June 23, 2008
Firefox 3 Blocklisting
Firefox 3 phones home at launch daily and checks to see if it should disable any of your plug-in/extensions. One plug-in currently being considered for blocking is pre 9.0r124 releases of Flash Player. If you are a Firefox 3 user and your Flash content suddenly no longer works, this new feature may be the reason why. Via John Dowdell.
June 18, 2008
Flash Player 10 Public Beta
Code-named Astro, Flash Player 10 was announced last October at Max 2007 and released for public preview mid-May. I highly recommend immediately downloading and installing the beta and testing your Flash content, submitting any issues you run across to Adobe's bugbase -- better that issues are uncovered early and given a chance to be addressed before general release.
A common problem with upgrades are older detection scripts that fail to recognize newer versions -- fix these now rather than when your client calls to complain (hint: swfobject 2.0 was recently released).
Key New Features (from Flash Player's Sr. Product Manager's coverage):
3D Effects - transform any display object in 3D with easy to use ActionScript APIs while retaining full interactivity.Really cool stuff discussed by Adobe engineer/product mgr types:
Custom Filters and Effects - In addition to the native filters in Flash Player you can also make your own using Adobe Pixel Bender. These filters, blend modes and fills can be scripted and animated using ActionScript
New Text Engine - Bi-directional text, vertical layout, styeable device fonts are all part of the capabilities of the new text engine. In addition, this generic engine will power a new set of text components with really mazing typographic and layout functionality.
Visual Performance - through two new wmode settings you will be able to take advantage of the video card to speed up rendering and blitting.
Vector - A new ECMAScript 4 data type that is very much like an array but only accepts one type. By knowing what type will be stored in the array access performanc is dramatically faster.
Runtime FileReference access - With Flash Player 10 beta you can open a file dialog box to ask a user to select a file and load it into the runtime. You can also save content from the runtime to the desktop.
Justin Everett-Church's Peer to Peer (P2P) in Flash Player 10 beta and RTMFP in Flash Player 10 beta.
Tinic Uro's Adobe Pixel Bender in Flash Player 10 Beta, What does GPU acceleration mean? and what one of my colleagues calls The Holy Grail of Flash audio, the three-part Adobe Is Making Some Noise.
Finally, and once you've installed the prerelease, get on over to Adobe Labs and check out the feature demos and feature videos, hosted by members of the Flash Player team. TETO!
