Tag Archives: Flash Player

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 Books

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Adobe today announced that Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be shipping fairly soon. This is great news for the community because the runtimes are LOADED with great new features. How do I know the features are great? Because I’ve been working with them for the past couple of months while writing a set of companion books for O’Reilly about them both! In fact – the drafts are complete as of last night and are currently in tech review.

What’s New in Flash Player 11

Comprehensive Quickstarts for Browser-Based Experiences

Author: Joseph Labrecque
Publisher: O’Reilly Media (October, 2011)
ISBN-13: 9781449311094
Pages: 60 (estimated)

This book will detail the various enhancements, new functionalities, and general improvements available in this new version of Adobe Flash Player. Each item is explained in detail and when possible, a series of screen captures and a full code examples will be provided, enabling you to both grasp the new feature in a visual way, and integrate the feature into your own code quickly, based upon example.

What’s New in Adobe AIR 3

Comprehensive Quickstarts for Desktop and Mobile

Author: Joseph Labrecque
Publisher: O’Reilly Media (October, 2011)
ISBN-13: 9781449311070
Pages: 80 (estimated)

This book will detail the various enhancements, new functionalities, and general improvements available in this new version of Adobe AIR. Each item is explained in detail and when possible, a series of screen captures and a full code examples will be provided, enabling you to both grasp the new feature in a visual way, and integrate the feature into your own code quickly, based upon example.

More information will be provided once these books are in the hands of the editor!

Flash Player 10.2 will be a Game-Changer (again)

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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!

FP10.2 Stage Video

Important to note that Flash Player 10.2 beta is separate from the Flash Player “Square” 64 bit beta which obviously would have its own benefits… then there is “Molehill”… and surely a bunch of other awesome advances in the works which will all be included in a future release version of Flash Player.

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.

Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile – Out Now!

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A new era in mobile technology begins as Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile is released by Adobe:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the release of Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 to mobile platform partners. Redesigned from the ground up with new performance and mobile specific features, Flash Player 10.1 is the first release that brings the full Web across desktops and devices. Mobile users will now be able to experience millions of sites with rich applications and content inside the browser including games, animations, rich Internet applications (RIAs), data presentations and visualizations, ecommerce, music, video, audio and more.

[read the full press release]

The list of Flash Player mobile platform partners is quite impressive as well:

  • Android
  • BlackBerry
  • webOS
  • Windows Phone
  • LiMo
  • MeeGo
  • Symbian OS

Pretty much all mobile platforms but for one, eh?

Unfortunately, I’m still held back from getting the full experience on my Droid, as Motorola and Verizon have yet to release an update to Android 2.2 (Froyo). For instance, going over to http://m.flash.com/ I and presented with this:

Boo!

I have to say that this is impeding my ability to develop and test effectively for mobile. I’ve considered rooting my device and installing some custom ROMs in the past but this time might actually do it. I’ll probably hold out for a few weeks longer- then all bets are off!

Flash Player 10.1 Demo on Android 2.1

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Today, Google hosted an “Android Press Gathering” where they revealed the detailed of the Google “Nexus One” phone. Shortly thereafter, Adobe posted the following video demonstration of Flash Player 10.1 running on the forthcoming Android 2.1 (coming soon for Nexus One, Droid, so forth):

Looks like it’s running very nicely on the device!

I’ve been using a Motorola Droid, myself, and have been quite pleased with the Android OS.