14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has released the second beta for the upcoming Flash Player 11. At this stage, the team is focusing on stability and bug fixes as all of the main features have already been included.
As such, if you're already running Flash Player 11 Beta 1, there shouldn't be any noticeable changes, but the plugin should be faster or at least more stable.
"Adobe Flash Player 11 desktop beta drives innovation for rich, engaging digital experiences with new features for cross-platform browser-based viewing of expressive rich internet applications, content, and videos across devices," Adobe wrote on its Flash Player Labs page.
"Some of the features from the Flash Player Incubator, such as Stage 3D and 64-bit support, have been moved into this beta release," it said.
Flash Player 11 promises to be an interesting release due to a number of technologies. The most promising, albeit not one that is likely to make a huge splash from the get-go, is Stage 3D, Adobe's new 3D graphics API.
It's a low-level API that aims to make the most out of a computer's graphics hardware capabilities.
As such, it should give developers a way of creating advanced games or adding powerful effects to their apps. Stage 3D competes with the WebGL standard. Microsoft Silverlight also offers a low-level 3D API.
Another first for Flash Player 11 is support for 64-bit architectures. Adobe experimented with a 64-bit version for Linux for a while, but is now coming out with full support for all desktop operating systems, Windows, Mac OS, Linux.
Flash Player 11 continues to develop support for real-time communications, audio and video, suitable for any chat app. Flash Player 11 introduces support for the G.711 codec for telephony. It also includes support for H.264/AVC SW encoding, for better quality video.
Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta 2 for Mac is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta 2 for Linux is available for download here.