Cool Stuff with Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 - 10/11/2011
Posted on Oct 11, 2011
As I am sure you heard, MAX was amazing again this year. There was lots of press coverage of all the announcements and acquisitions across a wide array of media outlets. However, eWeek provided one of the more comprehensive as well as most balanced in my opinion in their overview of the MAX announcements. As there was, for obvious reasons, so much information to cover, I have decided to break up my weekly posts into two this week, with this edition focused exclusively on announcements, tutorials, blog posts and code samples surrounding the new Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 releases that went live during MAX. Part two, coming soon, will focus on everything else.
Cool Flash Player 11 Stuff
The official Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 announcement by Adobe's Tom Nguyen discusses a lot around new features like Stage3D and some of the content already being created with it, including the release of the Starling framework for 2D development. It also briefly covers the announced acquisition of Nitobi. However, one release that it mentions seems to have been missed by many as I haven't seen it discussed which is the Proscenium ActionScript 3 code library that uses Stage3D to help you create interactive 3D content. Proscenium is now available on Adobe Labs.
Obviously, when discussing the Flash Player 11 release, the first thing that tends to come up is Stage3D. Adobe's Thibault Imbert shares a video with engineers and other members of the Flash Player team telling the story of Stage3D (a.k.a. Molehill). Meanwhile, Marco Scabia shares a demo from his Flash Camp Italy presentation that is a 3D rendering of the famous Duomo of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore using Stage3D.
One of the most jaw-dropping announcements and demos from the MAX Day 2 key note was that Epic and Adobe are bringing Unreal Engine 3 support for Flash 11 as reported by gaming website Joystiq. Not only does this look amazing but I believe it will continue to push the capabilities as well as adoption of the Flash Player going forward. As if to prove that point, not wanting to be left out of the game, Crytek announced that it is 'investigating' Flash for its CryEngine. Between that and the Angry Birds announcement as well as the Starling framework, it is clear that a whole new level of Flash gaming is coming.
FlashONGames announced that their Flash Player 11 game Delta Strike Beta launched on Facebook also utilizing Stage3D.
Fumio Nonaka discusses some lesser known new ActionScript language features in Flash Player 11 that add new methods of the Matrix3D class to copy elements between a Matrix3D object and another Matrix3D, Vector3D or Vector objects.
Cool AIR 3 Stuff
Adobe's Christian Cantrell discusses the new audio capabilities in AIR 3 which are device speaker selection and background audio playback on iOS including a sample project on Github that demonstrates both. Christian also covers a new API for providing hints to the garbage collector in AIR 3 called System.pauseForGCIfCollectionImminent() and allows more flexibility in guiding the player on when garbage collection would be ideal.
Chris Griffith demonstrates handling native JSON in AIR 3 including encoding and decoding of JSON strings.
Randy Troppmann writes about how AIR 3, FMS 4.5 and OSMF 1.6 enables hardware decoding of H.264 video in iOS apps allowing you to create custom video players in your AIR-based iOS applications.
Cool Native Extension Stuff
While native extensions are technically part of AIR 3, they received so much (well-deserved) attention from developers this week that I decided to give them their own section. Clearly, every AIR developer is excited about the possibilities this feature opens up and a number of people have already released their extensions publicly.
First off, Milkman Games posted an extremely detailed beginner's guide to developing Android extensions for AIR 3 that is an excellent reference if you would like to learn how to get started building your own native extensions.
James Scott of Jampot released two new AIR 3 native extensions for iOS and Android. The first allows you to use native popups on iOS and Android while the second, for iOS only, allows you to update the badge on your app's icon letting a user know there are updates within your application.
Small Screen Design created the app that eventually won the Adobe AIR App Challenge. They also share a Github repository that contains a number of Android native extensions including ones for sharing content, sending SMS and showing a Toast message.
Adobe evangelist Piotr Walczyszyn posts a video demonstration, source code and sample project for his new AIR 3 native extension called as3c2dm for push notifications via C2DM (Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework).
Adobe's Christian Cantrell posts a sample project to Github for getting orientation data from the Android operating system via an Android Native Extension which is available as part of the project code.
Adobe's Harish Suvarna created an AIR native extension for Invoking ICU (International Components for Unicode) from Adobe AIR for enhanced Unicode support within your application. In part 2 he shows how to compile and build this ANE from the prerelease version of Flash Builder 4.6.
Cool AIR for TV Stuff
One of the other items that I think was more easily missed at MAX was a number of announcements regarding AIR for TV. However, the media did manage to pick up the news with Yahoo! Finance discussing new partnerships with LG and TiVo and Software Magazine reporting on Samsung announcing its first smart TV app developed using Adobe AIR.
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