What's New in Flash Player 11

Preface

Introduction to Adobe Flash Player 11

This book will detail the various enhancements, new functionalities, and general improvements available in this new version of Adobe Flash Player. Each item is explained in detail, and when possible, a series of screen captures and a full code example will be provided, enabling you to both grasp the new feature in a visual way, and integrate the feature into your own code quickly, based upon example.

During the development cycle between Flash Player 10 and Flash Player 10.1, Adobe rewrote much of the underlying code in order to lay a solid foundation that not only benefited traditional web experiences, but could also be brought over into new areas such as mobile and television. This foundation has served to make Flash Player 10.1–10.3 very stable while allowing Adobe to begin adding small features upon each incremental release. In contrast to these incremental versions, with Flash Player 11 we begin to see the rapid evolution of the Flash runtime into something not only great at interactive, gaming, media distribution, and enterprise applications…but into something that pushes all these areas way beyond their previous limitations.

With the recent rise of expanding web technologies like HTML5 (including HTML/CSS/JavaScript), it is very important that the Flash Player evolves in a way which not only showcases why it is still relevant, but also why it is still (in many cases) the ideal technology platform for advanced interaction on the Web and beyond. With Adobe ramping up the Flash Player release schedule along with more iterative tooling support in Flash Professional and Flash Builder, not to mention a number of new community partnerships in support of the platform from both independent framework and third-party tooling support, we can expect great things in future incremental releases of Flash Player 11 and within the entire platform ecosystem.