A mere week after Adobe Systems reported that it would be shedding nearly 700 employees or 9% of its total worldwide workforce, the company is releasing two highly anticipated new products that have been in the works for a while: Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.
Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.
Update: sorry, we unintentionally – no, really – jumped the gun on this one. The links to the products are now live: Flash Player and AIR.
People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience.
But first things first.
Both the new Flash Player for desktop browsers and the latest iteration of the rather popular cross-platform runtime environment for desktop apps were announced in the beginning of October and previewed at the recent Adobe MAX 2009 event (see video below). That means there aren’t too many surprises left with regards to what the upgraded versions bring, so we’ll just give you a quick run-down.
Both Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1:
- boast support for multi-touch and gestures (yes, you’d need a machine with a touch screen)
- include a global error handler, which enables devs to write a single handler to process all runtime errors
- (finally) support local microphone access, so you’ll no longer need to first pass through a server in order to record audio locally on both Flash Platform runtimes
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 now also leverages hardware decoding of H.264 video on Windows PCs, netbooks and mobile devices.
Want all that goodness on your mobile phone, too? Hold your horses: while a public beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Palm webOS is expected later this year, Google Android support is expected no sooner than early 2010, and support for Blackberry smartphones will likely take even more time to be added.
Also new in Adobe AIR 2.0 and worthy of a mention:
- Native process API: enables apps to communicate with native applications on local machines
- Mass storage device detection: plug in your Flip camera or that USB stick you got as a gift at the last conference you attended, and AIR 2 applications will be able to detect them
- Open document API: with it, AIR apps can ‘ask’ the OS what the default application is associated with files and function accordingly
- Improved socket support: think AIR-powered local servers and P2P apps
- Speedier WebKit: updated version that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities
(Original image via Ryan Stewart)
“Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label…and are available now via Adobe Labs.”
Forgive my blindness, but I don’t seem to be able to find any such thing on the Adobe Labs site. The closest thing I can see is:
“A public developer beta of the browser runtime is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year”
I’m having the same issue…
Just found the Flash 10.1 link
http://labs.ado...shplayer10.html
Yep, Adobe have updated the site now, looks like the embargo date finally rolled around
I cannot find the link to download AIR 2.0. Which would be a godsend if it really does use less CPU/RAM and I run a few AIR apps.
Sorry, this went up before the links to the beta products were live (not intentionally) – updated the post to reflect that and added links to the products, which are now definitely available from Adobe Labs.
Yeah, you got this up fast. It’s almost as if you were briefed under NDA. But I know TechCrunch doesn’t do NDAs.
A briefing /= NDA.
Another thing in both AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 are a lot of code optimizations that people should see without any code changes.
Especially with AIR 2 the team spent a lot of time optimizing how much CPU and memory the runtime uses so people running AIR applications on the AIR 2 runtime should see an improvement in both areas.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
well i can’t imagine that was very difficult considering that flash tends to be a massive resouce hog.
Great news! Keep up the good work.
Hi Ryan:
Is hardware acceleration in this release?
Hardware acceleration for video playback is available only for Windows; no Mac support because there is no public API for hardware acceleration and for Linux because there is no standard API yet.
“no Mac support because there is no public API for hardware acceleration”
WAT?
http://forums.p...4-gpu-decoding/
http://xbmc.org...ead.php?t=52752
No public API
The machine is firing the humans, and releasing new products which other machines can engage with. How insensitive these guys are.
probably the dumbest comment posted on TC for a long time.
Dear Adobe,
It’s the iPhone stupid!
Yeah, it must be Adobe’s fault because Apple is letting all these other plugins run in Safari on the iPhone. Oh wait, they aren’t…
I think TechCrunch broke yet another embargo — nothing on Adobe’s site yet.
adobe needs techcrunch more than techcrunch needs adobe
If TC doesn’t need Adobe why make sure they’re first out with the news?
Sorry, not purposely, updated post.
No H.264 hardware encoding for the Mac? Flash Player uses up so much CPU time on OS X compared to Windows that it’s crying out for it.
Blame Apple
… the socialist company.
Everything’s CLOSED! even appstore is GATED!
For me it’s always about Google. Here’s what my search yielded:
Adobe Labs – Downloads: Flash Player 10.1:
http://labs.ado...shplayer10.html
Download links :
FP 10.1 page : http://labs.ado.../flashplayer10/
AIR 2.0 page : http://labs.ado...loads/air2.html
Amazing. I’m pretty happy about this new release but I think it’s also funny that even in a few years time where multi-touch devices become the norm and we are all using our computers in new and even unimaginable ways, we’ll STILL get to deal with issues like huge memory leaks in air applications.
“boast support for multi-touch and gestures (yes, you’d need a machine with a touch screen)”
Multi-touch and gestures also work via trackpads (such as on MBP).
Bad programmers can create memory leaks in any environment. I can write a program with a single loop that will create a memory leak in any mainstream OS but is this the fault of the OS? If AIR is going to be powerful enough to be useful, it’s also going to allow programmers to create leaks. Adobe has been working with the developers of popular AIR apps to improve their code but the fault lies with the programmer, not the runtime. The garbage collection in AIR/Flash is not perfect but leaks can be avoided with a bit of effort.
That was meant to be a reply to Malcolm above.
Now if only Flash would be supported on the iPhone. I know…still, one can always dream…
your dream sounds like a complete nightmare to me, why would you dream of clunky badly designed apps with choppy animation?
…on a dumb device that does nothing outside what steve allows it to do.
No 64-bit?
same question I have.
Has Adobe released any schedule — even a vague one like “mid-2010″ — for releasing a version of Flash that works properly on Mac?
Great! I like Abode AIR. I use it for running auto tweet application for twitter.
the flash player is so cool
nice work, i got my app in flash 10, and will be trying to include the multitouch feature
Flash is a piece of #@$%# and another try from Adobe to lock internet and computer users into a proprietary technology and we all know where that will lead us. Remember Microsoft? The wealth of some is the lack of freedom of choice of others.
Don’t fall for it a second time.
a simple listing of flash player features
http://askmefla...eased-whats-new
Well, I’m glad for the GPU support, but what I’d really like to see was support for 3d hardware accelerated content, pretty much like Unity web player does.
The way to go is 3d. I just don’t know what is taking Adobe so long to follow it.