A couple of weeks ago, Adobe slipped this announcement past my radar screen. It seems we can download the Flash 10 Beta now (previously codenamed “Astro”), and it is chock full of new enhancements, most notably of which are access to Pixel Blender and 3D hardware acceleration.
Pixel Blender is a technology Adobe rolled up for After Effects CS3, originally. It basically gives the developer a lot of easy access to image (bitmap or vector) and video manipulation functions. If you are a hardcore type and you download Flash 10 Beta, then you should check out the Pixel Blender Exchange for a lot of demos showing you what things are possible with it. Here’s a video to show some of it off, as well:
Now let’s talk about the hardware acceleration. This should be a great addition that makes everything just gorgeous, right? Actually, no. It seems that it actually doesn’t speed up your traditionally optimized Flash apps, in fact it slows them down.
Does that seem counter-intuitive? Maybe it is, but it’s no real surprise to most game developers. 3D graphics in general is hard stuff, and as a community we’ve had to invest major amounts of time and money iterating our skillsets, toolsets, platforms, and teams to get to the point where we are today. This will also be the case with Flash 10, though the timeframe will be massively compressed (think 1 year instead of 10.)
There are already some amazing 3D libraries for Flash that actually work really well for us hardcore developers. But Adobe’s press release says that those options are “reserved for expert users” and that Flash 10 will make the functionality “available to everyone”. So does that mean that these frameworks will be able to actually just bootstrap the new hardware acceleration and get better seamlessly? Or is Adobe posturing this technology to compete and cause dreaded fragmentation, here? Eventually i think the point will still be moot, though (in a year the tools will be settled, regardless.)
As the confused juggernaut of Microsoft approaches this space with its usual lumbering pace and lack of direction or solidarity with Silverlight, it looks like Adobe is taking the appropriate steps to keep their 98% slice of Flash-enabled web browsers fully geared up, and its developers fully tooled up. Expect these improvements to trickle down to Adobe AIR rather quickly, as well. And if Google’s announcement yesterday is any indicator, i’m sure they’ll be keen to get some 3D acceleration in the browser as well…
Special thanks to Nick for turning me onto this bit of news.