Aral Balkan

Adobe just mentioned at the keynote at Flash on the Beach that Astro is to get typed arrays. From what I remember, this wasn't mentioned at the keynotes at MAX. This is something that Flash coders have been asking for (and which other languages like Haxe have provided) for some time now.

Typed arrays make debugging and maintaining your applications easier by giving you compile-time type safety when dereferencing an array and they will probably also result in compile type optimizations that will translate to performance improvements at run-time.

Also mentioned was 64 bit support and "device convergence" (with the Nokia N810 given as an example of the types of devices that Adobe will concentrate their mobile efforts on).

My understanding of "device convergence" is that in the future we will see more and more devices supporting the full version of the Flash Player as opposed to Flash Lite. This is already happening in devices such as my N800, which runs Flash Player 9 (and pretty darn well at that, too!)

I don't think Flash Lite is going away any time soon as it has uses far beyond the playback of Flash content on mobile devices (it can be used to create phone UIs, wallpapers, screensavers, etc., and I believe that we will see it used in this capacity for some time to come.) However, I'm confident that we will also see optimized versions of the full version of the latest Flash Player appear on mobile devices, perhaps even alongside Flash Lite, in order to give users a faithful rendering of web pages. Devices such as the Nokia N800 and the Apple iPhone already render web pages faithfully (sans Flash on the iPhone for the time being) and this is going to become a user expectation. I was just talking to Paul Betlem, senior director of Flash Engineering at Adobe, during the break and he confirmed my suspicions on this.

Finally, Richard Galvan, technical product manager of Flash, demoed (for the first time) animated IK in Flash. I'm going upload the video of that in a little bit. Animating bones in Diesel (Flash CS4) is going to be as easy as tweening any other object. In other words, a piece of cake! :)

Comments

• [...] [Via: Aral Balkan] [...]

  by Apukeittiö.fi » Blog Archive » Dieseliin IK on 2007-11-16 12:53:53

• Nice! Any words on Enums and method overloading? These would be my other two most-wanted features.

  by sascha/hdrs on 2007-11-05 13:28:38

• I have a new N810. It rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The internet experience is great. However, bandwidth for flash files in a browser is a real drag. Thus, playing the files from the device makes sense. Problem is, I can't get the n810 to play a flash file succesfully. The browser won't load the file even though there is a 'open file' menu setting. The media player won't do it either. It would be nice for you guys to develop an ability for the n810 media player to load .swf files as well as Mpeg and the other formats. Anyone up to the challenge? Andrew andrew@orrgroup.com

  by Andrew on 2007-11-30 16:33:44

• Hey Aral, did you have that video of Astro that shows the IK/bones. I would be very interested to see that I dont' see it on your site anywhere.

  by Ryan [draw.logic] on 2007-11-17 21:36:37

• [...] in tweening with xml closer to flex or even Silverlight like transitions and storyboards. Aral Balkan, a sponsor of OSFlash, posted on this and even that Diesel Flash CS4 will include more T.... Tweener , TweenLite, Animation Package, Animation System etc these are all helping to define the [...]

  by MosesProposes: Standardizing Animation and Motion Kits for Flash, Flex, After Effects, Javascript and I add Director and haXe « [ draw.logic ] on 2007-11-17 22:55:14

• That's too weird. I swear I had no insider knowledge when I wrote this post: http://www.richardleggett.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/10/22/does_flash_lite_have_a_future See you later on Aral!

  by Richard Leggett on 2007-11-05 11:22:14

• I hope they add overloading too, but goddamn, when they do, I also hope people don't go crazy with the possibilities. That is to say that I hate the typical Microsoft APIs where you have thousands of overloads for every method, many of them pretty redundant.

  by Zeh on 2007-11-05 14:26:16

• Zeh, isn't that the same in Java?! For framework development overloading would be extremely useful though.

  by sascha/hdrs on 2007-11-05 14:33:56

• Sweet about Nokia n810. That is actually on my personal wish list as soon as it comes out. I was hoping to use it for a mobile flash dev platform as well.

  by John on 2007-11-05 14:56:05

• well... if Astro support typed Array then that means it will support AS4 based on ES4 ;) and considering this http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf there will be much much more than just typed Array

  by zwetan on 2007-11-05 18:16:14

• [...] I remember that Daemon talked what he saw something like that on the MAX, and If I understood him correctly, CS4 will completely change how timeline works, After Effects look-a-like tweening? They also managed to get video preview into the IDE, advanced tweening engine and Inverse Kinematics tween animation. Wohoo! Except, I don't care about the timeline tweening. I am eager to hear more about Flash Player 10, ECMAScript 4, typed arrays and all that strange stuff that designers ignore by default. [...]

  by bling bling nivas.hr blog - white and nerdy edition - Flash 10 / CS4 Diesel ‘n’ stuff on 2007-11-05 23:52:10

• Josh has a great overview of ECMAScript 4 http://www.zeuslabs.us/2007/10/28/discover-ecmascript-4-the-future-of-actionscript/

  by Tink on 2007-11-06 01:59:07

• [...] Next version of flash gets a cross-domain component cache, typed arrays, encrypted video streams, much better text flow, 64 bit support, multiple processor support, full screen gpu support, … Also see Aral’s post on this. [...]

  by Flash on the Beach - day 1 - Kristof Neirynck on 2007-11-06 11:05:28

• [...] Flash CS4 (DESIEL) Features: - new stage rendering core built on Player 10 - can see live video at authoring time - better WYSIWYG on stage, less need to preview - easier timeline use - tweening bezier adjustment: no more keyframes - 3D-style bones in shapes *and* movie clips - inverse kinematics - “Animating bones in Diesel (Flash CS4) is going to be as easy as tweening any other object.” more [...]

  by judahs blog » Blog Archive » Design and Development Convergence on 2007-11-06 19:24:26

• I hope that they add overloading... a very important feature in my opinion.

  by Mark Zuckerberg on 2007-11-08 09:01:56

• Has anyone else been accepted into the n810 device program? http://maemo.org/news/announcements/view/1192708879.html I'm looking forward to building some flash 9 apps for it!

  by seth on 2007-11-09 17:38:26

• You mentioned bones in your article. We actually have already started makin some bones with rudimentary IK. So if your feeling bored please check it out http://blowingthroughlines.com/2008/02/10/flash-as3/automatic-bending-joints-in-as3-simple-bones/

  by johnnymiller on 2008-02-11 21:25:32

• nice.... thanks

  by تحميل on 2008-07-07 00:30:55

• I have also read all this in a newspaper article but blogging this is really nice.

  by Newspaper Articles on 2008-08-16 17:18:21

• thanks a lot.

  by sohbet on 2008-07-07 20:38:14

• I see now thanks....sesli chat sesli sohbetsesli chatsesli sohbet

  by sesli chat on 2008-04-20 08:25:35

• Funny that Adobe hasn't brought over Flex's typed array capabilities to Flash. In Flex you can define an [ArrayElementType(...)] metadata element before the array in question to make Flex check for the correct array data types at compile time.

  by Nathan Derksen on 2012-03-28 19:38:48

• Heh, looks like someone linked to this article as current news, it's a tad old, so ignore my last comment :-)

  by Nathan Derksen on 2012-03-28 19:40:49