Adobe is clearly determined to match Microsoft Silverlight all the way and has made a number of announcements regarding new versions of its Flash player.

To begin with Adobe have now released the Flash Player 9 update 3 which adds support for H.264 standard video as seen in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. With new hardware acceleration and multi-processor support, and new associated Media Server options, this promises to lift the ceiling for web video quality and to match Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0's handling.

Announcements regarding Microsoft's Flash-killer Silverlight player are certainly coming thick and fast.

The media-oriented Silverlight 1.0 beta went live back in May at the MIX 07 conference but most of the talk was about the imminent launch of the next 1.1 player which would add .NET support for advanced programmability. Now Microsoft has begun talking about what's going to be in Silverlight 2.0...

Microsoft has finally officially released its free HD Photo plug-ins for Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

I wrote about HD Photo a while back when it was first announced and after my initial doubts - why on earth would we want a JPEG replacement? - I was won round by the flexibility of the specification...

Well it had to happen. With Microsoft pushing Silverlight on the basis of its superior video handling, Adobe had to respond. And rather than waiting for the next release of the CS apps it's updated the existing Flash Player 9 ...

Tom Arah gets to grips with Microsoft’s new Expression Studio and Silverlight platforms and wonders how they will fare against Adobe’s Flash.

Recently I looked at how Adobe is reworking Flash in preparation for the coming battle with Microsoft over the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space and, with it, the likely future of computer-based design...

VERDICT: Radical improvement of the production workflow for desktop application development - and of the results that can be achieved.

Expression Blend is the central component of the new Expression Studio suite and of Microsoft’s drive to become a major player in the world of design software...

VERDICT: Disappointingly cut-down graphics application designed to work hand-in-hand with Expression Blend.

When Microsoft bought the innovative graphics application, Creature House Expression, there was brave talk of taking on Adobe Illustrator in terms of vector handling, Photoshop in terms of bitmaps and Fireworks in terms of web graphics...

Microsoft pulls off an extraordinary feat reinventing desktop application design, but it's only the taste of things to come regarding the web.

For years now there has been talk of Microsoft’s determination to move into the design software territory normally associated with Adobe. Now, with the launch of the Expression Studio suite, the talk is over – so how does it shape up?

VERDICT: Bizarrely antiquated and underpowered creative asset management.

To give a general boost to its professional design credentials and in particular to its Expression Studio suite, Microsoft decided that it needed an application for managing media assets and so bought up iView MediaPro 3...

With GoLive all-but gone, it might seem that Dreamweaver now holds a monopoly over professional page-based web authoring.

However there’s still one company with the resources, vision and resolve necessary to mount a serious challenge to Adobe, and Microsoft is absolutely determined to do just that.