Some sites are wrongly suggesting Adobe has abandoned Flash, it hasn’t. What Adobe has announced is they’ll no longer be developing Flash for mobile browsers, which is something very different indeed.

Adobe will now be focussing on developing HTML5 software that incorporates all the Flash features we love (and hopefully leaving out the bugs and ones we hate) into new applications. An early demonstration of this software was showcased in the preview release of ‘Adobe Edge’, their HTML5 animation tool. How advanced the final software will be and the price is shrouded in mystery but if Adobe get these things right, they could once again help change the face of how we create web content.

So the big question is, does this mean the end for Flash desktop? The answer is no, not for now at least. Currently Flash offers designers and developers the ability to create content rich software, games and applications that can be delivered online far quicker and cheaper than via any other web platform.

Like any good software house we use all the technologies available to us and pick the best one for each job. Thankfully fewer websites are being built in Flash, with the software instead being used to create interactive applications that anyone can view – as long as you’re not on an iPhone or iPad and if you are, we can build you a very nice app for that.

Scottish universities hold a high proportion of Scotland’s nationally important collections – more than 1.8 million items. The Revealing the Hidden Collections website gives information about all the material through almost 2000 detailed descriptions of collections and an increasing number of records of individual items and collections, making available all records through a single search maintained by the Culture Grid.

The website was designed and programmed by Gooii Nottingham and can be viewed at: umissearch.org.uk

Gooii collaborators Tim McCourt and Wesley Louis have just won the awards for ‘Best of British’ and the ‘Audience Award for Best Film’ at this year’s highly respected ‘Canterbury Anifest’. This is great news for the director/animators and we are very excited to be working with them on an exciting short film for a new high profile client.

Congratulations to Tim and Wes. Click here to view the Canterbury Anifest website or here to view the excellent and award winning ‘Drawing Inspiration‘.

The highly respected website ‘Fun Educational Apps’ has just reviewed the first three games in the Fab-Phonics series. Highly rating the apps, they describe them as “engaging and easy to use fun learning…” saying they are “cute, simple and effective learning… the kids loved it and we are sure yours will do too”.

To read the full review and also be in with a chance of winning the apps, for either your iPhone or iPad, please visit: http://www.funeducationalapps.com

Mac OS X Lion is sitting in my dock, winking at me, waiting to be installed. Despite the great temptation to install, I’m going to hold off for a day or so, as my current copy of Xcode, the software used to build and complile iOS apps, isn’t Lion compatible. In the meantime the Lion compatitble Xcode 4.1 is downloading on our spanking new Mac, to ensure we can code and compile effectively without interrupting our workflow. What I have seen of Lion so far looks very, very good.

Mac OS X 10.7, or Lion as it’s better known, is released today and it’s just not its weatlh of features that sets this release apart. Lion is the first operating system to be released almost exclusively as a download, as well as being one of the cheapest OS at only £20.99 (or $29.99 if you’re dollar lucky). This is compared to Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, which retails at a whopping £219.99.

So what’s OS X Lion like? I have now idea, over an hour in and my download’s still not even 25% complete.

For more infomation the Lion’s roar visit: www.apple.com/macosx

The ever insightful Jeffrey Zeldman recently lectured on the skills and opportunities that should be the top of every web designer’s list. Titled ‘What Every Web Designer Should Know’, his keynote speech in Atlanta confirms the best practices we feel important here at Gooii. Great importance is placed on designing around content, my personal belief is that “content is king” but I guess in a world where the web is made up of people from many different skill sets, it’s a timely reminder for some.

One of his final points is that with the advent of HTML 5, “every website is now an application.” A great way of thinking and approach to the products we use every day, for a long time the web has no longer been about online documents and its easy to forget that a website serves a greater purpose than simply being an online presence.

Visit www.lukew.com to read LukeW’s notes from the lecture or the always excellent www.zeldman.com

This is a great story about how an app called ‘Hidden’ was used to recover a stolen MacBook. Apple has long had an app that can locate a lost iPhone or iPad but ‘Hidden’ goes one step further by taking photos from the laptop’s webcam and sending them back to the owner. In this case owner and interative designer Joshua Kaufman was able to retreive his machine after posting pictures of the machine’s “new owner” on his blog and providing police in Oakland, Canada with the information.

For more on this story visit the BBC website.

Blast those ghosts and learn your tables with this great new App, adapted from the Primary Games classic.

Try and score 100 hits as fast as you can by tapping on ghosts which are a multiple of your chosen number. Be careful though, tapping an incorrect multiple will see your score reduced by 10 and it’s Game Over when you reach -100.

Gooii took Interactive Resources’s classic game and rebuilt it from the ground up for Apple iPhone. The app features entirely new graphics and has been coded in Objective C, Apple’s approved programming language for iPhone and iPad Apps.

Click here to download Ghostblasters from the Apple App Store.

UPDATE: Ghostblasters is currently no.1 in the iTunes New and Noteworthy Education section.

Doctors in Canada have been studying the ability some blind people have to “see like bat” by listening to echoes. The doctors found that “visual brain areas play an important role for echolocation in blind people… which seems uncannily similar to vision”. Dr Lore Thaler of the University of Western Ontario hopes that with further research the technique can be taught to others, in order to improve their way of life.

For more on this facinating study visit the BBC News website