Chris Herring

The following was written for my current employers April newsletter.

The flash team recently went along to the Adobe Creative Suite 5 launch party to learn about some of the new features we can look forward to in Flash Player 10.1.

One of the common moans users have about Flash Player is the affect it has upon their computer’s processors which results in their laptop battery being drained. Flash Player is based upon a frame rate, and the frame rate determines how many times code is executed per second. Imagine if you have your web browser open with 10 tabs of the same Flash movie running. Even though you can only see one tab, all 10 Flash movies would be running at say 31fps, subsequently draining your laptop battery. Now with Flash Player 10.1 the player automatically detects whether a Flash movie is hidden in a tab and automatically reduces its frame rate to 2fps.

When working with just English it is easy to overlook how different languages display text information. For instance Japanese text is read vertically, while Arabic text is read from right to left. Previously this would require a clever code, however the text engine in Flash Player 10.1 has been vastly improved, adding the ability to change the direction and orientation of text.

Recent releases of Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer added ‘private browsing mode’, which when activated, enables the user to browse the Internet knowing that any data about sites and pages they have visited will not be saved by their web browser. Flash Player 10.1 now automatically checks and adjusts to the web browser’s ‘private browsing mode’, so any Local Shared Objects which can store information about a user’s visits in Flash sites will not be remembered when private browsing is turned off.

Finally, have you ever been watching a piece of full screen video when after a couple of minutes your screensaver appears? Flash Player 10.1 now has the ability to disable your screensaver whilst your video is playing or buffering. Great stuff.