New version of Flash optimised for processing and battery life
Adobe has released the final build of Flash 10.1 and AIR2 for Windows, Mac and Linux, along with a bundle of patches for existing code. Flash 10.1 for Android will be released later this month.
Flash 10.1 has been designed to operate of a wide variety of platforms and has been optimised to work with different powered processors and memory capacities. Improvements include reducing memory footprint, especially for bitmap-intensive applications, a tweaked ActionScript virtual machine and reducing the power consumption for content running in the background on a non-visible browser tab.
Desktop users will benefit from hardware-based H.264 video decoding and the software has a video viewing system dubbed Smart seek which adds DVR functions such as rewind and fast forward to flash video. The incorporation of the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) should also boost video performance.
Multitouch controls have also been added to the new version, with developers getting the APIs for pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. The software is also capable of a private browsing mode where personal data is wiped.
“Mac performance was also an explicit focus for us,” Paul Betlem, senior director of Flash Player Engineering wrote in a blog entry.
“One improvement we made is the use of a double-buffered OpenGL context for improved full screen playback efficiency. We also investigated a number of compile-time optimizations using Xcode to improve our overall execution speed of Flash Player on Macs.”
As promised, the company also released patches for serious security flaws in Flash. The 10.1.53.64 update patches 32 issues with Flash that would allow remote code execution, system crashes of the loss of virtualised images.
