Flash Magazine

Getting started with Flash Player 10

Yesterday, Lee Brimelow posted a great video tutorial showing how to get started playing with Flash Player 10, Hank Williams has some clever thoughts on the new Peer to Peer functionality and Peter Elst sums up The recent Adobe Community Summit.

Flash Player 10 feature: Pixel Bender

Pixel Bender was formerly called Hydra and it has been shown publicly on several occasions. You can think of Hydra as a filter factory, a way to create cool effects in realtime. The trick here is to use the graphics card to do the calculations and not the processor.

Flash Player 10 feature: New text engine

Few things in Flash have caused me more grief than the poor text support in former versions of the Flash Player. Flash Player 10 promise to change this forever. This is another fruit of the merger - the Flash team have gotten access to the typography knowledge inside Adobe.

Flash Player 10 feature: Dynamic streaming

This functionality will work with a future release of Flash Media Server to automatically adjust the playback quality as the bandwidth fluctuates. This should put an end to rebuffering and video that stops - if this works as well as advertised.

Flash Player 10 feature: Dynamic audio generation

Adobe have been talking to a number of members of the community about their requirements for sound and bugs related to this. Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert went as far as to create their own campaign to get bugs fixed and it sure have worked. Not only does Flash Player 10 fix the bugs, but it also brings new features to the table.

Flash Player 10 feature: 3D support

Everybody is talking about 3D in Flash but it has had it's limitations. Flash Player 10 will contain several features that will add to Flash's 3D support, including hardware accelerated 3D texture transforms and extensions to the 2D drawing API.

Flash Player 10 feature: Load and Save files using FileReference

The new Flash Player 10 beta will give us direct access to the FileReference object, allowing you to really interact with the users filesystem.

Welcome back M/AXNA!

MXNA is back online, but the last traces of Macromedia disappeared in the process

Open Screen Project - Adobe opens even more

Today, Adobe skips all licensing fees for devices and opens up the SWF and FLV specs for anyone to create devices supporting Flash. According to Dave McAllister of Adobe, the goal is to create a consistent experience across all devices and they're not afraid this will cause player fragmentation.

Sony Ericsson to extend Flash Lite capabilities

SonyEricsson has lagged behind other phone vendors in terms of Flash support, but today they announced 'Project Capuchin' - a plan to Flash-enable most of their phones. By creating a bridge between Flash and the Java based phone API, Flash developers should be able to access all the phone features including bluetooth, motion sensors, payment and more using a new SWF2JAR packaging tool.