The future of Flash brighter than ever

Posted by on Feb 28, 2011 in Flash | 3 comments

Yesterday at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco Adobe launched the Adobe AIR and Flash Player Incubator program. The Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages.

One of those features is the Molehill API for 3D. Molehill is a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Flash Platform runtimes. Adobe worked closely with the most popular ActionScript 3D frameworks so that not only advanced 3D developers can take advantage of these new APIs. These 3D frameworks already have Molehill enabled versions available today:

But Molehill does not just offer high performance 3D APIs but can also be used for 2D graphics! Flash Player Product Manager Thibault Imbert has more information and an example on his blog.

Unity added the cherry on top of yesterday’s news. They announced that an upcoming version of Unity (the very popular game development tool) will allow developers to target Flash Player. I can’t wait to play around with it!

These are very exciting times for Flash developers! Check out Tinic Uro’s blog to see how you can start playing with Molehill today!

Flash on!

3 Comments

  1. Bartek
    February 28, 2011

    This is awesome news! The cherry on top Unity-announcement is just brilliant! Great!

  2. horseman
    February 28, 2011

    Indeed, the Unity announcement is incredibly exciting news. I have to say though that I’m surprised that an Adobe evangelist would be excited as well given that Unity is technically a rival company that releases what could now be called a directly competing toolchain.

    Here’s hoping that Adobe does indeed find this news to be awesome, however. The possibilities for the future are amazing if Unity’s team can pull this off.

  3. James
    March 13, 2011

    Well, I must say Molehill is great addition to the Flash runtime. The future of Flash wasn’t in a doubt for desktops at any stage for me, the real question is future of Flash on smartphones. I really appreciate the efforts of Adobe engineers to bring the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR on the mobile platform. The next milestone improving performance for Flash Player in the browser and AIR Apps performance to match up with native application performance on any mobile platform.

    Another thing for which Flash is being criticized, the battery usage. I know that people just say anything without having really experienced such thing, but I think the way Adobe has proved that Flash can run very well on mobile devices, this battery issue can be addressed that way to prove them wrong.

    I’m sure Adobe is working very hard to bring great stuff to this legendary platform, we’ll see more cool stuff with passage of time.

    Serge, can you please tell me if there is any chance to get our hands on Incubator build for Android, so we developers can start testing this great set of APIs on our smartphones as well?