Flash Player 11, AIR 3 just weeks away

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 September 2011 17:46

Your IT - Entertainment

Imminent upgrades to Adobe's Flash Player and AIR will support console-quality games and HD video on a wide range of devices from smartphones to TVs.

Adobe is preparing to release Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, which it says will enable the delivery of "console-quality" 2D and 3D games to nearly all PCs and many other devices such as tablets (including the iPad), smartphones (including the iPhone) and TVs.

New features include accelerated 2D and 3D graphics with "smooth 60 frames per second rendering", extensions supporting specific software and hardware features (including device data, magnetometers and near field communications), a captive runtime (so users don't need to separately download, install and update AIR on Android, iOS, Mac OS X or Windows), premium video content protection on all supported platforms (including mobiles), and full frame rate HD video on iOS devices.

64-bit support allows "a seamless experience" with 64-bit browsers on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

"With this milestone release Adobe pushes the envelope of what is possible on the Web with a typical PC and opens up a new world of immersive, high-performance gaming experiences," said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of platform at Adobe.

"Zynga's mission is to connect the world through games by bringing play to everyone, everywhere," said Cadir Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga. "In order to do that, we're committed to building mainstream entertainment across all devices, platforms and applications, whether it's through Flash or HTML5. We look forward to the release of Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 as next-generation applications to help bring Zynga games to our players worldwide."

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be released in early October.