Adobe Releases Flash and AIR Betas -- Visual Studio Magazine

Adobe Releases Betas of Flash 10.1 and AIR 2

By Jeffrey Schwartz
11/17/2009

Adobe today released the public betas of its namesake Flash Player 10.1 and its next-generation Adobe Integrated Runtime, dubbed AIR 2.

Flash 10.1 is the first of its runtime releases based on Adobe's Open Screen Project, aimed at providing high-definition content across PCs and mobile devices using HTTP streaming. It also supports Adobe's new Flash Access digital rights management solution and offers H.264 hardware decoding on Windows-based PCs, netbooks and mobile devices.

The beta releases come as Microsoft is expected to disclose the future of its Silverlight RIA platform at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week. Both companies are in a heated battle to offer developers tools to build rich content. Adobe Flash is nearly ubiquitous on desktop and notebook computers. The company has stepped up its battle with Microsoft with the release of AIR.

The beta of AIR 2 is intended to let developers to improve its desktop rich internet application runtime environment with support for mass storage, native application processes and support for peer-to-peer and UDP-based networking. Unlike Flash, AIR is not as ubiquitous -- Adobe said it is installed on 200 million systems. Both FlashPlayer 10.1 and AIR 2 also introduce support for multi-touch and gesturing.

Adobe had announced both last month at its annual Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. The company said the new Flash Player 10.1 will support Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Google Android and Nokia's Symbian OS. Also, Adobe Research in Motion said they will co-develop a version of Flash that will run on the BlackBerry. None of those features are in this first beta and are not expected to appear until sometime next year.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

VS Code v1.99 Is All About Copilot Chat AI, Including Agent Mode

Agent Mode provides an autonomous editing experience where Copilot plans and executes tasks to fulfill requests. It determines relevant files, applies code changes, suggests terminal commands, and iterates to resolve issues, all while keeping users in control to review and confirm actions.
Windows Community Toolkit v8.2 Adds Native AOT Support

Microsoft shipped Windows Community Toolkit v8.2, an incremental update to the open-source collection of helper functions and other resources designed to simplify the development of Windows applications. The main new feature is support for native ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.
New 'Visual Studio Hub' 1-Stop-Shop for GitHub Copilot Resources, More

Unsurprisingly, GitHub Copilot resources are front-and-center in Microsoft's new Visual Studio Hub, a one-stop-shop for all things concerning your favorite IDE.
Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.
Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.