Adobe just release a new version of Flash Player 10 beta (10.0.0.525). There are a few new things to talk about! In addition to the primary features, and all of the fixes and improvements requested by the community that made up the first beta, we’ve added a few more items that have repeatedly heard from customers about:

  • 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.