Flash Player and Adobe AIR feature list

Flash Player 11.6 and Adobe AIR 3.6 (February 12, 2013)

SWF version: 19

Feature	Documentation
Lossless video export from standalone and authplay.dll	No documentation impact
Support for flash.display.graphics.readGraphicsData() that returns a Vector of IGraphicsData	API reference
Improve permissions UI related to full screen keyboard access	No documentation impact
Prevent ActiveX Abuse in Office Documents	Administration Guide
Support file access in cloud on Windows	No documentation impact
Enhance multi-SWF support	API reference
Migration certification for ANEs	Guides: Signing an updated version of an AIR application ADT package command
RectangleTexture	API reference
File API update so AIR apps conform to Apple data storage guidelines	API reference
Separate sampler state for Stage3D	API reference
Set device specific Retina Display resolution (iOS)	Guides: Setting desktop application properties iOS Settings

Flash Player 11.5 and Adobe AIR 3.5 (November 6, 2012)

SWF version: 18

Feature	Documentation
Shared ByteArray	API references: flash.concurrent.Condition flash.concurrent.Mutex Using worker for concurrency
Invoke Event enhancement (for openurl)	API references: InvokeEvent InvokeEventReason Guide
Packaging multiple libraries in an ANE (iOS)	Guide
Debug stack trace in release builds of Flash Player	API reference
Statically link DRM (Desktop only)	API reference Guide

Flash Player 11.4 and Adobe AIR 3.4 (August 21, 2012)

SWF version: 17

Feature	Documentation
Concurrency (ActionScript workers)	Guide API references: Worker WorkerDomain WorkerState
Telemetry API	API reference
Flash Player SandboxBridge support	API reference
StageVideo.attachCamera() improvements	Guide API references: attachCamera() Camera.drawToBitmapData() VIDEO_FRAME event
List connected devices	Command syntax
New location for the iOS Debug Bridge (idb) utility	Guide
Compressed texture with alpha support for Stage3D	Guide API references: Context3D.requestContext3D()Context3DTextureFormat CubeTexture uploadFromBitmapData() and uploadFromByteArray()
Direct AIR Deployment for iOS	Guide API reference
AudioPlaybackMode.AMBIENT	Guide API reference
Resolve ANE Symbol Conflicts on iOS	Guides: ADT ANE
iOS Push Notifications	Guide API references: flash.notifications packageflash.events.RemoteNotificationEvent
LZMA Support for ByteArray	Guide API reference
Increase GPU Reach	API reference

Flash Player 11.3 and Adobe AIR 3.3 (June 8, 2012)

SWF version 16

Feature	Documentation
Full screen keyboard input	Guide API reference
Texture Streaming	Guide API reference
BitmapData.drawWithQuality	Guide API reference
BitmapData.encode	Guide API reference
HW Failure String in Context3D.driverinfo	API reference
Aspect Ratio Enhancements	Guide API reference
USB Debugging for AIR iOS	Guide
Enhanced Background Behavior for AIR iOS	Guide
Test and Debug Simulator Support	Guide
JPEG-XR Support	API reference
New location for File.applicationStorageDirectory (Mac OS only)	API reference

Flash Player 11.2 and Adobe AIR 3.2 (March 28, 2012)

SWF version 15

Feature	Documentation
Stage3D for Adobe AIR	Guide API reference
Silent Auto Update for Windows	Guide
Multithread Video Decoding	API reference
Mouse Lock	Guide API reference

Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 (October 4, 2011)

SWF version 13

Feature	Documentation
Stage 3D Accelerated Graphics Rendering	Guide API reference
Flash Access Content Protection Enhancements	Guide
Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS)	Guide
NetStream.dispose()	API reference
H.264/AVC Software Encoding for Cameras (desktop)	API reference
Enhanced High Resolution Bitmap Support	API reference
High Efficiency SWF Compression Support	Release notes
G.711 Audio Compression for Telephony	API reference
Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support	Guide API reference
Garbage Collection Advice	Guide API reference
Cubic Bezier Curves	API reference
Secure Random Number Generator	API reference
Socket Progress Events	API reference
DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying	Guide API reference
MovieClip.isPlaying	API reference
Sound.loadCompressedDataFromByteArray	API reference
Sound.loadPCMFromByteArray	API reference
Native 64-bit Support	Release notes
Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding	Guide API reference
TLS Secure Sockets Support	Guide API reference
Native Extensions	Guide API reference
Flash Access Content Protection Support for AIR Mobile	Guide
Encrypted Local Storage for Mobile	Guide API reference
Captive Runtime Support	Guide
Stage Video Hardware Acceleration (AIR Mobile)	API reference
H.264/AAC Playback Support (AIR for iOS)	Guide API reference
Front-facing Camera Support (AIR for Android)	Guide API reference
Background Audio Playback Support (AIR for iOS)	Guide
Device Speaker Control for Mobile (AIR for iOS & Android)	API reference
16 and 32-bit Color Depth	Release notes
Game Controller API (AIR TV)	Guide API reference

