Last Friday (November 11th 2011) the Flex Product team made a huge announcement about the future of Flex. The initial impression from the post, in-conjunction with the Flash Mobile announcement, caused a lot of controversy and confusion about the current state of Flex, Adobe’s overall goals with Flex and how they planned to handle Flex in the future.
Yesterday (Nov. 15th), the product team updated the post with a lot more clarity and details about what Adobe is doing with Flex. The core take-away with this update is that Adobe will be donating nearly all of the Flex eco-system (excluding the Flash Player, AIR & Flash Builder) to Apache:
We are preparing two proposals for incubating Flex SDK and BlazeDS at the Apache Software Foundation.
In addition to contributing the core Flex SDK (including automation and advanced data visualization components), Adobe also plans to donate the following:
- Complete, but yet-to-be-released, Spark components, including ViewStack, Accordion, DateField, DateChooser and an enhanced DataGrid.
- BlazeDS, the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Flex applications.
- Falcon, the next-generation MXML and ActionScript compiler that is currently under development (this will be contributed when complete in 2012)
- Falcon JS, an experimental cross-compiler from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript.
- Flex testing tools, as used previously by Adobe, so as to ensure successful continued development of Flex with high quality
Adobe will also have a team of Flex SDK engineers contributing to those new Apache projects as their full-time responsibility. Adobe has in-development work already started, including additional Spark-based components.
Adobe also plans to continue support of current and future versions of Flex within the Flash Player, AIR runtimes, and Flash Builder. We definitely recommend reading the full post on the Flex Product teams blog.
August 25th, 2011 Chris Griffith
Adobe officially released the latest minor update to Flash Player to version 10.3.183.7.
This release addresses compatibility issues that were encountered with Flash Player 10.3.183.5. These include:
- Flash Player 10.3.183.5 Shared library/gotoAndPlay() or gotoAndStop() bug (2940617)
- Textfields are displaying text vertically in 10.3.183.5 release (2941694)
- Massive Animation Slowdown following install of FP 10.3.183.5 (2941759)
- Flash Player 10.3.183.5 MSI installers do not install Windows Control Panel applet (2940568)
- Flash player 10.3 displays a black screen (2943064)
- Sound repeating and building up bug (2941616)
- Flash applications at certain websites (http://www.justin.tv, http://heylenmichel.de) now load correctly (2939645, 2944081)
You can download this release from the following pages:
Get Flash Player
Alternate Flash Player Download Page
Developer Note:
Please note that users will not be automatically prompted to download and install this build if they are already at 10.3.183.5. Users below 10.3.183.5 will be prompted at their normal auto update interval. If your applications have been effected by an issue with 10.3.183.5, and you’d like to prompt your users to update, we recommend you use SWFObject.
April 14th, 2011 Chris Griffith
A big congratulations to Demian Borba on hosting another successful Flash Camp Brasil.
The hot news from the conference was the presentation by Arno Gourdol,
Director of Engineering for Adobe’s Flash Runtime on “Sneak Peek of Future of the Flash Runtime!”
Here are the highlights from the presentation:
- Faster GC : GC hint API and more.
- New numeric types : float and float4 (very useful for Molehill in the future).
- Concurrency : Worker threads (shared nothing model) to leverage multicore CPU’s. No more UI ‘s blocked when doing expensive operations.
- Stage3D : The API used for Molehill (that you know through the Incubator builds).
- StageVideo : Allowing full GPU acceleration (decoding + blitting) when used with H.264. Part of Flash Player 10.2 and coming to AIR soon.
- Threaded video pipeline : Will decode non H.264 streams on another thread (H.264 being decoded by the GPU), Net I/O will also be moved to another thread, all this bringing smoother playback.
If you are curious about the slides, you can download them here.
February 8th, 2011 Chris Griffith
Adobe has released Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. They’re especially excited that this release introduces Stage Video, a full hardware accelerated video pipeline for best-in-class, beautiful video across platforms and browsers. Additionally, this version of Flash Player offers all the new capabilities previewed in our beta release, like custom native mouse cursors, multiple monitor full-screen support, Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support, and enhanced sub-pixel rendering for superior text readability.
Feel free to tweet with hash tags #Adobe #Flash #stagevideo
Flash Player Team blog post
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash-player-10-2-launch.html
ADC
Adobe Stage Video page
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stagevideo.html
Getting started with stage video
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/stage_video.html
Working with native mouse cursors in Flash Player 10.2
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/native-mouse-cursors.html
Debug Players Here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html
Our headliner will ber Greg Wilson, Group Manager Enterprise Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems as our headliner. Also joining us will be a representative from the Spoon team. You’ll hear about the future of Flex from Adobe and Spoon’s perspectives, a little about Adobe’s HTML5 vision, and have plenty of time for questions and answers. 
These beta 4 runtimes for the Windows and Mac OS desktop environments can be now be