Adobe Brings It’s ‘A’ Game to Flash 10.2

With Flash being the most pervasive software platform in the world, installed on over 99% of all computers, their recently released version 10.2 has been highly anticipated. As mobile devices dominate market share, and the sophistication of online engagement rapidly evolves, the question is – did they deliver?

For the blow-by-blow of all the shiny new features, jump on over to Adobe’s site directly.

Or for a summary on how it might affect you, here are some of our thoughts on Adobe’s latest effort.

By far the biggest advancement is Flash’s new Stage Video API with hardware acceleration. What that means in layman’s terms is that Flash will now allow smooth, beautiful playback of up to 1080p HD video with minimal effort from the CPU. In addition to providing a more stable experience, it will keep resources lean, and preserve battery life on both smartphones and PCs. In addition, they’ve also improved the smart seek function, and the new technology will allow for slow motion, double-time, instant replay etc., allowing you to jump around video effortlessly. This will have a huge impact on building interactive experiences around fullscreen video playback. It will also accommodate changing networking conditions – adjusting quality on the fly depending on the user’s network speed.

Adobe has also focused a lot on enhancing globalization, with locale support that can be based on location or OS/user selected language. A big addition is sub-pixel text rendering for improved clarity and readability (especially for complex character-based languages).

Some of the most significant enhancements in 10.2 are in the mobile realm. Major improvements have been made to multi-touch and gestures, as well as mobile text input. If a physical keyboard is not detected on the device Flash will now automatically raise the native virtual keyboard for text fields. They’ve also done a lot of optimizing for loading and playback, including pausing and sleep-mode if it’s not being used, with no interruption in audio/video playback. One of the most anticipated features was the accelerometer, which they’ve implemented with x, y and z-axis.

Back on the desktop, they’ve brought things like advanced memory management (to prevent browser crashes), native custom cursor (to dramatically improve performance), stream reconnect (keep video going even if the connection is disrupted), IE9 hardware acceleration, multi-monitor fullscreen support, and browser privacy mode.

All in all, Adobe has done an impressive job – by adding important new features that show their commitment to innovation, and to answer their critics who are concerned with their relevance on mobile platforms.

At Pixelcarve we look forward to continuing to drive innovation on the web by using many of the new features available and helping our clients create unique and memorable experiences for their brand.

Until next time,

Curtis Priest
Pixelcarve Inc.
Partner/President & CEO

*Special thanks to Daniil for his contributions.