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!

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

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.

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!

Sweet!

This may be timed to coincide with CES 2010 in Las Vegas which begins today.

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.

Most important to my work is the Publisher ID changes in AIR. I’ve have the need to migrate certificates before, so have paid close attention to the changes as outlined by Oliver Goldman. Hopefully, these changes will make things more direct when having to migrate code signing certificates for our apps using a non-computed Publisher ID.

While these are minor updates to end-users, it’s important to note that Adobe does update the platform runtimes a number of times each year to address bugs and small feature enhancements. They do take good care of their platform and their users!

Adobe AIR 1.5.3 Release Notes

Adobe AIR Team blog post announcing AIR 1.5.3

Flash Player 10.1

AIR 2.0

These are the first fruits to come out of the Open Screen Project – and hopefully much more good will follow as FP 10.1 for mobile devices will begin shipping later this year into next covering mobile platforms like Palm, Blackberry, and Android.

Some good resources:
Flash Player 10.1 Beta Release Notes
Introducing Adobe AIR 2 beta
Flash Player 10.1 public prerelease demos and interviews
Mobile and digital home

UPDATE: Wow. Christian Cantrell has everything you could need at AIR 2 Public Beta Resources.

Sometimes it’s looking at the player running in the browser, in which case I just need to perform a debug player install from:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Other times, it’ll be pissed off about the player used by Flash Professional at:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS4\Players

I’ve found a pretty foolproof (for me) way to fix this secondary problem. Just grab FlashPlayer.exe from:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder {such and such release}\player\win

Copy this into the Flash Pro location, restart FB, and you should be good.

Don’t know why this happens from time to time… but it’s happened enough that I feel the need to document it- at least for myself.

Since I was using a flash.display.Loader display object to load the image up, and Loader has no smoothing property, I totally spaced on this and it’s been out there for months rendering images in a pretty crappy way. I just needed to assign the image data to a Bitmap object and use that for display instead.

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private function imageLoaded(e:Event):void {
    var imageBitmap:Bitmap = imageLoader.content as Bitmap;
    imageBitmap.smoothing = true;
    imageDrag.addChild(imageBitmap);
    //scale away!
}

Easy.

Learn from my blunder- always make sure to enable smoothing!

Starting with version 10,0,2, if Flash Player sees a “Content-Disposition: attachment” header while downloading a SWF file, it will ignore the SWF file rather than play it. Note that this restriction applies only to SWF files and not to other types of content, such as images, sounds, text, or XML files, policy files, etc.

If you control the HTTP server on which the SWF file resides, determine whether you trust the SWF file to execute in the server’s domain. If so, remove the “Content-Disposition: attachment” header by changing your HTTP server’s configuration.

While our resolution did differ slightly from the one posted above.  It effectively does the same thing.