Astro and Hydra

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At the MAX keynote today Emmy Huang and Justin-Everett Church demoed “Astro” and “Hydra“. “Astro” is the codename for the next version of Flash Player 10. The evangelists got a briefing on Astro a few weeks ago, so I was excited to see it today. What Emmy talked about was a new way to do text in the player. Previously, text wasn’t handled as well as it could have been in the Flash Player and that’s led to it feeling less “native” and I think it some cases less “webby”. It also didn’t support bidirectional text. In a move that I think will be good for developers, we’re making the text rendering engine extensible. This means developers will be able to create their own rules for things like layout, and languages on top of the Flash Player. It also means we’ll be able to roll out text updates whenever we want which is going to mean text will be an important and vibrant part of the player.

Hydra is also pretty cool, though I’m not as familiar with that world as I should be. It’s a good example of the interoperation between the product lines. Developers/Designers can now create their own filter effects. Because one of the goal of “Hydra” is interoperability between our design products and the player. So you can use the language to create custom filters, effects and blend modes and then use them in a lot of different places.

[tags]Max2007, Adobe, Flash Player, Astro, Hydra[/tags]

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  • Benny

    I am really excited about the new text engine and the other Astro stuff.

    Now I am wondering, did Emmy talk about when we’ll be able to get playing with Astro (beta) and the new APIs? …and with which tools (Flex/Flash?) Do we have to wait till the next major releases: Flex4 and Flash CS4 or may we expect updates for Flex3 and Flash CS3?

  • Mika

    Curious if next player will support rest of the languges (Armenian, Georgian, Hindi, etc.) which are currently not supported in Unicode. Fillig Flash forms for that languages showing questionmarks.

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  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey Mika, with this new engine we’ll be able to support any language in theory, it’s just a matter of writing the code. And I think that’s something third parties can do.

    @Benny I’m not sure about that. I’ll try and find out for you.

  • http://en.flash-ripper.com/ Rostislav Siryk

    Ryan, this new text behavior is the most important thing which Flash Player could propose in all its maturity.

    Its curious how a lot of developers let easily encourage them with buzz-words like “3D features in Astro” and how they miss really important things like text engine updates.

    Actually, web always had a dominant text nature and will always have it just because we as people use words to think our thoughts, not 3D objects; so do the search engines etc.

    For me, this text engine update is the most important change in the Flash Player after implementing the AVM2, JIT and binary data handling.

    Now I recall the old dream about seamlessly integrated Flash content. One of the most irritating limits of the FP is its sobriety regarding other DOM members: flash doesn’t share its content with others. Yes, we have the ExternalInterface but that’s far away from including flash into the browser rendering pipelines, with shared focus management, text inputs and same CSS styles. Finally, blending Flash into DOM makes it search-friendly.

    I realize this is just a dream; but who knows you Adobe guys always know how to surprise us the happy flash platform addicts.

    So… is there a chance this text rendering update could become the first step to the “DOM-transparent” Flash we’re dreaming so long about?

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