FITC Toronto is in full swing. The event that was once called “Flash in the Can” has now extended itself to other developing platforms such as “HTML 5” and “Open Frameworks.” That isn’t to say that Adobe isn’t playing a major part at the event: The Adobe Keynote that happened last night was impressive, to say the least.

The keynote speaker, David Wadhwani (Sr. Vice President of Adobe) gave an overview of the evolution of the Flash platform, giving much credit to the Adobe team and showed gratitude to the developer community. Wadwani then continued by demonstrating features of the new updates bring brought to the Flash platform in video, applications and games.

The highlight, for me, was the demonstration of the new “Flash Player” and how it performs on the new update: While running an HD video right now will send your processor to over 120% usage, with the new “Flash Player”, the same video would only use 14% of your processor’s power. Does this mean that flash is finally an efficient enough platform to be used on mobile devices, specifically iOS? It certainly seems so.

Adobe Product Manager, Richard Galvan demonstrated how easy it is to develop for tablets using Flash Pro and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and deploy and debug the applications on the tablet themselves. This demonstration was the catalyst for many excited and impressed software developer’s applause. Senior product Manager, Deepa Subramaniam demonstrated the “Flex” SDK (Software Development Kit) which includes Flash builder 4.5 and the new features focusing on tablets, such as programming touch gestures and code generating for constantly used pieces of code (which are customizable!) From these demonstrations, it’s clear that Adobe’s effort to keep relevant and is poised to become the standard application for tablet application developers because of it’s features, and it’s clear that they’re trying to please their audience by making it much easier to program with. It’s impressive how easy it is to code the same application for iOS, Android and the Blackberry Playbook.

Adobe evangelist, Lee Bremlow rounded out the demonstrations by showing the major improvements of the adobe AIR in its prior releases (particularly on iOS) and how the AIR platform has been made more accessible to developers, despite which platform they hope to develop for. They also made reference to a 2D/3D engine they’re working on currently known as “Molehill” (working title.) The graphics of the games they presented are on par with console graphics and it runs very smoothly, even on mobile platforms.

More Terry Paton iOS Games from Lee Brimelow on Vimeo.

No doubt, Adobe has felt the pain of not having “Flash” supported on iOS, but the demonstrations they had made a bold statement. The there are public betas of many of the products mentioned and the new “Adobe Creative Suite 5.5” became available just this morning. Have fun and stay tuned.