Flash Player 10.1 & AIR 2.0: It’s not just about new features…
Recently I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the performance and stability of the Flash Player and AIR runtimes. I got another one just this morning and thought it would be a good idea to write a quick blog post about this.
Let’s talk about Flash Player first. In all honesty, I also encounter the occasional Flash Player crash in Safari on Mac OS X. Many times this seems to be caused by an uncaught exception. Some of these crashes could have been avoided if the developer had written the code to catch that exception. Flash Player 10.1 will make this a lot easier with a global exception handler.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to push this back in to the developer’s shoes but it is something to think about. And just to be totally clear: Flash Player shouldn’t crash on an uncaught exception. That said, you should know that the Flash Player team is aware of some stability issues and is working on that. They are also constantly monitoring our public bug base so if you do encounter a crash, make sure you log it in the bug base! You can rest assured that stability and performance are always on top of the agenda of the Flash Player team.
I also keep hearing people say that the AIR runtime uses too much of the available system resources. Obviously this depends heavily on what the application is actually doing at that time. If your application is suffering from this symptom, make sure you read these blog posts. Soon after reading these three posts, your AIR application will use less than 1% of CPU while idle. In AIR 2.0 the target is to reduce the idle CPU usage to 0%. Early tests with AIR 2.0 show a 30% memory reduction and a 50% reduction in JavaScript CPU consumption. We’re also targeting a 40% reduction in runtime size.
We haven’t announced any specific dates for the release of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 but make sure you keep an eye on Adobe Labs and our blogs.
Adobe AIR enables rich internet applications on the Windows, Mac AND Linux desktop
If you haven’t heard, last monday morning we released AIR 1.0 after an extensive period of both private and public beta testing. One of the biggest themes for AIR is cross-platform compatibility with just one installer file and without having to code anything specific (with a few exceptions like application menu’s and dock/system tray icons) for the OS your targetting. Actually, as of now you don’t even have to target a specific OS anymore to make a desktop application. The AIR runtime takes care of that for you. You just make your app using HTML, Javascript, Flash or Flex or even combinations of that, export a .air file and it works cross-platform right out of the box.
We’ve also been talking about Linux support from the very start and Kevin Lynch showed a demo of that at the Engage event in San Francisco. He used the Parleys application. Parleys is a project by the Belgian Java User Group. It allows you to watch all the presentations recorded from numerous JUG-events. I think they currently have some 200 hours of content on the site and now in the app that’s been built by Benjamin Dobler. (Watch the video interview with Benjamin)
Anyway… You don’t have to take my word for it. Just go and check out the video.
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