Adobe releases new Flash 11 and Air 3 to Beta Channel

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaXvTsoeVs]
Stage 3D Molehill demo

For all of you Adobe Flash and Air fans out there, Adobe has released the next major version of the authoring tool out onto the Internet.  New features of Flash include, Stage3D APIs, 64-bit support, G.711 audio compression for telephony, H.264/AVC SW Encoding, Socket Progress Events and HD surround sound.

Developers can download the betas here.

Full listing of new features in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 below:

• Stage3D Accelerated Graphics Rendering — Stage3D (“Molehill”) is a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering developed by Adobe. Stage3D provides a set of lowlevel APIs that enable advanced 2D/3D rendering capabilities across screens and devices (desktop, mobile, and TV). It gives 2D and 3D app and framework developers access to high performance GPU hardware acceleration, enabling the creation of new classes of rich, interactive experiences. Note: These pre-release builds include Flash Player and AIR desktop support; AIR for Android and iOS support will be enabled in a future pre-release build.

• Flash Access Content Protection Support for Mobile — Flash Access content protection support is now available on mobile devices.

• H.264/AVC Software Encoding for Cameras (desktop) — Stream high quailty video from your computer’s camera with higher compression efficiency and industry-wide support, enabling both immersive real-time communications (e.g., video chat and video conferencing) and live video broadcasts.

• Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support — Allows ActionScript developers to take advantage of high performance native parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data. Developers can integrate existing data seamlessly into their projects.

• G.711 Audio Compression for Telephony — Support interoperability with legacy phone systems via the Flash Media Gateway (FMG) and other third-party clients (through the open RTMP protocol) without the need for transcoding.

• Garbage Collection Advice — Provides smoother, more responsive user experiences by allowing developers to provide hints (through System.pauseForGCIfCollectionImminent)  to optimize garbage collection scheduling.

• Cubic Bezier Curves — The Graphics.cubicCurveTo drawing API allows developers can easily create complex cubic Beziers without requiring custom ActionScript code.

• Secure Random Number Generator — Developers can now take advantage of cryptographically secure random number generation to build more secure algorithms and protocols.

• Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Flash Access Enhancements — Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) provides protection for streaming video across screens while eliminating the deployment complexity of a license server. New Flash Access content protection features include key rotation support, V3 license chaining, domain support, and enhanced output protection and device filtering.

• Socket Progress Events — Improve management of data transfer using the Socket class by providing a new property to determine the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer and a new event for when data is being sent to the network layer. The new APIs (Socket.bytesPending, Event.OutputProgressEvent) allow applications can easily track progress and provide responsive feedback.

• Native Text Input UI (mobile) — Mobile apps can now take advantage of the native text input controls on mobile platforms, including platform-specific user interaction behaviors such as magnification and text selection. Native text controls are available on Android, BlackBerry Tablet, and iOS operating systems.

• JPEG-XR support — Flash Player and AIR now include support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard (International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-2). The computationally lightweight JPEG-XR format provides more efficient compression than JPEG, enables both lossy and lossless compression support, and adds support for alpha channel transparency.

• Enhanced high resolution bitmap support — BitmapData objects are no longer limited to a maximum resolution of 16 megapixels (16,777,215 pixels), and maximum bitmap width/height is no longer limited to 8,191 pixels, enabling the development of apps that utilize very large bitmaps.

• High efficiency SWF compression support — Developers can now take advantage of LZMA compression for their SWF files. LZMA compression can reduce SWF size by up to 40%, enabling users to benefit from richer experiences with shorter download times and reduced bandwidth consumption. Use Tinic’s tool or a custom one to compress your SWF’s.

• DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying — DisplayObjectContainer now implements a removeChildren API allowing developers to quickly remove all of a container’s children using a single API.

New Features in Flash Player 11

• Native 64-bit Support (Flash Player desktop) — Take advantage of native support for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit web browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
• Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding (new for Flash Player) — Improve app responsiveness and deliver smoother animation by decoding images on initial load instead of on demand. Images are cached as needed.
• TLS Secure Sockets Support (new for Flash Player) — Enables secure communications for client/server applications.

New Features in AIR 3

• Stage Video Hardware Acceleration (new for AIR) — Leverage hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline to deliver efficient, best-in-class high-definition (HD) video playback experiences. Decrease processor usage and enable smoother video, reduced memory usage, and higher fidelity on mobile*, desktop, and TV devices (*supported on Android 3.1, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and iOS).