6 lesser known features in Flash Player 10.1

Posted by on Apr 13, 2010 in Flash Player | 4 comments

I’m sure by now you know about all the new features in Flash Player 10.1 but I’m also sure that there are a few that you don’t know about yet. Some of them are pretty cool and very useful/good to know. That is why I wanted to give you a quick list of 6 lesser known features.

  1. Disabled screen saver in full screen mode
    There’s nothing more annoying than having to press the keyboard or moving your mouse every few minutes to prevent the screensaver from kicking in while watching a video in full screen. Flash Player 10.1 now temporarily disables your screensaver if video is playing and not paused, stopped or buffering. But it also works with audio. So… if you’re running a full screen app that plays audio and it is not paused, stopped or buffering and actually has volume the screensaver will not kick in.
  2. Flash Player throttling
    Before Flash Player 10.1 the runtime would just render out all SWFs at the maximum possible frame rate even when they were not visible. In 10.1 this is now changing as Flash Player can detect whether or not a SWF is visible or not… if the browser actually supports it. Check out Tinic’s blog post on this topic and his follow up on which browsers support it.
  3. Mobile text input
    I’ve been asked this question a couple of times over the last few weeks which is why I wanted to highlight it in this post. Flash Player 10.1 provides support for use of native device virtual keyboards with TextField support if no physical keyboard is detected. A virtual keyboard is automatically raised and lowered in response to focus changes on text fields.
  4. Globalization API
    The new ActionScript globalization APIs allow Flash Player to use the values chosen in the operating system locale preferences to process text and lists and present information based on location context. Locale specific information and processing can include: date, time, currency and number formatting; currency and number parsing; string comparison for sorting or searching for text; and upper/lower case conversions.
  5. Graphics hardware acceleration on mobile
    A GPU-based vector renderer replaces the software renderer on smartphones and other mobile devices, resulting in faster rendering performance for more expressive user experiences while consuming less power. This supports hardware acceleration of all rendering, including vector graphics, bitmaps, 3D effects, filters, color transforms, alpha, device and embedded text, Saffron type, and cacheAsBitmap.
  6. Private browsing mode
    Flash Player 10.1 now automatically respects the host browser’s “private browsing” mode (Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer), where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content.

The release of Flash Player 10.1 is just around the corner now but you can already start developing applications that target the new APIs today. The release candidate of Flash Player 10.1 as well as all the information on how to start building apps today is available on Adobe Labs.

Flash on!

4 Comments

  1. Abdol
    April 13, 2010

    You know serge… there is also private browsing in safari :D

  2. Billy
    April 13, 2010

    The release of Flash Player 10.1 is just around the corner now but you can already start developing applications that target the new APIs today.

    Sweet! Just like we could start developing applications that target the iPhone.

    Oh wait.

  3. Kevin Newman
    April 13, 2010

    About that GPU support – will there be a way to test that on a dev computer (I didn’t have the privilege of being in the private beta)?

    In other words, will the testing environment for mobile apps simply be a simulator (a la iPhone SDK), or is it a full on hardware (cpu/gpu/timings) emulator (a la Android SDK/zsnes)?

  4. as3isslow
    April 14, 2010

    Adobe PLEASE improve/rewrite the graphics engine of Flash Player on Windows/Mac/Linux.

    AS3 boasts fast speeds, but complicated applications fall to their knees once there are many objects on screen or the application goes full screen.

    You also claimed Flash Player 10 used hardware acceleration/directX/opengl to boost graphics, but it either seems it is not true or you implemented it the wrong way.

    Actionscript 3 is SLOW, it could be much-much faster. Please fix this and I will choose your platform for development, finally.

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