Adobe, today, has updated its core Flash Player to 10.1 and Adobe AIR to v2.
Designers and developers can now build rich Web content for the browser when running the Flash Player on the desktop and mobile alike. Final releases of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 are expected in the first half of 2010.
The big features in AIR 2 are: 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.
Adobe officials are excited about the mobile capabilities of flash player:
“As we are bringing Flash Player to multiple devices, this is the first beta release,” said Tom Barclay, Adobe senior product marketing manager for the Flash platform. “What we’re announcing now is really the full Flash Player. Everything that the full Flash Player can do on the desktop we trying to take over to a mobile device,” Everett-Church said.
The earlier Adobe’s Flash Lite software had limited potential for the mobile users, the new Beta update brings desktop capabilities to the mobile platform. 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.
Clearly, they’re trying to basically create one version of the software, a common foundation across different platforms including desktop and mobile
The Flash Player 10.1 browser runtime is based on efforts of the Adobe-driven Open Screen Project to provide a Flash-based unified runtime environment for devices. Version 10.1 features media delivery using HTTP streaming and content protection from Adobe Flash Access 2.0. Also, version 10.1 can leverage hardware decoding of H.264 video [based on GPU] on Windows PCs and devices, thus conserving battery life and offering smoother video playback, Adobe said.
Flash Player 10.1 features availability for a range of devices, including smartphones, netbooks, and other Internet-connected devices, Adobe said. Content can be delivered across different OSes and devices. Also, SWF files can be deployed on devices with limited processing power.
“What’s happening now is in the process of bringing Flash Player 10 features and eventually AIR features as well to mobile, we are now working on a single code base and single environment,” said Aaron Filner.
Both AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 support multitouch and gesture-based applications on touch screen devices. The beta releases are available as free downloads from-
Adobe Labs: Download
Mobile Devices supported include Android, Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, and Symbian S60. The AIR 2 beta is offered for several Windows OSes, including Windows 7, as well as for Mac OS and Linux. As we already know, there is till no hope for Flash on iPhone, thanks to Apple’s closed policies.
What do you think, is this a good move for the mobile platform? What happens to iPhone?
