Adobe AIR has been a double-edged sword since it was first created. Developers can create beautiful applications quickly and easily distribute them to users. The problem has always been performance and resource usage. With AIR 2, Adobe has decreased memory usage by about 30% across the board and boosted overall performance. This is in addition to a slew of new features:
- Native Process API
- Open documents with the user’s default application
- Microphone data access
- Mass storage device detection
- Updated, faster WebKit with enhanced support for HTML5 and CSS3
- Multi-touch and gestures
- TLS/SSL sockets
- Global error handler
- New networking support including UDP and server sockets
- Screen reader support(Windows)
- Reduced CPU usage on idle
- .rpm and .deb installer packages for the runtime on Linux
- Native installers for applications (.exe, .dmg, .rpm, .deb)
Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It will also be coming to Android later in June, but you can grab the beta from the Android Market. This new version of Flash brings improved performance, power management and video. It also has multi-touch, private browsing capabilities, and a few tweaks to make it perform better on Macs.
With 10.1, Adobe focused on creating a single Flash runtime that could run efficiently across all devices. They were able to make changes that “directly translate to faster execution and reduced resource consumption.” Talking specifically about mobile devices, this ultimately results in Flash not sucking the life out of your battery. The garbage collector has also been improved, which means Flash will more efficiently release memory it is no longer using.
On desktops, Flash Player 10.1 includes hardware-based H.264 video decoding. This gives you smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead and offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance and reducing system resource usage.
Multi-touch is probably one of the more interesting new features. It supports pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. As it is trying to slim down, Flash is also becoming more mobile friendly. These changes probably won’t get Flash onto the iPad, but they are definitely a step in the right direction. As HTML5 becomes more and more popular, Adobe will need to continue to step their game up to remain relevant.