Flash Player 11 to launch in October; AIR 3 to further support iOS
In a pugnacious bid to finally dispel doubts over the future of Flash, Adobe is today claiming that the media player will be available to as many as one billion mobile devices by 2015.
Today the company announced that its next generation Flash Player 11 would launch in October this year, complete with an array of new features such as hardware-accelerated 3D rendering.
Along with the release of Flash 11, Adobe will launch AIR 3; a superset of Flash Player that brings Flash based apps outside browsers and onto devices such as mobiles.
Apple has famously prohibited Flash across its entire range of mobile devices.
Allowing Flash-supported programs to be repackaged for iOS is key to Abobe’s plan for domination on smartphones, the company said.
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Adobe claims that more than 200 million smartphones and tablets, including iOS devices, already support Flash via Adobe AIR.
“By the end of 2015, that number is expected to increase to 1 billion,” the company said.
That figure is related to the projected sales of all mobile and tablet devices, which Adobe assumes Flash applications would be possible to work on.
Native Flash programs will not be available on iOS devices unless Apple changes its controversial policy. The Air program is Adobe’s new priority in solving the conundrum, but HTML 5 tools are argued by some as a more elegant solution.
In a Develop-attended conference call, an Adobe executive made the it clear that the company sees value in HTML 5, but less so in games.
“Our approach is that customers see significant advantages for Flash in a few focused areas, such as games and rich media,” said Danny Winokur, the president and general manager of Adobe's Platform division.
“If HTML 5 matures to a certain point, that’s fantastic, [but] there will continue to be new opportunities in Flash,” he added.
A key feature of Adobe 11 is its ability to display hardware-accelerated 3D applications.
Adobe said Flash 11 enables up to “1,000 times faster" rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2.
“Developers are able to animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames-per-second rendering and deliver console-quality games on Mac OS,” the company said.
The 3D capabilities of Flash 11 has spurred game engine vendor Unity to support the player.
At the conclusion of his conference call, Winokur gave the Unity engine a shining endorsement. He said Adobe is “excited about what they are going to deliver when it comes to 3D and 3D modelling”.
Adobe can eat shit. Nobody wants Flash player on their phones, I disable it on my laptop when I'm running on the battery.
One stupid Flash advertisement can set back my battery performance by hours!
I'm sorry, but please just let Flash die. It's not all that great for games anymore, Adobe has never supported animators (the latest useful features for animators date from Flash 8 which was made by Macromedia) and advertisements have been possible in Javascript for as long as Javascript exists.
Flash is an awesome platform - much more so with the Molehill 3d api's. You can reach so many players in the browser. And the "in the browser" aspect is important because otherwise you've got to go through appstores, pay the 30% fee to Apple, MS or whoever, a cost which is passed onto the gamer. Small wonder Apple ban it from iOS, and Microsoft are banning it from their new Metro interface. They can't make money out of browser games otherwise, and they know HTML5 games will never be as sophisticated. It's the biggest con in the industry and a lot of people are being fooled.
As for advertisements - which is a little off topic in the context of gaming but I feel is worth addressing given the oath's comments above - what a lot of the anti-Flash brigade don't realise is that you get rid of Flash adverts and you're going to get a load of HTML5 adverts. These too will eat your CPU, vector animation doesn't come cheaply in energy use terms regardless of if it's Flash or HTML5 pushing the media about.
The good news is you can disable flash from your browser if you wish. I wonder how easy it will be to disable HTML5 adverts, given they're not a plugin and more difficult to separate from a sites content?