Developer guidance for websites with content for Adobe Flash Player in Windows 8

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/jj193557(v=vs.85).aspx

Adobe Introduces Premium Features for Gaming with Flash Player 11.2

• Premium feature APIs in Flash Player 11.2 will benefit graphically demanding games by giving developers access to hardware accelerated graphics rendering in combination with domain memory, which is used by C/C++ cross compilers such as Adobe Alchemy. Developers can use the premium features to publish games for Flash Player across PC browsers and as natively packaged mobile apps using Adobe AIR for distribution through the Apple iTunes App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore for Android and other mobile app markets.
• With today’s release of Flash Player 11.2, we are making premium features available free of charge for content published prior to August 1. Starting August 1, these features will be licensed for commercial use, and there is no charge for the first $50K in application revenues. The use of premium features within Adobe AIR, including for mobile applications for iOS and Android, will be royalty free.

Adobe Flex now Apache Flex

Adobe planed to donate Flex to Apache foundation and now Flex is officially accepted by Apache Software Foundation(ASF).

For more info on this – http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/FlexProposal

 

Flash Player Adminm Guide

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/flash/articles/flash_player_admin_guide/flash_player_11_1_admin_guide.pdf

What’s new in Flash Player 11 ?

• Native 64-bit support (Flash Player desktop): Take advantage of native support for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit web browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
• Stage 3D accelerated graphics rendering: Stage 3D (formerly called “Molehill”) is a new architecture for hardware-accelerated graphics rendering developed by Adobe. Stage 3D provides a set of low-level APIs that enable advanced 2D/3D rendering capabilities across screens and devices (desktop, mobile, and TV). It gives 2D and 3D app and framework developers access to high-performance GPU hardware acceleration, enabling the creation of new classes of rich, interactive experiences. (This release includes Flash Player and Adobe AIR desktop support; AIR for Android and iOS support will be enabled in a future prerelease build.)
• Adobe Flash Access content protection support for mobile: Flash Access content protection support is now available on mobile devices.
• H.264/AVC software encoding for cameras (desktop): Stream high-quailty video from your computer’s camera with higher compression efficiency and industry-wide support, enabling both immersive real-time communications (e.g., video chat and video conferencing) and live video broadcasts.
• Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) support: ActionScript developers can now take advantage of high-performance native parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data. Developers can integrate existing data seamlessly into their projects.
• G.711 audio compression for telephony: Support interoperability with legacy phone systems via the Flash Media Gateway (FMG) and other third-party clients (through the open RTMP protocol) without the need for transcoding.
• Garbage collection advice: Provide smoother, more responsive user experiences by allowing developers to provide hints (through System.pauseForGCIfCollectionImminent) to optimize garbage collection scheduling.
• Cubic Bézier curves: With the Graphics.cubicCurveTo drawing API, developers can easily create complex cubic Bézier curves without requiring custom ActionScript code.
• Secure random number generator: Developers can now take advantage of cryptographically secure random number generation to build more secure algorithms and protocols.
• Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Flash Access enhancements: Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) provides protection for streaming video across screens while eliminating the deployment complexity of a license server. New Flash Access content protection features include key rotation support, V3 license chaining, domain support, and enhanced output protection and device filtering.
• TLS secure sockets support (new for Flash Player): Enable secure communications for client/server applications.
• Socket progress events: Improve management of data transfer using the Socket class by providing a new property to determine the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer and a new event for when data is being sent to the network layer. The new APIs (Socket.bytesPending, Event.OutputProgressEvent) allow applications to easily track progress and provide responsive feedback.
• Native text input UI (mobile): Mobile apps can now take advantage of the native text input controls on mobile platforms, including platform-specific user interaction behaviors such as magnification and text selection. Native text controls are available on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry Tablet OS.
• JPEG-XR support: Flash Player and AIR now include support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard (ISO/IEC 29199-2). The computationally lightweight JPEG-XR format provides more efficient compression than JPEG, enables both lossy and lossless compression support, and adds support for alpha channel transparency.
• Enhanced high-resolution bitmap support: BitmapData objects are no longer limited to a maximum resolution of 16 megapixels (16,777,215 pixels) and maximum bitmap width/height is no longer limited to 8,191 pixels, enabling the development of apps that utilize very large bitmaps.
• High-efficiency SWF compression support: Developers can now take advantage of LZMA compression for their SWF files. LZMA compression can reduce SWF size by up to 40 percent, enabling users to benefit from richer experiences with shorter download times and reduced bandwidth consumption. Use Tinic Uro’s LZMA compression tool or a custom utility to compress your SWFs.
• DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying: DisplayObjectContainer now implements a removeChildren API, allowing developers to remove all of a container’s children quickly using a single API.
• Sound.loadCompressedDataFromByteArray and Sound.loadPCMFromByteArray: Developers can now inject compressed or raw PCM sound data into a Sound object to play sounds.
• Asynchronous bitmap decoding: Improve application responsiveness and deliver smoother animation by decoding images on initial load instead of on demand. Images are cached as needed.

