3 “hidden” gems of Adobe Labs

Posted by Serge Jespers on Sep 23, 2011 in labs | 2 comments

With the big announcements about Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 earlier this week you may have missed some of the other exciting new goodies available on Adobe Labs. Here are some of my favorites.

Visual Size Report
Hot off the grill, as they say. Visual Size Report is an extension for Flash Professional that allows for easier size optimization of SWF files. Designers and Developers often need to consider file sizes when creating content in Flash Professional, especially when deploying for mobile platforms or creating advertising assets, regardless of platform. This extension installs a graphical panel (“Size Report”) that allows you to see the various elements of a SWF file by category and their size. You can just double click an element to find it in the appropriate workspace window.

Pixel Bender 3D
Pixel Bender 3D is a version of the Pixel Bender kernel language that allows you to produce vertex and fragment shaders that run on 3D hardware to generate output images. These kernels operate on 3D objects and affect their appearance. Pixel Bender 3D is built on the Stage3D APIs, previously codenamed “Molehill,” and found in Flash Player 11, which handles the display of 3D objects in AIR and Flash Player. Pixel Bender 3D provides a quick and convenient way of supplying shaders to Stage 3D. Where appropriate hardware is available, Pixel Bender 3D is GPU accelerated.

Alchemy
Alchemy was released 2 years ago as an experiment and hasn’t really been updated since. That is about to change and it’s going to blow your mind! ;-)

We have not updated the original Alchemy prototype, and while we noted from the beginning that it should not be relied upon for production content, we’ve received persistent requests from developers asking for official support in the Flash runtimes. We’ve been listening and have decided to invest in creating an improved version of Alchemy, which we plan to release as part of a paid production offering for commercial development. We intend to make non-commercial use free of charge.

The production release will offer significantly better performance and productivity over the Labs prototype. By re-architecting major portions of the technology, we aim to enable code execution approaching native performance, scalable support for large code bases, full debugging support, up to 75% reduction in code size, and seamless integration with ActionScript – all while reaching virtually every connected computer on the web.

More on the Flash Player blog