RSSAdobe releases AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas
By Tim Conneally | Published November 17, 2009, 10:22 AM
Today, Adobe has made the betas of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The big features in AIR 2 were shown off at Adobe MAX in October, and they include: Support for USB mass storage devices, support for multi-touch and gesture-based input, improved support for local peripherals and native application processes, improved performance, and peer to peer and UDP networking.
Flash Player 10.1 adds a host of functions designed with the mobile device in mind. Even though today's beta of 10.1 is not available on mobile platforms, Adobe says it will be available "across a broad spectrum of smartphones and other Internet-connected devices in 2010." Already, it includes support for Android 2.0, Windows Mobile 6.5, Symbian S60 V5 and Palm WebOS.
In order for Flash Player 10.1 to be "ready for mobility," Adobe says it has made a number of tweaks to run on constrained systems, which include performance improvements, rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations.
Like AIR 2, Flash 10.1 supports multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer and mobile input models which will bring rich Flash interaction to mobile platforms. Going further, however, it also adds support for screen orientation changes, sleep mode, adaptive frame rate streaming, and graphics hardware acceleration.
Intels GMA500 is not supported in this version. What a disappointment. Devices with that chip need accelerated Flash the most.
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|Great, just what we need, UDP. For the love of god, we do not need folks inventing their own streaming protocols.
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|I can't get any videos to play with Flash 10.1. I am running a compatible video card with the required video drivers as specified in the 10.1 release notes. I tried several video sites and none of them will play. I was all excited to have a version of Flash that didn't have the chops. Oh well, back to the POS 10.0.
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|I havent had any issues. but keep in my it's a beta.
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|Well i tested it. Hulu on a 30inch monitor is alot better now. I wont say perfect, but a huge improvement. As far as resource hog, memory wise yes, not so much cpu, and i bet the video card is taking most of the work. But it works alot better, so we should be happy.
Regarding 64bit web browsers, just not something that is gonna happen anytime soon. Not really needed anyway and most web sites will not support it untill they have to. Besides windows 64bit whatever version you have defaults to a 32bit browser cause microsoft knows that 64bit is not primetime on the internet just yet. Thats not a major issue, it's just a fact. There's no need for 64bit browsers since the net is all 32bit.
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|What I want to know is, is the new Flash Player any less of a resource hog on desktops, or should I stick with using Flowplayer on YouTube (hurrah for Greasemonkey!) ?
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|http://www.anandtech.com...doc.aspx?i=3678&p=2
yes it should be.
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|Ooh, thanks for the link - my kit is all a good few years old but it certainly looks worth a go - looks like this could be a real performance improvement for a wide range of applications on a wide range of systems, kudos to Adobe if so!
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|Is Flash compatible with 64-bit web browsers yet? There's no reason Adobe couldn't have had a 64-bit version of Flash available on 64-bit Vista's launch date. Demand for 64-bit desktop multimedia software was very, very high back then.
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|What does a 64-bit plug-in for a browser have to do with content creation software?
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|What does content creation software have to do with this story? The story is about Flash Player, which is what GD was commenting on. I also think that Adobe should've already had a 64-bit version (or at least a 64-bit friendly) of Flash Player out. It's becoming harder to purchase a desktop that isn't running a 64-bit system (because most computer have at least 4GB of RAM now). I know MS includes a 32-bit version of IE on their 64-bit OS', but be like being forced to run a 32-bit version of Photoshop because a major 3rd-party publisher refused to provide a 64-bit compatible plug-in (no flames please, this is just a thought-example for how Adobe would feel if another company lamed-down one of it's flagship products unnecessarily).
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|Anything to make Flash run better is welcomed.
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