Upon the solid groundwork laid by the Flash Player 10.1 release, Adobe continues to innovate by adding some incredible new features to the runtime in a beta of Flash Player 10.2. There are two, in particular, that I will highlight:
- Native Custom Mouse Cursors
Do you know how long I’ve waited for the ability to define native custom mouse cursors in Flash… instead of hiding the native cursor and tracking x,y of a display object across the stage? Since Flash 4. Thank you, Adobe Flash Player engineers! This is a great example of something that can improve performance and usability at the same time. Excellent. - Stage Video Hardware Acceleration
This is the big one! Effectively removing video rendering from the display list and treating it separately from all other objects allows for an absolutely glorious improvement in the way video is rendered on a users system. Most people are getting between 0 and 0.3 percent CPU usage on full screen 1080 HD video. There are reports that Mac users are getting better performance with Flash Player than they are in Quicktime. That is really something!
With such a great amount of stuff happening in the runtimes – I cannot help but see Flash Player 10.1 as a real turning point for Flash in terms of rising beyond all the criticisms of the past few years.
Just want to emphasize that “Flash Player 10.1” in the closing paragraph is *not* a typo…
Indeed, Adobe is always innovating! When I started with Flash 6 years I could not imagine that someday I’ll be able develop applications for all platforms and devices. Back then a flash developer was a flash developer, which meant you can do Action Script and work with the timeline, now with all the different stuff you can do with AS3, “flash devs” can be broken down into different sub-sections. Web-Devs, App-Devs, Game-Devs, etc. Absolutely wonderful. :D
I don’t see an end to this! Thanks for post. :)
With all that came with the last two point releases…makes me wonder what Adobe has up its sleeve for Flash 11.