Two weeks ago, Adobe released Flash player 10.1 for browsers, and now it has released 10.1 for mobile phones and mobile browsers as well. The new release adds a bunch of speed and reliability improvements, and should help on battery life as well — something Flash is known to use a lot of on phones.

The company says it plans on bringing Flash 10.1 to over half the smartphones before the year 2012. Of course, don’t expect those smartphones to include the iPhone.

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Adobe has released Flash 10.1, which brings a major new feature in form of hardware accelerated video playback, power improvements and much more.

An OS X version is under way, and it’ll certainly be welcome — we’d like to watch a few YouTube videos without our MacBook fans spinning up like crazy.

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Apple and Adobe have been fighting over Flash on the iPhone and iPad for a while now, and now Apple CEO Steve Jobs has personally joined the fight, writing an open letter criticizing Flash for being closed and inefficient. Jobs said,

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

You can read the lengthy and interesting letter here.

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Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful application for image editing. It’s an industry standard for anyone serious about photo manipulation and such. However, it comes with a heavy price tag. Of course, it can be easily pirated, but we don’t advocate any illegal activity here at Sly. Let’s take a look at a few of the alternatives for image editing. Every program on this list is free.

5. IrfanView - Less of an image editor, more of an image viewer. If you’re not interested in adding fancy text and editing to your images and only want a reliable cropping and resizing tool, IrfanView is a light application that will do exactly that for you. I use it all the time when I don’t want to boot up Photoshop, which comparatively takes a lot of memory out of my system RAM.

4. Helicon Filter - The main focus of Helicon Filter is to provide an image editing program for photographers. You can easily edit standard images with it, offering a very basic and straightforward approach.

3. Pixia - The focus of Pixia was to be for the Anime and Manga community, however it has reached out to people looking for Photoshop alternative. The project has recently updated to a new engine, so be sure to give it a try.

2. Paint.net - Developed on the .NET framework, Paint.net offers a simple solution for your every day needs for resizing, cropping, etc.

1. GIMP -  The most powerful free image manipulation out there. It matches up closely to Adobe Photoshop, and delivers a lot of bang for no buck. If you want more of a replication of Photoshop, be sure to check out GIMPshop.

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No, not another post listing all the wonderful speakers at the conference, but my experience on the first day of South By Southwest Interactive - lines for everything!

I arrived at the Austin Conventon Center with what I thought was plenty of time to park the car and get into my first session. That was a mistake. I lined up with all the other drivers to get into the parking lot, finally it was my turn to pay, except that whilst the car in front of me paid and drove up the ramp, the attendent left their booth and flagged me forward and told me the parking lot was now full and I would have to turn around and leave!

This was followed by 15 minutes of driving around the block to find another parking lot - fortunately I found one only a couple of blocks away.  So having parked the car I headed back to the convention center, only to be greeted by one of the longest lines I have ever seen. I confirmed with a helper that this was in fact the line for the people who had already pre-registered, yes I was told it was.  So 50 minutes later I had finally progressed to the front of the line - except it wasn’t it was the front of the downstairs portion of the line. Next was to line up to use the escalator to go up to floors to the badge pickup. Finally I was allowed upstairs to be met with, yes you guessed it another line. 15 minutes later and I was standing in front of the badge pickup desk confirming my details, those confirmed, I was told to go and “wait in line” for my badge to be brought out. Ten minutes of waiting produced my badge so now off to get my conference bag and directory. Back down stairs past all the people still in line, I over hear one of the assistants telling someone that the end of the line is now outside the building (its raining out there) guess my wait indoors wasnt so bad.

Bag pickup, is of course at the end of another line - this one not so long, only about 5 minutes. I pick up my directory and bag. I am cautioned that the directory will cost me $40 if I lose it - yikes, best I don’t lose it then. The schwag bag contains some odd things. A $20 camera bag from Crumpler (very nice), an iPod sock from Adobe (very strange) and a bunch of magazines (very wasteful).

So that was my Lineup experience. More from the sessions coming.

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