Flex 4 – Adobe AIR

The wonders of world came in dark
Showed us the Light of Life as a mark
So start your day in dark
To enjoy the life as a spark

Life is a circle of live
Circle starts and ends at a chive
So feel the warm of life
Make one day as a bright of life

Life has given warm and cold
But be smart to have the brightest hold
See the moment of truth and be bold
Wake up at when the days starts to mold

Hold the day in the bright of dawn
Bold to stay as the supreme don
Life always smooth in den
Come out and spend the life in sun 

Hope someday life folds and beholds

- Bids 

Adobe Flash Player 10

As mentioned in my earlier post, for further posting on new features of flash player 10.

The current Adobe Flash Player version released is 10.0.22.87 with  some of the known bugs fixed.

New Features

• 3D object transformations

Support for the 3D objects with the help of Actionscript 3.o new class and method libraries of 3D, by help of these classes, cool 3D effects can be created for more details see the specific post.

• Custom filters via Pixel Bender

This technology was originally meant for the image processing and creating filter and effects. This feature not only improves the quality and but as well as is meant to act as multi-Core and multiprocessing system, as per GPU and CPU.

• Advanced text support

This is the feature we always of think when we are using dynamic text or using custom fonts or re-size, so using of the text class we can achieve this. Text Object Class is taken from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) which is known as Saffron its some where similar to the concept of Microsoft’s ClearType,  which both works to improve anti-aliasing.

• Speex audio codec

As from the word “Speex” soundex, recognizes us as Speech….. yes this codec is meant for speech communication, as its developed as a dedicated codec for speech communication, which was lacking till now.

• Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP)

Real time media flow protocol or RTMFP  is the new communication protocol from Adobe which enables the main user to end user or to multiple users running multiple flash players as peer to peer connection or communication. Generally meant for rich application development using Adobe AIR framework.

• Dynamic sound generation

Dynamic sound generation will be extend the existing sound class and create audio content over the existing audio in library, a sampleCallback event handler to extract the raw sound data from existing library. Which will make your application eassier to mix n tune your audio files ex- loading an external mp3 file mixing audio voice from mic and finally creating your own.

• Vector data type

Vector data type is meant for creating a simplicity of data collection for improving performance.Vector data type is an introduction of a new Class called Vector, which is a Typed Array, as after having lot of POC its clear, that Vector data type has a significant performance improvements over using an Array, goodthing about Vector Class – it has all the same methods of an Array.

Enhanced Features

1. Larger bitmap support
2. Graphics drawing API
3. Context menu
4. Hardware acceleration
5. Anti-aliasing engine (Saffron 3.1)
6. Read/write clipboard access
7. WMODE

Flash Player was initially released around 1996. (Macromedia)

• Features like animation of vector graphics.
• No Audio support.

Flash player 2 released on 1997. (Macromedia)

• Sound Support with Stereo Audio input.
• Insertion Bitmaps.
• Library support for tween between colors.

Flash Player 3 released on 1998. (Macromedia)

• Insertion of Audio and compression into MP3 for reducing the size.
• Improvement of animation, playback and publishing.

Flash Player 4 released on May 1999. (Macromedia)

• Achieved installations worldwide around 100 million
• Introduction of MP3 streaming
• Later end of year Flash Player reached almost 98% of systems with Internet.

Flash Player 5 released on August 2000. (Macromedia)

• Yes this is the time when flash started the capabilities of scripting.
• Customizing authorize environment.
• Started the thought process of usability

Flash Player 6 released on March 2002 (Macromedia)

• Great new feature of Flash Remoting (AMF) and Web Service (SOAP)
• Also started the live audio and video streaming over RTMP, use of Macromedia Communication Server
• Introduction of screenreaders via Microsoft Active Accessibility
• New Codec system added called Sorenson Spark video (FLV).
• Introduction and proper implementation of Shared Libraries

Flash Player 7 released on September 2003 (Macromedia)

• Implementation of  ActionScript 2.0
• Streaming of audios and videos as progressive way.
• Chrating and graphs support started.
• Flashlite 1.1 introduced for Flash Player Mobile Phones (based on flash player 4)

Flash Player 8 released on August 2005 (Macromedia)

• New video codec – On2 and VP6
• Support for runtime loading of GIF and PNG images
• Major performance improvement in caching especially Bitmaps
• Improvement in blendmodes and live filters.
• Introduction of Text Rendering Engine called Saffron Type System
• File upload and download capabilities
• FlashLite 2.0 released around Dec 2005 based on Flash Player 7.0

Flash Player 9 released on June 2006 (Adobe)

One of the major Aquire process in IT Industry  Adobe Aquired Macromedia.

• AVM 2
• Actionscript 3.0
• E4x parsing
• ECMAScript 4 virtual machine donated to Mozilla Foundation and named Tamarin.
• Binary Socket support
• Full screen support

In Decemeber 2007  some mojor improvement version were released with features like

• FlashLite 3.0 with FLV support
• H.264
• AAC (HE-AAC, AAC Main Profile, and AAC-LC)
• ISO Base Media File Format (MPEG-4 Part 12)

Flash Player 10 – Adobe Flash Player 10 released on October 2008

• New Features

1. 3D object transformations
2. Custom filters via Pixel Bender
3. Advanced text support
4. Speex audio codec
5. Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP)
6. Dynamic sound generation
7. Vector data type

• Enhanced Features

1. Larger bitmap support
2. Graphics drawing API
3. Context menu
4. Hardware acceleration
5. Anti-aliasing engine (Saffron 3.1)
6. Read/write clipboard access
7. WMODE

So there is a major changes in flash player in the past,  but most will be thinking about the new features of flash player 10.

How and what are the new flash player 10 features,  in my next posts I will focus on the flash player architecture and will take the new features of FP 10 individually so keep looking the blogs.

There are so many benefits of Rich Internet Applications, we will point out few.

• Low cost deployment model.
• Faster response as compared to primitive web application
• Rich user experience
• Cross platform

Why we needed RIA (Rich Internet Applications)?

Any Guesses..

The fact to get rid of the complexity of client/server version management and technologists were sold on multi-tier computing. This time client/server was called legacy. And to rub it in, good old desktop applications were labeled “fat.”

Excited with server multi-threading, messaging, persistence, and similar toys, we pretend not to think that, at the end of the day, we’d have to trade user experience and productivity for the transparency of application deployment. And to make us feel better, we proudly called the new breed of applications “thin client.” So thus experts started finding solutions for the same and final conclusions was RIA.