Flash Player settings go native
One of the major gripes about Flash Player is the tiny little settings dialog box. If you’re anything like me and have also cursed and sweared while using this dialog box you may will be happy to hear that that is changing now.
If you downloaded and installed the Flash Player Incubator release you can already check it out yourself. Not only does this new native settings panel allow you to set your camera and microphone preferences but it also allows you to delete your Flash cookies, set your P2P preferences and automatic update preferences.
I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a big improvement! Flash on!
UPDATE: A few people on Twitter asked me if this was OSX only. The answer is “No”. You’ll soon see this on other platforms as well.
New Molehill demo video by Flare3D
Flash is great for social gaming. We all know that. But Flare3D is showing off the “next generation of social gaming” using the upcoming Molehill APIs. Molehill is going to bring Flash (and the web) to a whole new level!
Flash on!
(Hat tip @JosephLabrecque)
Flash Player 10.2 available now
It is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Hmm… I think I’ve heard that before somewhere. And yeah I know… I’m exaggerating a bit ;-) What I mean to say is that while Flash Player 10.2 only seems like a minor update, the new capabilities it brings to the web are not at all minor.
This release introduces Stage Video, a full hardware accelerated video pipeline for best-in-class, beautiful video across platforms and browsers. Additionally, this version of Flash Player offers all the new capabilities previewed in our beta release, such as custom native mouse cursors, multiple monitor full-screen support, Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support, and enhanced sub-pixel rendering for superior text readability.
Companies such as Vimeo, Brightcove, Epix, and YouTube have already started work to enable support for Stage Video to deliver amazing video playback experiences. You’ll be seeing them enable Stage Video performance in the near future. And you can try examples of Stage Video today after upgrading to Flash Player 10.2. If you’re using Google Chrome you can just run Chrome’s updater and you will be ready to go.
If you work with video in Flash make sure you add Stage Video capabilities to your project today!
UPDATE: The debug version of Flash Player 10.2 is available here.
Flash on!
HTML5 and Flash play along just fine in Sour’s “Mirror” music video
It’s not about which technology you pick! It’s about what you do with it! This online music video from Japanese band Sour is a perfect example of how HTML5 and Flash can play along just fine. I already said this once before but it’s great to see that people are starting to realize that HTML5 and Flash can greatly complement each other.
It’s really hard to explain what the music video does and looks like. You’re just gonna have to try it yourself! The site does ask you to log in to Facebook and Twitter and even asks you to connect your webcam but it’s all good. It won’t start spamming your Facebook/Twitter followers and the webcam integration is actually a lot of fun. At the end of the video you can even download an image of yourself in the video.
It’s great to see that one of the developers behind this is Saqoosha who you may know from FLARtoolkit fame. I just saw that he’s playing around with a Microsoft Kinect AS3 library!
One quick little anecdote: It was funny to see that Engadget originally titled their blog post about it with “Sour’s Mirror HTML5 music video is absolutely wild” saying it was all built with just HTML5. I’m glad they saw that they were wrong, changed the title and added this to the post: “It’s stunning. Why can’t HTML5 and Flash always play this nicely together?”.
Let’s make 2011 the year we all get along and focus on creativity and great user experiences instead of focusing on one technology killing the other. Deal?
Introducing StageVideo and Flash Player 10.2
StageVideo is a huge improvement to Flash Player! By using StageVideo in your applications you can decrease processor usage by up to 85%. It also enables higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality. In addition to leveraging hardware decoding of H.264 video (introduced with Flash Player 10.1), Flash Player can now display and scale video using the GPU as well, performing all calculations in graphics hardware to offload work from the CPU and extend battery life. StageVideo benefits not only H.264 video, but all video codecs in Flash Player are composited by the GPU when StageVideo is used.
If you haven’t seen the StageVideo demo by Tinic Uro at Adobe MAX you may want to check that out first!
Now that you’ve seen the demo it’s time to start building and test your video apps. Using the StageVideo API is really easy. My colleague Mihai Corlan has an excellent blog post on how to add StageVideo to your applications.
While StageVideo is a big and fantastic improvement in Flash Player it is not the only new feature. Developers can now also define custom native mouse cursors. This new feature allows developers to define native mouse cursors, including animated cursors, at the OS level. This eliminates the need for ActionScript code to emulate custom native cursors, increasing performance.
For more information check out Adobe Labs.
Kevin Lynch on Flash Player optimizations and HTML5
NewTeeVee Live invited Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch for a fireside chat yesterday to talk about HTML5 and what Adobe is doing to support HTML5 development as well as talk about recent comments suggesting that Flash is a battery drainer.
“Playing rich content uses more battery than non-rich content whichever technology you use.”
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