Adobe Releases Its ‘Flash’ Roadmap, With Major Focus To Gaming And Premium Video

Posted on Feb 22 2012 - 12:46pm by Editorial Staff

Adobe today released its first publication of a new roadmap document for the Adobe Flash runtimes development – future bug fixtures and development around the two key areas – gaming and deployment of premium video is given priority – the company believes that Flash suited more for addressing the gaming and premium video markets and will primarily focus its development efforts in those areas – along with which it will make architectural and language changes to the runtimes in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes are placed well in order to achieve richest experience over the web and mobile devices for the decade time.

Adobe AIR:

The new Flash APIs and capabilities would be released via the Flash Player plug-in first, and then eventually included in an Adobe AIR release. Moving forward, Adobe AIR and Flash Player browser plug-in releases will be increasingly synchronized and released simultaneously. Adobe AIR 3 added the ability for developers to extend the API surface and functionality of the runtime by bundling native extensions into their applications. Future Adobe AIR development will focus on incorporating features from the core Flash Player runtime. While desktop and mobile-specific APIs will be developed, they will not be the primary focus for Adobe AIR development efforts.

Flash Player 11.2:

  • Mouse-lock support
  • Right and middle mouse-click support
  • Context menu disabling
  • Hardware-accelerated graphics/Stage 3D support for Apple iOS and Android via Adobe AIR
  • Support for more hardware accelerated video cards (from January 2008) in order to expand availability of hardware-accelerated content.
  • New Throttle event API (dispatches event when Flash Player throttles, pauses, or resumes content)
  • Multithreaded video decoding pipeline on the desktop which improves overall performance of video on all desktop platforms

Flash Player “Cyril”:

  • Keyboard input support in full-screen mode
  • Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio
  • Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content
  • LZMA compression support for ByteArray
  • Frame label events

Flash Player “Next”:

  • Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base
  • Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine
  • Updates to the ActionScript language

ActionScript “Next”:

From a language design standpoint, Adobe uses the following assumptions as a guide for next-generation ActionScript development:

  • Increasing demand for long-term productivity benefits such as robustness, modularity, and maintainability to complement shorter-term productivity benefits characteristic of scripting languages, such as speed of development
  • Demand for high performance increases
  • Demand for hardware utilization increases
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