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Today, Adobe have released their first public beta of Flash Player 10 on their labs website. Code named “Astro”, Flash Player 10 introduces a whole fist full of compelling new features. It’s headline feature being a new range GPU utilization’s; from accelerated compositing to custom filter rendering. 3D is also introduced and bumped up to a first classes citizen with the introduction of the Z axis to all display object. On the coding side, we see the welcomed introduction of typed arrays which mean iterating over data just go a whole lot faster. Add in a new text layout engine and we’re only just touching the surface!

Player 10 is indeed an sneak peak into the future of Flash. If they can do this much with just one version release, just imagine what is going to happen in 11 and 12. Dynamic VM scripting languages FTW!

Why are you still reading this? Check it out: labs.adobe.com

Paul Tondeur has posted an article about the new Milestone 1 of the Alternativa3D Flash engine.

The new showcase demo for Milestone 1 looks insanely great! I like the use of Stage quality/poly-count toggling. The sound mixing is nice, especially with headphones. And also, take the time to press the “T” key to view the polygon outlines, they look to be very dynamic; not much seems to be going on “off screen”.

Check it out for yourself:

San Flashcisco (aka. the San Francisco Flash User Group) is meeting this month to discuss Flash Video and is pleased to announce that they have special guest speakers from Justin.tv and YouTube to give talks on the ways they utilize Flash video.

In addition, San Flashcisco shall be readying some example FLA’s for you that demonstrate the latest Flash video features such as fullscreen playback. And San Flashcisco member, Mark Altenbernd, shall be giving an brief overview of Adobe Flash Media Server.

RSVP & Details: http://sanflashcisco.com/event/4

Cost: Free to attend & free PIZZA & BEER

Update

After inspecting my dispatcher .. i find this awful mistake:

override public function addEventListener(type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean=false, priority:int=0.0, useWeakReference:Boolean=false):void {
_node.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference)
}

override public function removeEventListener(type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean=false):void {
_node.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture)
}

(DOH!!!!!!!!!! LOL)

——

To cut to the chase, in my personal AS3 framework, I’ve implemented deconstructors in all my DisplayObjects objects. The deconstructors mostly feature removeEventListener calls as I try to stay away from using weak refs. Today, while making a regular memory leak check using Flex Builder 3’s profiler, I noticed that I had a few DisplayObjects still latched onto an event dispatcher model object they were supposed to have let go of.

The first thing I did was to put a trace() in my deconstructor to make sure it was being called, yes it was. WTF? After some more digging, I then saw that this particular DisplayObject was flagged to not attach itself to the event dispatcher in the first place. (Wait, you mean that addEventListener hadn’t even been called in the first place? Yes!) So I switched the flag so that the DisplayObject would attach to the event dispatching model and guess what, this time it got GC’d after the deconstructor call.

So why is removeEventListener causing this to happen, the API docs define the method as:

“Removes a listener from the EventDispatcher object. If there is no matching listener registered with the EventDispatcher object, a call to this method has no effect.”

Has no effect, huh? But it seems to be doing something. Has anyone noticed anything similar to this?

Reminder: San Flashcisco March meet is tonight.

This month we are honored to have eBay Technical Evangelist, Alan Lewis, as our special guest. Alan will be presenting a case study on the high profile Adobe AIR project, eBay Desktop. Then afterwards he’ll be available to answer all of your burning questions in an AIR Q&A panel.

We shall also be exploring new workflows within the Flash Authoring IDE for creating and publishing AIR projects and taking a brief look over the new AIR APIs/features.

Cost: Free to attend & free PIZZA & BEER

Details & RSVP

San Flashcisco has just announced the agenda for the March 20th San Flashcisco meet up.

This month we are honored to have eBay Technical Evangelist, Alan Lewis, as our special guest. Alan will be presenting a case study on the high profile Adobe AIR project, eBay Desktop. Then afterwards he’ll be available to answer all of your burning questions in an AIR Q&A panel.

We shall also be exploring new workflows within the Flash Authoring IDE for creating and publishing AIR projects and taking a brief look over the new AIR APIs/features.

Cost: Free to attend & free PIZZA & BEER

RSVP Now!.

