14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming Adobe Flash Player 11 has reached release candidate stage. This means that it's almost ready for every day use and, assuming that no issues pop up during this stage, which is unlikely, this is the version that gets pushed to the hundreds of millions of people using Flash on their computers.
Adobe Flash Player 11 comes with plenty of updates and new features, but standing out is support for 64-bit architectures, on all supported operating systems, and new, low-level 3D graphics capabilities.
"Adobe Flash Player 11 desktop release candidate 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 announced.
"Some of the features from the Flash Player Incubator, such as Stage 3D and 64-bit support, have been moved into this release," it explained.
Flash Player 11 promises to be one of the best releases yet, if only for the native 64-bit support.
Users have been asking for this for years now and, while Adobe has experimented with some, limited support before, it's now going all out and releasing 64-bit versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, all supported desktop platforms.
This means that those running 64-bit operating systems and, more importantly, 64-bit browsers will no longer have problems with Flash Player.
This is a especially welcomed on Linux, where users had to go through plenty of workarounds to get Flash Player to work on their systems.
For developers though, the big news is the Stage 3D API, a fully hardware accelerated graphics API which enables to them to build much more elaborate graphics for games but also to accelerate some fancy animations and so on.
Now that the release candidate is out, the final, stable version of Adobe Flash Player should be coming along soon, the previous beta release is about one month old.
Adobe Flash Player for Windows is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player for Mac OS X is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player for Linux is available for download here.