Flashplayer
We have just posted a new whitepaper on Adobe.com. The whitepaper, titled Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes lays out the 1 to 2 year roadmap for the Flash runtimes (primarily Adobe AIR and Flash Player). This includes information on specific planned releases, longer term player work, and supported platforms.
This is actually the third Flash platform white paper that we have released in the past week (Adobe’s view of Flex and its commitments to Flex in the future, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR security), and is a part of a larger process of trying to provide clear and open communications around our thinking and plans for the Flash platform.
There has been a lot of buzz in the mobile space lately, and I suspect there will be even more around Windows Phone 7 at next week’s Microsoft Mix conference. One thing I wanted to clarify as it may have been lost in some of the other news is that Adobe and Microsoft are working together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series.
So, the Interwebs is all a buzz again around the latest article that “proves” that Flash will not be useful on mobile devices (much less the iPad). From the article:
Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware.
That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.
The news from Adobe MAX 2009 that probably generated the most buzz and discussion online was the announcement that Flash CS5 will have support for outputting applications for the iPhone. While I am really excited about the news, and the work we are doing around the iPhone, I am here to tell you that you should not care about it.
Let me repeat that:
You should NOT care about using Flash to build applications for the iPhone.
I have been learning some game development lately, and building my first game (well, at least my first game since Flash 4). I think game development and deployment are some of the real strengths of the Flash player, but ones which we haven’t specifically focused on in a while.
While working on my game, there were a couple of things I needed to do where additional player APIs could have made the development easier (as well as likely speeding up execution).
We have just released the shipping version of Flash Player 10 (Mac, Windows and Linux). You can find more information on all of the new features on the Flash Player product page.
You can download the player for Mac, Windows and Linux players from here.
You can grab debug and standalone players from here.
You can grab the release notes from here.
