/2010/12/01/10-things-to-keep-in-mind-for-producing-cross-platform-media/
Flash Player 10.2 Beta Released
Adobe clearly isn't sitting around resting. A new beta for Flash Player 10.2 has hit public release. This one contains the much talked about Stage Video that puts video rendering in the hands of the GPU thereby cutting down your CPU usage to just a few percent while watching HD video. Thibault Imbert has all the details for you:
http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2373
YouTube testing Stage Video
Hot off the heals of the Flash Player 10.2 release, YouTube has announced that they are testing and aiming to support Stage Video in their player. Developers can already make use of it by adding wmode=direct to their url query parameters.
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/12/accelerating-youtube-playback.html
Drawing with Kinect
It was only a matter of time before this happened. The folks at Razorfish have ported their gesture based drawing application, DaVinci, to use the Kinect as the controller.
http://emergingexperiences.com/2010/12/davinci-goes-touchless-with-xbox-kinect/
Canvas for Games?
Lot's of people have been experimenting with using the HTML 5 canvas element to build browser based games. At this point there are still lots of potential problems to be aware of though.
http://paulbakaus.com/2010/07/19/why-canvas-is-not-an-obvious-choice-for-web-games/