Adobe Maps Future of Flash, Flex, AIR

At the Flashforward conference Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief software architect, shed light on the ongoing development events around some of the company's core technologies, including Flash, Flex and the Adobe Integrated Runtime for developers and designers.

"We're really focused on video technology and helping you create experiences," Lynch said. Adobe intents on helping developers and designers plan, acquire, produce, manage, publish, deliver and play back video content.

"Incredible progress" has been made with AIR, said Lynch. The second beta of AIR will also support access to local file system archives, user notification, applications updates, drag-and-drop capability and local storage, among other features. Yet, Adobe`s efforts are concentrated mainly on enabling AIR apps to run well on the desktop, taking advantage of Flash, as well as HTML and PDF. A beta of the AIR technology will be available in a couple of weeks. 

Hitting on Adobe's most famous technology, Lynch went on with the upgrade to the current version of the product, Flash Player 9, known as "Moviestar" which highly enhances the video capabilities of the player. Moviestar includes new features, improvements and bug fixes for Windows, Macintosh and Linux versions of Flash Player 9, including:

• multicore support for vector rendering
  
• full-screen mode with hardware scaling
  
• Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework
  
• Support for MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) in the Windows plug-in

Adobe is also in the process of open-sourcing the Flex framework. From Flex 3, also known by the code name "Moxie" users can expect the following enhancements:

• language intelligence
• support for AIR, code refactoring
• memory and performance profilers
• SWF (Shockwave Flash) file size reduction through persistent framework caching
• a visualization component
  
• designer workflow