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!

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.