NEW YORK: The Adobe Flash Player 17 has been released as a beta version with the code name of Octavia. Flash Player and AIR are able to help businesses deliver rich experiences to customers in various digital points. The latest update allows content to move more consistently between browsers and standalone apps or native OSs in order to reach the user on any device of his or her choice.
The runtime program shares common codebases, so developers are able to reuse the code for deploying a console quality to two-dimensional and three-dimensional games, through the AIR and the Flash Player. The latest version 17 was released on March 11th 2015 and comes with new features, enhancements and bug fixes. It also includes fixes related to the performance and security, as well as device compatibility.
Updated Features
Support for Video Texture, in AIR – Windows – Mac – iOS Devices
The ActionScript enables a video that is hardware accelerated and can be used in the form of a source texture in case of Stage3D environments. At present, using such a video will require an un-accelerated Video object. Currently, there is also the need for bitmap representation manipulation of video frames. The VideoTexture feature is a new one in the Adobe Flash Player 17 and it enables a direct access of texture objects sourced either from a Camera object or from any Netstream. The feature is available for the iOS devices, for Windows and for AIR Mac. An upcoming release will also offer support for Android.
Enhancements to Control Panel
Due to the enhancements in the updated version, ActiveX plug-ins as well as NPAPI and PPAPI plug-ins will now be displayed by system control panels, in their currently installed versions. It has also been clarified as to the way in which Chrome as well as Chromium users will be able to edit the settings in the Flash Player.
Improvements in Mac Installer
During the installation, previously Mac users would be asked to close their Chrome browser. This is no longer necessary in the new version. The user experience of Adobe installers will also be improved further in the later versions.
Enhancement of ADT Packaging times
The AIR 16 version offered support in compiling and packaging the iOS apps related to the 32 bit and the 64 bit platforms. In the new update, both 32 bit and 64 bit architecture can now be compiled in parallel. This will result in reducing the packaging time by half.
Stage 3D Enhancements
The recent versions of the Flash Player have offered more support for Stage3D profiles, both Standard as well as Standard Constrained. The new AIR 17 version brings in additional Profile for Standard Extended in case of the iOS devices and the Android devices, supporting GLES3. This means that AGAL3 is also available, with the same profile names being used for requestContext3D or for requestContext3DMatchingProfiles, in Stage 3D. Most of the top tier smartphones have the OpenGLES 3.0, which is necessary for this profile. The focus is initially on mobile devices, but the functionality will also be brought for PCs in future updates to the Flash Player.
Verdict
Download the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player 17 in order to get the best web experience across various platforms and for various devices. It has an extensive reach with end users as well as developers all over the world, as both are able to reap the benefits of using browser based or standalone apps with this runtime software program. Games and content offer a better performance and are more responsive, when you use the new ActionScript feature of the latest update.