Creation of an iPhone App with Flash and without a Mac (for all Windows lovers)

http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2011/09/22/creation-of-an-iphone-app-with-flash-and-without-a-mac-for-all-windows-lovers/

Flex: where we are headed by Andrew Shorten

It has been about three months since we shipped Flex 4.5 SDK and a corresponding update to Flash Builder, in which we delivered exciting new capabilities to build and deploy applications for Google Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS platforms. The feedback on the release has been fantastic – with customers blown away that they can leverage one tool, one framework and one codebase to deliver apps across leading mobile platforms, not to mention web and desktop as well.

Since then the product team has been heads-down working on our future plans for Flex SDK and Flash Builder, and although we’re not quite ready to share all the details, we wanted to provide you with some insight into what we’re focusing on, and where we expect to make investments going forward.

Investing in Flex, Flash Builder, Flash Player and AIR

Adobe is continuing to make significant investments in Flex, Flash Builder, Flash Player and AIR – we have hundreds of engineers who are actively working on exciting new tooling, framework and runtime features and enhancements to be included in upcoming releases.

Our teams are currently working on a free update to Flex SDK and Flash Builder for release later this year that will further demonstrate our commitment to delivering a complete solution for building and deploying mobile applications to multiple platforms.

Beyond this update we’re already working to deliver our next major releases.

Recognizing the role of Flex has changed

Since its inception, Flex has been highly leveraged as a leading solution for building “rich Internet applications”– potentially applicable wherever a rich, expressive and engaging user experience delivered via the browser was required. We’ve seen product configurators, e-commerce sites, games, e-learning experiences, banking services, business dashboards, photo editors, audio/video channels, productivity tools, line-of-business applications and more, all built with Flex.

We’re at a point now where it is incumbent upon us to focus on where Flex provides unique value in the marketplace.

There are countless examples where, in the past, Flex was (rightly) selected as the only way to deliver a great user experience. Today, many of those could be built using HTML5-related technologies and delivered via the browser, and at Adobe, we will provide tooling to help designers and developers create those experiences – Edge and Muse are two such examples.

That doesn’t mean however that HTML5 is the right choice for all use cases – the performance, framework maturity and robust tooling provided by Adobe are sighted as critical factors by enterprise customers as to why they continue to select Flex.

We firmly believe that Flex is already the best technology for building complex, high fidelity enterprise applications such as business dashboards, line of business tools, real time trading applications and desktop replacement applications, and see leading healthcare, financial services, telco, etc companies standardizing on it. We will continue to heavily invest in strengthening Flex for enterprise use, ensuring that you can deliver expressive, robust applications. As we share more details about our upcoming releases, you’ll see our commitment to tackle areas such as Spark component completion, accessibility, build system integration, performance analysis tooling and integration of a next-generation compiler, making Flex the #1 choice for building enterprise-grade RIAs.

Mobile – the next big thing for Flex

But we’re not just investing in the enterprise. The explosion of mobile devices has opened new doors for end users, enterprise organizations and developers, while at the same time introducing a new set of development challenges. As you’ve already seen with Flex 4.5, we are making big strides in providing developers with a single framework for building and deploying mobile applications to a range of different devices and platforms.

We’re continuing to focus on runtime performance, native extensions, new components, declarative skinning, adding more platforms and improving tooling workflows, such that in our next major release timeframe we expect that the need to build a fully-native application will be reserved for a small number of use cases.

The growth of the mobile market and the challenge of building out applications that work on a range of different form-factors and platforms present us with a huge opportunity to expose Flex to an entirely new audience of developers, while continuing to be relevant for existing Flex developers who are extending their applications to mobile.

The perception of “Flash”

All of this is no good of course if there are misperceptions or lack of awareness about what Flex (and more broadly Adobe) offers for Enterprise and Mobile application development. With all the FUD about Flash that has been in the marketplace over the past many months, we are highly focused on demonstrating just what Flex is capable of, both in the enterprise and for mobile app development.

On the enterprise side, we’re continuing to build meaningful relationships with large organizations as we introduce them to Adobe’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions. Flex is a core part of our CEM technology offering and the dialog we’re having with customers allows us to intelligently position Flex, Flash Builder and our runtimes as a way for them to deliver exceptional customer interaction through rich Internet applications and easy-to-use interfaces on web, desktops, tablets and mobiles (including Apple iOS devices).

For mobile, while we’re relatively new to the market we’ve already seen a great response to our offering – trial downloads of Flash Builder are higher than they’ve ever been before and we’ve already seen hundreds of mobile apps built and deployed to app stores, including several applications that top their category in the Apple App Store. As we roll out additional mobile development capabilities later this year, you can look forward to seeing stronger mobile-focused developer marketing from Adobe, including a series of case studies that highlight the success customers are having with Flex.

We’re excited to be working on the next-generation of Flex and look forward to getting continued feedback and input from both new and experienced Flex developers. Be sure to register for Adobe MAX, October 1-4 in Los Angeles, to learn more about our Flex roadmap.

Front-facing Camera Support in AIR 3

http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2011/08/front-facing-camera-support-in-air-3.html

Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta for Desktops

Flash Player 11 beta 2 now available on Labs.  This update provides added stability.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/flashplayer11/