As promised, Adobe has released beta versions of both Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. Originally announced earlier this year at Adobe’s MAX conference, the goal of Flash Player 10.1 is to create a unified platform that works on every operating system, both on the desktop and on mobile platforms.
Unfortunately for the mobile platforms, the key enhancements to the current beta release are limited to desktop environments. However, an Adobe spokesperson tells Webmonkey that support for Palm’s webOS will arrive later this year with Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian and Nokia support arriving in early 2010. Due to Apple’s developer restrictions, Flash will not be available on the iPhone.
The final release of Flash Player 10.1 is expected during the first half of 2010.
For now you’ll have to content yourself with improvements to the Flash desktop experience, and fortunately there are several welcome new features in Flash Player 10.1:
- Support for multitouch and gestures — Flash Player 10.1 understands gestures on hardware that supports touchscreen interfaces. However, since the mobile support is still lacking, we’re having a hard time seeing where multitouch is useful beyond Windows 7 devices with touch screens (which are scarce).
- GPU acceleration for H.264 video in Windows — This is good news for Windows users, but leaves us scratching our heads as to why the same isn’t available for Mac and Linux when plenty of other apps on both platforms already offer GPU-based acceleration.
- Support for local microphone access — This may well be the best news for developers since it paves the way to create online audio editors capable of the same sort of sophistication we’ve seen with online image editing apps.
The GPU acceleration is particularly noteworthy since is means that underpowered PCs like netbooks will be able to offer smoother video playback while also cutting down on the battery drain. Flash Player 10.1 also offers much improved buffering that lets you drop offline and still keep watching a video.
However, while Flash Player 10.1 offers some new features, this beta release is almost as significant for what it doesn’t include. Although Adobe says it’s in the works, you won’t find support for 64 bit operating systems, nor, if you happen to be on Mac or Linux, will you be able to take advantage of the new GPU acceleration.
Adobe already plans to have several updates to the beta before Flash Player 10.1 is officially released, but with mobile support still not ready and Flash Player 10.1 features varying considerably by platform it’s obvious that Flash still has a long way to go before it will fulfill Adobe’s goal of making Flash work everywhere.
And that’s an important goal, since there’s a new player in the multimedia world of the web that also plans to work everywhere: HTML5.
HTML5 has been touted as a “Flash killer,” making the ubiquitous plug-in unnecessary with new tags to embed video and create animations directly within HTML. The only problem is that HTML5 is not finished and browser support is far from complete.
But judging by today’s beta release, Flash Player 10.1 is also far from complete. If Adobe hopes to continue fending off HTML5 — which has strong support from the likes of Google and Apple — the pressure is on to deliver something more impressive than this beta by the time final release in 2010.
While Flash may be struggling a bit, Adobe AIR 2, the company’s runtime environment for making web-like native apps on the desktop and on mobiles, fares much better in this beta release. In fact, the new version of AIR, has some welcome new features and none of the cross-platform confusion.
In this release, AIR, which is perhaps most notable for its Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Alert Thingy or Twhirl, gains a very nice a native process API that will enable AIR apps to communicate with OS-native tools.
For example, TweetDeck could tap into Spotlight on Mac OS X to deliver search results from your system’s hard disk. The nice thing for developers is that the native process API means that the application itself is still cross platform. Also welcome is the ability to deliver OS-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, or .deb instead of the somewhat confusing .air installer.
AIR applications can also now detect and use attached USB devices — for example, plug in a USB stick full of photos and an AIR-based image editor can now import them for you.
Other AIR improvements include support for drag-and-drop file exporting, a faster version of WebKit (for AIR’s HTML support), as well as the same microphone and multitouch support found in Flash Player 10.
Webmonkey editor Michael Calore also contributed to this report.
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