Just got in to Toronto for FITC. I’m looking forward to presenting tomorrow during the keynote on all of the cool things that we’ve been working on for the last year, and the even cooler things to come.

I’m also looking forward to Joa Ebert’s talk on Hydra and Flash Player’s own Jim Corbett who will be giving an updated version of his popular talk from MAX, “Flash Player Internals.” If you want to know how Flash Player works and what really happens when you run ActionScript, do a tween, or use a filter, make sure you make it to this session.

The sessions overall look great (as always for FITC), so I’ll try to get some blogging in along the way.

If you are at the conference, say “hi.” I should have Flash swag with me at all times

Adobe just released the numbers for Flash Player 9, update 3 (9.0.115) in addition to the major player versions. 61.8% penetration for 9.0.115 in 3 months is almost twice as fast as Flash Player has updated in the past.

It is really exciting news when you think that the majority of Flash Players are now taking advantage of multi-core support, and can view H.264 content.

I’m in the process of upgrading wordpress and will soon be moving the site to a newer, faster server, so if you experience issues with the blog, please do try back soon.

I’m also going to be trying some new anti-spam plugins, so if your comments are blocked, please let me know through the contact link above.

Adobe Image Foundation Toolkit Prerelease 2 is now live on Adobe Labs. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the AIF toolkit is the tool for creating your own filters for use with Flash Player Astro. The most exciting part of the refresh are two Flash-specific enhancements.

The toolkit can now produce bytecode files (.hbc for now). While you can’t do much with them right now, these are the compiled files that Flash Player will use to render the pixel shader. The other enhancement is support for some new filter features that are going to be supported in Flash. While they were originally not allowed in the Flash profile, you can now use conditionals to make more complex filters than before.

To see some of the filters that have already been built by the community, take a look at the Hydra Gallery.

If you send headers to a domain that does not match the domain where the SWF is hosted, you need update your crossdomain.xml file to allow them to continue to work with Flash Player 9.0.124.0. While this is discussed in the ADC pre-announcement, it could use a bit more detail. Flash Player support wrote a great technote on details of how to set up <allow-http-request-headers-from>.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb403185

One of the examples from the article is:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM “http://www.adobe.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd”>
<cross-domain-policy>

    <!– This domain can accept a MyHeader header from a SWF file on www.example.com –>
    <allow-http-request-headers-from domain=”www.example.com” headers=”MyHeader”/>

</cross-domain-policy>

Also, it is worth reiterating that the new header crossdomain syntax is required for both send and sendAndLoad network APIs. For network requests without additional headers, traditional crossdomain syntax and behavior continues.

I’ve gotten several queries about where to download the latest debug player.

here you go: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

This link should work for you any time you need a new debug player for any of our supported platforms.

Happy debugging!