Flash Player “Square”: 64-bit on Windows, OSX and Linux
Native 64-bit support is one of the most requested features for Flash Player so I’m sure this news is going to make a lot of people happy. Today we’re releasing a preview of Flash Player “Square” which includes native 64-bit support.
Today we’re making available a preview of Adobe Flash Player that we’re calling “Square.” This preview includes support for two new areas, namely enhanced support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta and native 64-bit support for all major desktop operating systems including Linux, Mac, and Windows.
This is obviously very exciting news but please keep in mind that this is a preview release.
We’ve found “Square” to be stable and ready for broad testing, but keep in mind this a sneak peek and not everything will be fully baked. Those using the previous 64-bit version of Flash Player for Linux should find this new version even faster and more stable. If you encounter any issues, I’d encourage you to file a bug in our public database [https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/] so we can investigate.
More info on the Flash Player Team blog. The download is now available on Adobe Labs.
Using Growl in AIR applications with AIR 2 NativeProcess
The AIR2 release is just around the corner and one of my favorite new features is the ability to use native scripts. As I’ve already demonstrated earlier, this is extremely powerful and here’s another good example.
From the moment AIR was released, a lot of developers were asking for Growl support to add toast style notifications. Up until now, there hasn’t really been an easy and flexible solution so most developers opted to build their own notifications. I really like Growl and the fact that you as a user have total control over the look and feel. I use the Mono style created by Christopher Lobay. It’s probably the sexiest toast style notification I’ve ever used.
With AIR 2 you can now call Growl right from within your application. I actually call the Growlnotify command-line tool, which comes as an extra in the Growl download. Most people probably don’t install these extras but that’s no problem. I can bundle the command-line tool as part of my application and call it directly from my applicationDirectory.
So… How does this work? It’s actually extremely easy… The first thing you do is set up a new File object that points to the Growlnotify tool.
var file:File = File.applicationDirectory;
file = file.resolvePath("growlnotify");
As I am going to bundle growlnotify with my application it will just be installed as part of the app and thus resides in applicationDirectory.
The next thing I have to do is set up a NativeProcessStartupInfo object. That’s where I’ll store the basic information that is used to start our NativeProcess.
var nativeProcessStartupInfo:NativeProcessStartupInfo = new NativeProcessStartupInfo(); var processArgs:Vector.<String> = new Vector.<String>(); processArgs[0] = "-n"; processArgs[1] = "My AIR application"; processArgs[2] = "-p"; processArgs[3] = "0"; processArgs[4] = "-t"; processArgs[5] = "Your Growl title"; processArgs[6] = "-m"; processArgs[7] = "Your Growl message"; processArgs[8] = "-a"; processArgs[9] = "Adobe AIR Application Installer"; nativeProcessStartupInfo.arguments = processArgs; nativeProcessStartupInfo.executable = file;
In this case, I’m also adding a bunch of arguments in my NativeProcessStartupInfo object. These arguments will be passed on to the growlnotify command-line tool. In this example, I’m setting up the name of my application, the notification priority, the title and message of my notification and I’m also telling it to use the icon associated with the Adobe AIR Application Installer. (Check out the Growlnotify docs for more info on these settings)
Next and last step is to actually call the native script.
process = new NativeProcess(); process.start(nativeProcessStartupInfo);
This code above will result in this Growl notification:
The only downside of using native scripts is that you’ll have to package your application specifically for the operating system you wrote your native script for. So in this case, I’d have to package it as a .DMG file since Growl only exists on OS X. That said, I really wouldn’t mind an OS X version of TweetDeck that allows me to use Growl instead of their custom notifications…
I really can’t wait to see what you guys are going to build with AIR 2! You can already start today! Check out Adobe Labs for more information!
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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