14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has confirmed the availability of Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X. The company has also said that Flash Player 10.1 is on its way to Android devices, and that Adobe AIR 2 runtime is now available for download for devs looking to deploy applications built for AIR 2 on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Talking about the Mac-specific changes delivered in Flash Player 10.1, Adobe’s Paul Betlem says, “Our Mac engineers, with some help from the Safari team, made significant changes to Flash Player for Macs. Here's a partial list of the work we completed for Argo,” he writes on the Adobe Flash Player Team Blog. “First and foremost, Flash Player 10.1 is a full-fledged Cocoa app (though legacy Carbon support remains for some browsers that require it). We now leverage Cocoa events, use Cocoa UI for our dialogs, leverage Core Audio for sound, Core Graphics for printing support, and use Core Foundation for bundle-style text,” Betlem reveals.
“Mac performance was also an explicit focus for us,” Betlem continues. “One improvement we made is the use of a double-buffered OpenGL context for improved full screen playback efficiency,” he outlines. “We also investigated a number of compile-time optimizations using Xcode to improve our overall execution speed of Flash Player on Macs. Rendering performance was improved by our use of Core Animation. For Macs running OS X 10.6 or greater, we leverage the hardware acceleration in Core Animation to dramatically improve the efficiency of displaying web pages which combine both SWF and HTML content.”
Softpedia readers may remember that the Flash Player preview release, code-named “Gala,” introduced support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Mac OS X 10.6.3. Unfortunately, according to 9to5mac, today’s Flash Player update does not include support for the H.264 hardware acceleration that was originally revealed in its Gala release.
Still, users are to experience faster video playback, more efficient CPU utilization, and greater battery life, thanks to the overall performance improvements of Flash Player for Mac, Adobe’s Betlem claims. He also reveals that Adobe AIR 2 runtime is now available for developers looking to create and distribute applications built for AIR 2 on the Mac, as well as for Windows and Linux platforms.
Also noteworthy is that Flash Player 10.1 takes advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities employing a new set of ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events. This, according to Betlem, “[creates] the ability to interact with multiple objects simultaneously or work with native gestures, such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap.”