We just got back from L.A., where three of our Flash developers attended Adobe MAX 2009 to connect, learn and get inspired.

This year, much of the conference was focused on mobile development. The Open Screen Project, funded by Adobe more than a year ago is about to bear it’s first fruits. Flash Player 10.1 was announced and is heading to a mobile near you. This means that in the near future, you’ll be able to enjoy the full user experience of the Flash Platform on a mobile device, both embedded on the web as well as in stand-alone applications.

Adobe has put a lot of effort to optimize the Flash Player for the mobile computing platforms. Without these optimizations it would be almost impossible to run Flash applications on your mobile computing platform. For example, the memory footprint of running applications has been reduced by as much as 50%, a crucial optimization for most, if not all, mobile devices. FP 10.1 also includes multi-touch input and accelerometer support.

Most notably, however, is the fact that Flash Player 10.1 will include GPU-acceleration for the full rendering pipeline. Everything from drawing vectors, decoding video and compositioning will run on the GPU. The demos that we saw increased the frame rate of a Flash application running on an Android device from 5 fps to 25 fps while reducing the power-consumption by 90%. Amazing.

Most of the major mobile device manufacturers are now part of the Open Screen Project, with RIM beeing the last to join. Only Apple is missing, but I believe that it won’t take long before they join the fun.

Other notable news from the conference include that Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker) is really old nowadays and that - although beeing bought by Carlsberg - Budwiser Lite is still quiet terrible.