So if you’ve been wanting to start working with the new sound APIs, 3D or Pixel Bender, now is the perfect time!

In a much belated continuation of my series “Why it works that way,” I wanted to share with you a quick question I was asking Flash Player engineering. The question was: “Why does ActionScript always run on the first core?” This was really getting at: “Why can’t we spread the love around and round-robin ActionScript to a different core based on how many Flash Players are running at once?”

I figured that if ActionScript were running on processor core A for one SWF and processor core B for the second SWF, the general performance of both SWFs would be better right? Well, it turns out I had a incorrect assumption here, and by clearing that up showed something interesting (at least to my naive self). It turns out that it isn’t always the first core. ActionScript runs on the same core as the HTML page that hosts it.

If you happen to have two pages, or two tabs running in different processes that happen to be running on different cores, the ActionScript will be running on different cores. While there isn’t much (anything) you can do to get people to run Flash instances on different processors, I found the reason for why it runs on the same processor as the browser is both interesting and sort of “duh” at the same time.

The reason for both the browser and Flash Player running on the same processor is to specifically keep ActionScript synchronized with the page. This allows for the SWF and the page to interact through ExternalInterface. By having the two systems on the same core you won’t run into lots of strange errors where an application that relies on both AS and JS works one time, but not the next on the same machine because a slight difference in timing.

This demo is a combination of the new drawing API features like drawTriangles combined with an object made from APE (ActionScript Physics Engine). The texture that is mapped across the shape in this demo can be an image, video, pixel bender or simple color.

In the color demo you can see that the cloth has two sides. This is done with the concept of backface culling. When drawing triangles, you can specify if positive or negative triangles should be bypassed in rendering. This means that for a 3D app, you don’t need to double render, but for this far simpler example you can draw the negative triangles with a different texture by doinga second fill process where you don’t draw the positive triangles.

more to come!

BTW, if you are using APE and want to export to for Flash Player 10, you will need to go through and rename the Vector Class to something else since it will conflict with the new Vector data type.

Flash Player 10 introduces creative expression features like 3D Effects, Pixel Bender filters and effects, enhanced drawing API, a new text engine, new sound APIs and color management. While each feature is impressive on its own, it is really the combination of the features with each other and with the existing capabilities in Flash Player that show the range of the Flash platform.

When we add new functionality to Flash Player, we add it in two ways. First, we want to make features easy to use, so people at different levels of technical or design expertise can make use of them. The next step though is to also provide low-level APIs that allow developers the flexibility to create their own functionality. We’ve done this in numerous ways throughout the player.

A good example is 3D where you can use simple ActionScript APIs, Flash CS4 Professional 3D transformation tools, or build a sophisticated 3D library on top of the the new drawing API drawTriangles. No matter what level you come to Flash Player from, you can make great experiences and applications.

On a personal note, I joined the Flash Player team almost two years ago, when we were in the early phases of planning Flash Player 10. In going through the requests from the community, the technology we had access to from Adobe, and the great ideas from the Flash Player team, I was blown away by what an amazing release this would be. Throughout the process as we met with customers in large and small groups, as we sneaked features at conferences and finally unveiled the player in May in public beta, I saw with delight the growing positive reaction that our hard work was worthwhile and that this will be the best release of player to date.

I’ve joked with my co-workers that as much as I’ve loved working on Flash, this Flash Player makes me want to go back out in to the community and get back to making games, advertisements, and wacky UIs. While I’m keeping my day job, I hope you enjoy Flash Player 10 as much I have, and I look forward to seeing what you create!

This event is inspired by BarCamp, iPhoneDevCamp, and the Adobe Hackathon, to develop inspiring content and applications using an advance copy of the Flash Professional CS4 authoring tool.

Attendees will include Flash and Flex developers, mobile developers, UI designers, and testers, all working together over the weekend. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event.

Participants will be able to:

• Learn about new Flash Player features
• Create Flash Player 10 content and applications
• Test and optimize content and applications for Flash Player 10

Of course, there will be a Contest, featuring some great prizes including — you guessed it — Adobe Creative Suite 4! In addition to the prizes, winners of our Contest will be featured as part of our subsequent CS4 launch.

We are hoping to accommodate about 200 people at Adobe Town Hall in San Francisco. See our Agenda before you register to attend.

Register early! Spaces are limited.

