I am quite fortunate to live in Denver, Colorado. Why? Because my city was on the list of stops for the North American Flash Community Tour which is presently ongoing. For the Denver stop; both Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow provided us with a good, honest, down-to-earth discussion of recent changed in the Flash platform, the impact of these changes upon the community, new runtimes capabilities in gaming and beyond, and some long-term insight into the future of the platform and what Adobe is doing to prepare Flash for the next decade.
Some of the highlights for me included an updated demonstration of Monocle – a powerful new SWF profiler that seems to offer just about any information one would need when profiling Flash applications. Also of note was a demonstration of ActionScript Workers – finally we are about to have concurrency in ActionScript!
Interested in watching the whole thing yourselves? It was actually recorded by a number of community members and can be viewed via the following:
- Mike’s Presentation
- Lee’s Presentation
- Both presentations as recorded by (John Wilker)
Related to all of this; now that Flash Player 10.2 and AIR 3.2 have been released, both Flash Player 11.3 and AIR 3.3 betas are now out at Adobe Labs. Lots of good stuff:
- Full screen keyboard input
- Frame label events
- MouseEvent.RELEASE_OUTSIDE
- ApplicationDomain.getQualifiedDefinitionNames()
- Drivers gating hardware acceleration relaxed to 2006
- New driverInfo details
- Low latency audio support for streaming audio through NetStream
- BitmapData.drawWithQuality
- BitmapData.encode()
- Protected Mode for Firefox
- Flash Player background updates
- Low latency audio support
- Texture Streaming for Stage3D
- USB debugging for AIR iOS
- Enhanced Background behavior for AIR iOS
- Stylus support for Android 4.0
- Simulator Support (Mac)
- Aspect Ratio Enhancements
- Improved Mac App Store Support
Want more insight? Thibault Imbert has even deeper information on these goodies over at ByteArray.org.
Be sure to have a look at the Flash Runtimes Whitepaper if you haven’t already – it contains a ton of great information and will be updated as things are added in the future.
Lastly, I want to make it clear that (IMO) Flash is not “dead” in any way from where I am standing. I was pretty beaten down by the debacle in November and going into this year – honestly didn’t expect to be doing much Flash work at all. Turns out that pretty much all I am doing is related to Flash apart from my work with Adobe Edge.
I have 3.5 contracts with publishers for Flash content – the majority of that work is actually complete on my side of things. I’ll be talking more about these projects very shortly. In my day-to-day job at the university, I’ve being doing all sorts of crazy stuff with Flash, Flex, and AIR and have had plenty of client work in this area as well. In fact, I’ve had to turn potential clients away numerous times and most all of this is Flash related!
Maybe mine is a unique case – but with my own experiences over the past few months along with chatter from others working in the industry, coupled with some really (I mean really) positive internal messaging I’ve heard from Adobe, and topped off with events like this recent one with Mike and Lee… no denying it. Flash LIVES!
Good to hear you have 3.5 flash contracts others are not saying the same.
Well I hope you are correct about the future of flash, it’s is still the best tech for so many projects. However we cant say that there hasn’t been a big change in the “write once run everywhere” (no more linux/mobile) mindset and the way adobe plans to profit from the flash player ie the latest “speed tax” for using the stage3d/memory apis.
Monocle Looks very interesting, I cant help but think how the flash community have already created many similar opensource debuggers. Monocle must have some worthwhile features, I am trending to think its just another mediocre thing Adobe are wanting to charge us for.
Yes Flash Lives, it just has to start treating it’s developers better, other technologies would kill for the community flash has and imho is now taking for granted, this update is useful for games.
It is undeniable that “write once run everywhere” is really no longer the case to some extent. I think though, that the negativity around this comes from the fact that we are emerging from over a decade of desktop-only computing. Things are shifting and Flash is shifting along with everything else. Hopefully Mozilla and others will implement the modern “Pepper” API as Google has done so that such things will be standardized across all platforms.
The community has fragmented. This is far worse a situation than anything Adobe could do to the runtimes directly. Like all aspects of the shift we are currently experiencing – this too, will settle in time.