This week I’ve been reading a lot of posts from people complaining about the lack of Flash support for the iPhone. A lot of this commentary has risen from Steve Jobs himself having said that “it performs too slowly on the iPhone“. Now, I don’t doubt his reasoning for a second, but I’m not saying that AVC2 isn’t blazing fast. I’m saying that a lot of SWF on the Internet are poorly constructed, resulting in CPU bombardment.

The cost of a cycle on a handheld CE device is great because sooner or later you’re going to run out of power. If you’re running poorly constructed SWFs all day long from random-bogus-flash-site.com then your either going to run our of power fast or leak memory everywhere.

Today I could be viewing a small flash banner ad from website X that will motor up my laptops fans with what appears to be next to no functionally or animation - what the hell!? I propose that someone please start a Flash name & shame website that decompiles these SWFs so that common mistakes can filter down to the people who created them.

I believe that poorly constructed SWFs are the main reason why you won’t be seeing Flash on the iPhone anytime soon. Steve wants a consistent Safari experience for it’s users. It would be too painful if Safari crashed every couple of minutes because ‘Banner ad company XYZ’ hired the lowest bidder.

And of course it would only be naive to say that Flash on the iPhone isn’t a clash of interests. Why would Apple want another media player on the iPhone? Remember that at the end of the day, the iPhone is still the flagship iPod. Apple won’t sell any iTunes media if you can stream it for free all day long.

Of course Apple could choose to disable Flash in Safari, but allow you to create springboard apps. But this is really what the iPhone SDK is all about, so I don’t really think Flash fits here. Maybe platform portability is the best argument to have Flash apps, but why would Apple go for that. For starters, Apple doesn’t want famous iPhone app “Q” to one day start running on a Sony Ericsson phone. How would that sell iPhones?

The iPhone is extremely powerful in terms of multimedia rendering, You’re able to utilize its engaging Core Animation framework featuring embedded OpenGL to create the kinds of real time effect you would see in ‘Photo Booth’ for example. The ability to draw power from hardware acceleration means that the iPhone can pushing bits around the screen at a very decent frame-rate without bothering the CPU too much.

Could Flash 10 with hardware acceleration be the answer to the iPhone SDK? It seems today that AVM2 can push code around with ease but its display list rendering is greatly lacking. Could Flash 10 solved this? Could 10 be the platform of choice for competing mobile brands? It seems to me that portable mobile apps are the best way to compete with the iPhone right now. So, wouldn’t it be great if those portable apps were F10 SWFs?!

Adobe has just released version one of the desktop application runtime, AIR. Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Flash, and Flex technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop.

This is truly a monumental moment in the evolution of Flash. We’ve seen it grow from a modest animation player, to the enabler for rich website experiences, to the champion of web video and now to the darling of the Desktop.

Flash has always been an huge creative medium and now it’s gone and “super-sized” its abilities. There has never been a better time to be involved with Flash. Welcome to Desktop 2.0!

Adobe AIR Website
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

AIR FAQ
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/faq/

I’d like to thank everyone who was able to attend this months meet. I think we managed to double our attendance from the previous month to over 30 people! We’re all thrilled that San Flashcisco has become a big success after only it’s second meet, so thank you all again!

Check out photos from the event and view defails about the March meet here.

Luke Bayes, co-founder of AsUnit, shall be giving a presentation tonight to the San Flashcisco user group about his new project, Sprouts!

Sprouts is an open-source, cross-platform project generation and configuration tool for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3, Adobe AIR and Flex projects.

Lukes presentation will introduce you to this project and show how it may help you and your team be more productive.

Sprouts has the following features:
* Provides easily customized and shared project and code generators that get you up and running instantly and keeps you and your team moving quickly.
* Installs any publicly available ActionScript library directly into your project by name and version (including Adobe corelib, AsUnit, PureMVC, Cairngorm and many more).
* Instantly install and configure all of the tools you need to get started with ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 or Flex development on Windows, OS X and Linux (including the Flex SDK, MTASC, SWFMill, and the Adobe Flash Player).
* Provides simple, intuitive automated build tasks to help you build your project anytime from any computer and integrate your project with existing continuous integration tools.

Read more and RSVP