Adobe releases new Flash, AIR betas

Adobe Labs on Monday released test versions of two closely related foundations for Net-based applications, Flash Player 10.1 and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) 2.

Flash is widely used to bring streaming video, interactive graphics, and games to browsers; AIR, with Flash built in, is a foundation for other desktop applications. Both are instrumental to Adobe's effort to stay ahead of the gradually broadening feature set of HTML and related Web standards.

Notable Flash Player 10.1 is support for not just Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux computers, but also a variety of smartphones, though that support isn't yet built in. What is available is hardware-based decoding of the popular H.264 video format, which Adobe said improves performance and saves battery life. It also supports HTTP streaming linked with Adobe's content protection technology.

A version of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm Pre smartphones is expected later this year, Adobe said, and the final version for all systems is due in the first half of 2010.

AIR 2.0, which includes Flash Player 10.1, brings tighter integration with desktop computers. For example, it can communicate with some USB storage devices, monitor multitouch user interfaces, tap into microphone audio data, render Web pages using HTML5 and CSS version 3, and use UDP networking useful for in-game chat.

The final version of AIR 2 also is due in the first half of 2010, Adobe has said.

[Tedders85]

"What is available is hardware-based decoding of the popular H.264 video format, which Adobe said improves performance and saves battery life."<br /><br />Is this going to help with sites like Hulu and YouTube for netbooks that have limited processor power? Please say yes, cause I dearly want to play hulu full screen and in 480p...

[timber2005]

If the netbook has a seperate GPU, yea it would.... but I haven't seen (m)any with a dedicated graphics processor. <br /> <br />Then again, haven't really looked.

[adasha76]

Any nVidia Tegra based device should qualify for acceleration, and I'm pretty sure there are other ARM SOCs out there that could take advantage but I couldn't name them.

[Someone-else]

Looks good, but I'm still waiting support for 64-bit Linux...

[ddesy]

The only 64-bit Flash support they have at all is for Linux, actually.

[ddesy]

The only 64-bit Flash support they have at all is for Linux, actually.

[jake3373]

64-bit Linux is out, but it needs work (this is why it is still labeled "alpha" last I checked). My biggest problem is the object positioning in some Flash games.

[spoonie1972]

will this mean less than 115% CPU usage on osx?

[jake3373]

I agree, this is the worst part about Flash. I get this problem with Flash in every OS I use, and on an older computer that is running Google Chrome, I will sometimes kill the flash process just so a window doesn't take 30 seconds to minimize.

[lazycat202]

Adobe haters (Apple users) will ******** all day long!