14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has released the first beta of its upcoming Adobe Flash Player 11, a major release bringing several big features. Flash Player 11 Beta introduces Stage 3D, the new, hardware accelerated 3D graphics API for Flash and is also the first release with native support for 64-bit environments.
Some of the technologies have been previewed in pre-beta releases in Adobe's Incubator program. But they're now ready for a wider audience and are mature enough to be introduced as part of the beta.
"Today we are excited to announce the availability of the Adobe AIR 3 beta and the Adobe Flash Player 11 beta for desktop platforms on Adobe Labs," Adobe announced.
"AIR and Flash Player continue to drive innovation for rich, engaging digital experiences with new features for cross-device standalone application development and expressive rich internet applications, games, and videos in the browser," it added.
"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 explained.
The star of the show in Flash Player 11 is Stage 3D a new low-level graphics API developed by Adobe under the codename Molehill.
With the big emphasis on 3D graphics on the web lately, with the WebGL standard and Microsoft Silverlight's new 3D graphics capabilities, the new API couldn't have come at a better time.
The Stage 3D APIs provide low-level access to the GPU making compelling 2D and 3D animations and effects possible. They also work across devices, wherever Flash is supported, on the desktop, smartphones and tablets, TVs and so on.
Another headliner for Flash Player 11 is support for 64-bit architectures. Flash Player 11 will be available in 64-builds for all supported desktop environments, Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
Flash Player 11 also introduces support for H.264/AVC encoding for cameras, a boost for real-time communications or simple video recording. Flash Player 10.3 got support for better audio in voice calls, the new feature is rounding up Flash's capabilities in this area quite nicely.
Finally, Flash Player 11 also gets support for JSON, making it easier to integrate with JavaScript applications.
Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta for Windows is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta for Mac is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta for Linux is available for download here.