Flash Player 10.3: New Features

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Flash Player 10.2

Recently, Adobe has officially released its new Adobe Flash Player 10.3. Most of its enhancements are focused primarily on mobile devices, i.e. Android based phones and tablets. Some fascinating features have also been developed for the PC market. In this article, we will discuss the innovations of Flash Player 10.3 and the capabilities yet to come.

New features in Flash Player 10.3 for PC

Adobe continues to integrate the Omniture business, acquired over a year ago, in the ecosystem of the Adobe products. For example, the new version of Flash Player 10.3 is natively integrated with the Omniture Web analytics service offering a detailed analysis of Web-based video consumption. We have already posted on implementing similar features with Google Analytics, but with slightly more effort and somewhat less ease of use. Omniture SiteCatalyst comes with preset reports to analyze video consumption, while Google Analytics employs an event-based mechanism, not always perfectly meeting the technical requirements for statistics.
The new Flash Player version features echo cancellation, enabling high-quality Web applications with two-way communication, i.e. phone calls and collaborative presentations, conference calls, and so on. Similarly to the professional telephony applications, Flash Player 10.3 enables noise reduction and acoustic activity detection.
Also, Flash Player has been enhanced by integration with the local storage settings in such browsers as Mozilla Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 8 (and older), and Google Chrome 11.

New Flash Player 10.3 Features for Mobile Devices

Hardware acceleration of H.264 decoding in Android 3.1 has been improved. This feature will be available in the latest Android devices, such as Motorola XOOM, which we have ordered for our lab. In the nearest future, we will offer a detailed overview of Flash-based mobile video applications development. By a competent approach to implementing hardware acceleration, you can substantially save on energy consumption and improve the quality of video playback.
Also, hardware decoding is available for audio content, freeing up additional resources.
The new ActionScript API is designed to control the on-screen keyboard when Flash application requests text input from the user.
Enhanced text rendering in Flash Player.
Improved management of SWF applications: out of memory error prevention, hibernation, etc.

Recently there was interesting video published o Adobe TV about video performance with harware accelerated playback on Android 3.1. We just got our Motorola Xoom and plan to perform oue own tests and demos. We have experience in video applications development for different Androids and as it is not a challenge but still there are a lot of pitfalls.

To Be Released

Adobe is constantly enhancing Flash Player with new features. The latest developments are available in Adobe Labs. In the near future, the following features are going to be released:

  • Support for G.711 audio codec for telephony
  • H.264/AVC SW Encode for client-side camera encoding
  • Support for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
  • API for GC
  • New events: pause/sleep/resume
  • TLS support

Wishing you a great success in the development of interactive applications!

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