AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas now Available

Posted on by

Tonight we’ve released the AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas on Adobe Labs (direct download links for Flash Player and AIR). This is the first time we’ve simultaneously released the desktop (AIR) and browser (Flash Player) runtimes for all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) at once, which is a great milestone for the Flash Platform. So what is this release and why should you care? One thing to note is that this is just the desktop runtimes, not any mobile runtimes. Those will be coming later. Luckily a lot of the work we did for mobile in terms of adding new APIs and optimizations are all in these releases so you’ll still get a lot of the benefits.

Flash Player 10.1

Lots of new stuff in Flash Player 10.1 including the multi-touch APIs, the performance gains, and some new networking APIs. The biggest thing (IMHO) with this release is the huge, huge memory improvements. Kevin showed the slide at MAX but it’s worth mentioning again. Without any code changes you’ll see significant improvements in memory with Flash Player 10.1.

flash_player_mem_footprint

AIR 2

air_logo_cloudsThe AIR team has been kicking all kinds of ass and I think AIR 2 is going to be a great release. One of the things we heard over and over again after AIR 1.0 was that people wanted more access to the native APIs of the operating system. AIR 2 brings a lot of that. Now you can open up a file with its default application as well as invoke native commands with the new NativeProcess API. We’ve also added the ability to create a socket server inside an AIR application and monitor changes to mounted drives. Plus a lot more. And you get all of the performance enhancements (and more) from Flash Player 10.1 so it should be a lean, mean AIR experience for end users as well.

Developing with the new Runtimes

(Update Christian has a list of AIR 2 resources that will help.) We won’t have a new Flex SDK for these runtimes yet so it’ll take a tiny bit of manual work to add support for the developer tools and the new runtime. Nick Kwiatkowski has a great screencast up for using the AIR 2 SDK in Flash Builder. It basically involves creating a copy of the Flex 4 SDK and then manually copying over the AIR SDK so it overwrites the AIR 1.5 SDK that ships with Flex 4. On the Flash Player side you’ll have to grab the playerglobal.swc and replace it in your Flex SDK.

I’m pretty excited about this particular set of runtimes. Talking to developers it seems like AIR 2 hits the mark and helps them accomplish more. Seeing the foundation put in on Flash Player 10.1 to create really great mobile experiences is also exciting. As always make sure to provide any feedback or any issues you run into over on the forums.

Related posts:

  1. Adobe Flash Player 10 on Linux: “One Heck of a Beta”
  2. Running Flash Player 10 beta and Flash Player 9 Side By Side
  3. Flash Player 10 is Here – Something For Everyone
  4. Flex Compiler for Flash Player 10 Available
  5. Flash Player 10 Mac/Win/Linux Release Candidate Now Available
  • JulesLt

    Excellent news – this is exactly the kind of thing I like – releases that improve performance and take less resources.

    (It also shows Adobe responding to the issues of Flex/AIR developers, who may want to run an application for hours).

  • http://slcfug.org/ David McGuigan

    So. So. So. Awesome. Props Adobe.

  • MC

    Sounds great, particularly the memory management. Any roadmap for when the debug players are out? My website doesn’t work in the new player and I can’t find out why.

  • http://blog.princeporter.com Porter

    Adobe is definitely moving in the right direction with this, mobile devices just got a heck of a lot better. Between this, and the amazing things I’ve seen in photoshop CS5, Adobe is heading in a very positive direction.