The reason why the re-compile is necessary is that we are making a change in how we differentiate the APIs for one version of Flash from another. Previously we used namespaces to make that distinction, but we are changing to a system based on metadata. It isn’t something that developers need to be concerned with, I just wanted to provide some insight.

Keep in mind as you do your re-compile that this is a beta, and some of the APIs have changed since the first beta post of Player on labs. A new version of the documentation also was posted last week, so make sure to download that as well.

Also note: There may be a prob or two doing Export Release in Builder with build 3.1.0.2148. the Flex team is looking into it and if needed will make updates in later SDK builds.

I admit that the 62% number both made me excited and made me nervous. 62% was way out of the norm even though our download and install data suggested the growth. Also, the data was gathered through a time-tested methodology for tracking Flash Player versions. When I got the 82% update I still felt relief followed by elation. This is a number that is consistent with the curve of 62% in 3 months.

But seriously, 82% in six months is fantastic. In our previous penetration models, that is where we expect our 9-month data to be. Besides the excitement this brings to me know that new features and security updates can penetrate fast, it is the knowlege that Flash Player cache, Hardware-scaled FullScreen, multi-core rendering, and H.264 are really out there at the levels that a lot of enterprises can make use of them. If you are developing for Flex 3, you can take full advantage of Flash Player 9 update 3 with 82% of users out there having the player.

• limited fullScreen Keyboard support
• unloadAndStop
• Wmode support for Linux

Limited FullScreen keyboard access
Whether or not you want to make a game or a video player with keyboard shortcuts, the restriction of keyboard support in fullScreen has been an annoyance to a lot of developers. The restriction was placed there because of heightened possibilities of malicious attacks while in fullScreen mode such as password phishing.

In Flash Player 10 we are easing this restriction to allow non-printing keys to be used while in fullScreen. Non-printing keys are arrows, space, shift, tab and similar keys that can’t be used to provide private information. These keys are very important however to let users do many types of selection and gameplay inputs.

I’m looking forward to a whole new set of immersive games in Flash. I wish I just had more time to play them

unloadAndStop
Grant Skinner and several other in the community have rightly pointed out some issues Flash Player 9 has with unloading content where it remains accessible after unload and elements such as audio keep playing until the item is garbage collected. We’ve worked many members of the community to come up with a solution that knocks out the major issue.

Starting with Flash Player 10 you will now be able to use unloadAndStop to unload a loaded SWF and also remove references, stop audio and video and in every way possible just make it go away.

Wmode support for Linux
Starting last December, Adobe started shipping Linux Flash Player at the same time as Windows and Macintosh making it a first-class Flash Player. To continue that we needed to work on some areas of how Flash Player works with its hosting environment so that external factors like WMode support can also be consistent across the supported platforms. For more information on the Linux enhancements, read Mike Melanson’s blog post on the subject.

NOTE
If you have started developing SWF10 content, you will need to re-compile older SWF10 to work with the new player.

Searchability of any dynamic technology is a difficult task because of the ever-changing nature of the content. By running SWFs through the runtime the spiders will have access to the content as it is seen by end-users. Google and Yahoo! Search can then take the text and link data and add the relevance back to the hosting page. The search partners are implementing the logic to navigate the application and can also choose how to make use of the data that is returned by Flash Player.

For Flash content producers, nothing has to be done to take advantage of SWF searchability. All SWF content will be accessible as it will be running through Flash Player. We do expect that the SEO community will start to generate best practices over time as it becomes clear what will cause content to be more useful to spiders.

All of this is going on now! Google is already in progress with spidering SWF content through the new system. Over the next weeks and months, you should see some pretty significant impact on the indicies as SWF content is made a first-class citizen for searchability. For more information, take a look at our official FAQ on the Adobe Developer Connection.

The new RTMFP protocol in Flash Player 10 provides an alternative to RTMP allowing customers to develop real-time communication applications with an improved user experience. Applications like chat and games are great examples of what you are likely to see make use of this technology. This new protocol has been designed for communication solutions, not massive content delivery.

We also chose UDP because it’s an efficient protocol for low-latency streaming video conversations, voice conversations or other similar solutions. UDP combined with the high-fidelity of SPEEX audio, will allow our customers to build great voice and audio solutions targeting Flash Player 10. To enable RTMFP and the UDP transport, authorization from a future server-based technology such as Adobe Flash Media Server will be required.

We are very excited about this new communication technology, the protection around it and being able to improve the delivery experience for both communication and media delivery to Flash Player.