Last night we launched Flash Player 9,0,60,120, a public beta of our next update to Flash Player. There are some pretty interesting features in it, most notably an enhancement to the full Screen, and a new caching system to let you download the Flex Framework once.

Read on for some details, but also check out Tinic’s Blog and his article about Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta.

Full Screen:
Full Screen itself is actually a few new features.

First the ActionScript API is updated to let you specify a target rectangle rather. This rectangle will be the only content shown in the full screen view. Even if you select a rectangle that is not the same aspect ratio as the screen, it will still only show your rectangle and will show the background color as bars when needed.

As the player transitions from the web page to full screen, you will notice the next feature, transition. The transition will zoom from the embedded SWF in the browser and quickly take over the whole screen. This transition will give the end user information about what is going on, and what caused the full screen behavior to occur. I like the idea of transitions a lot. This let’s your eye track any elements you are watching as you enter full screen. Otherwise there is some possibility of loss of orientation on the screen during a direct change to full screen.

Once in full screen, the fun really starts. While Flash is painting a LOT more pixels on the screen, you’ll actually see your processor levels fall. Flash Player 9 update introduces “hardware scaling,” and will very efficiently render your content to screen. I’ve seen some internal demos that are pretty amazing. There are a few caveats though.

  1. This is beta software!
  2. If you are using software like VMWare or Parallels, you may experience a crash. Before going into fullScreen mode, right click in the player and choose settings. In the Settings UI you will find a disable hardware scaling option. Make sure it is disabled to prevent the crash.
  3. As a developer, realize that not everyone viewing your content may be seeing it in hardware scaling. If the user’s video card does not support this functionality, the processing will be done through Flash’s traditional method.

Flash Player cache

Also as part of this beta release we are introducing a new way of caching Adobe platform components like the Flex framework. The framework is going to be an externalized file that Flash Player can download, verify and store on your local machine. The next time you need this file, from the same site, or any other site using this same file, you won’t need to download it again.

For Flex users, this means that the Flex framework will not be adding to your application from now on. You can take advantage of the UI components, but still deliver very small SWF files.

Wait, there’s more!
For the rest of the features and enhancements like recursive External Interface calls, multi-core support and more, take a look at the release notes.