New Flash Player info and Beta releases on Adobe Labs

As a warm-up to the Adobe MAX conference, Adobe today released details about Flash Player 10.1 for desktop and mobile and updated beta versions of Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Coldfusion, the Flex 4 SDK and Livecycle Data Services.

The Adobe MAX conference kicks off in Los Angeles soon, but there's already news on the Adobe Labs site:

Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile

This is maybe the most exciting release on Labs today. Previews have been sneaked throughout the year, but the MAX attendees will get to see Flash Player 10 on more platforms than ever. Offering the same version of the player and authoring language (AS3) will finally make Flash Mobile development a reality and not just something for the few experts that care to learn all the quirks. With support for Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and Symbian S60, this is a really solid lineup and we can expect more companies to come.

Featuring hardware support for Multi-touch / gestures, accelerometer input, screen rotation events, GPU acceleration as well as hardware decoding of video. This last bit is important as it frees up the slim CPU resources by offloading the video processing to other chips in the phone. We got to take a look at some of this at FOTB09 and what we saw really impressed us. We've played with former Flash Players for mobile devices and we've never really liked either the development experience or the result, but this time it's actually usable and fast enough. Read more about this at the end of our CS5 article.

Flash Player 10.1 for desktop

The 10.1 update is also available for the standard plugin version of the Flash Player and this new version supports Browser Privacy mode, expanded options for high quality media delivery, content protection and the long awaited Microphone access that opens up for voice recording, online karaoke, auto-tune and pitch applications and much more. Audio will definitely be the new frontier in Flash for quite some time ahead. Check out the feature list for a full overview. Note: The 10.1 players are not yet available. For now they are just "unveiled" but expect developer previews at Adobe Labs soon.

Beta updates

The second public beta of Flash Builder (formerly called Flex Builder) is now available and we hope it's more responsive and stable than the first beta release. We gave up upon that after just two days of testing. The new release has a new skinning workflow, support for FlexUnit 4, adjustments to the Spark components and more. Flash Catalyst is also updated and Ryan Stewart has a good overview of the changes on his site. (why not update the release notes though?) Read more about Catalyst and the other updates at Adobe Labs.

 

 

 

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