In order to continue receiving security updates, an upgrade to either Flash Player 11.7, or the standard Flash Player 11.8 release is required.

Flash Player 11.7 provides exciting new features, including Actionscript concurrency, webcam support for StageVideo and more. It also enables Protected Mode for FireFox on Windows, a sophisticated security-in-depth feature. With Protected Mode, Flash Player runs as restricted process, making it more difficult for attackers to build working exploits. Click here to learn more.

Flash Player 11.7 leverages hardware acceleration for audio, video and rendering to increase performance and lower CPU usage.

To ensure the smoothest possible transition, we encourage IT organizations deploying Flash Player 11.7 in managed environments to thoroughly test audio and video playback for critical use-cases using the latest available version before deploying this release widely. When hardware-related playback and stability problems do arise, updating to the latest hardware drivers frequently resolves these issues.As a secondary workaround, the Flash Player Administrator’s Guide details mechanisms for disabling hardware and audio acceleration via mms.cfg.

We have been hard at work to make Flash Player better than ever, and we look forward to continuing to serve you with a great web experience.

In addition to improving Flash Player security through sandboxing enhancements, we’ve also fixed high priority bugs and issues that were reported by our community and partners.

Similarly we have been focusing on making AIR 3.7 a world-class platform to build your apps for Android and iOS platforms. In this release, we are introducing exciting features such as capability to host swf files on an external server which can then be download by your iOS applications at runtime, and support for gamepads on Android devices (like Ouya TV). Amongst a couple of other features, this release also addresses the need of preventing backup of shared objects, if required by your iOS application to comply with Apple guidelines.

Also the Flash Pro team has recently provided a glimpse of their next generation tool. Check out this quick tour:

We encourage you to continue provide your feedback and comments and stay tuned for more exciting features.

Tareq Aljaber
Product Marketing Manager – Web Segment

Adobe AIR 3.6 introduces packaging and loading multiple SWFs feature. This feature provides our developers with better memory management by allowing them to load the assets they need dynamically at any time from multiple swfs and not have to load it upfront.

In addition to the features we’ve introduced in AIR 3.6, we’ve also improved the full screen permission dialog UI and Graphics Data Query in Flash Player 11.6; which game developers can use to generate sprite sheets at runtime.

We encourage you to download AIR 3.6 and Flash Player 11.6 and provide your feedback and comments. Please follow us on Twitter (@FlashPlayerBeta) and Like us on Facebook.com/AdobeAir to stay updated on upcoming beta builds and features.

The SWF specification had some undocumented things like a new tag for Telemetry (Adobe Scout) and some other miscellaneous attributes that we now fully document.

You can find both specs at the following url:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html

We look forward to get your feedback and comments.

With Flash Player 11.5 and AIR 3.5, the debugging workflow has been improved through a feature that allows developers to obtain a stack trace even from a release build. Additionally, developers can publish and package apps targeting iOS 6.0 with AIR 3.5. Click here to learn more about all the new features in AIR 3.5 and Flash Player 11.5.

We encourage you to download AIR 3.5 and Flash Player 11.5 and unleash your creativity. Please follow us on Twitter (@FlashPlayerBeta) and Like us on Facebook.com/AdobeAir to stay updated on upcoming beta builds and features.

With all this technology, there are many solutions to help you to build and create the apps you want to reach the platforms and devices you care about. Broadly, these manifest in two categories: native and cross platform.  Go “native” if you have good knowledge of both Objective C for iOS and Java for Android and can afford the time developing for both environments. A cross platform solution, though, will enable you to learn and program in a single environment.

This is where Adobe and AIR comes in. With Adobe AIR, you can deliver Flash Player browser content as an application.  Leverage the tools you are familiar with, like Flash Professional and ActionScript 3.0. With a few simple changes and clicks, you can publish the same code to iOS and Android: no major re-architecture or new languages to learn. This is what our friends at Gree call DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

Having one code base can help cut your debugging, testing, and development costs. This is what you get when you go with Adobe AIR. No need to do things two or three times when you can do it once with Adobe AIR.

15,000+ iOS and Android apps have been built, submitted, and approved using Adobe AIR. For example, Machinarium was built using Adobe AIR for iOS and Android devices. NBC Universal’s Olympic applications used Adobe AIR to deliver Olympic content to millions of devices. You can see some of the best games through the showcases at the Adobe Gaming site (http://gaming.adobe.com/).

Check out this cool video demonstrating one code base running across desktop, Android, and iOS all connected through p2P:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-JH35CyagE

Maybe you, too, can go DRY!

Using the background update mechanism in Flash Player, beta releases will be installed seamlessly to our nearly 1.1 million beta users and we encourage you to subscribe if you have not already. Beta users will have access to new features earlier in the release cycle to use, test, and provide feedback. You may also subscribe to our Twitter channel @FlashPlayerBeta https://twitter.com/FlashPlayerBeta to stay on top of the current release schedule updates.

Due to this change we will consolidate our private and public beta programs into a single public beta program so we can bring the world’s best runtime to our beta users’ fingertips.

Considering how important the private prerelease program is as a channel of communication and discussion with our key partners and customers, we will continue to keep our private beta forum active for discussion only; however, no Flash Player beta updates will be posted on this forum.

We believe moving to the rapid approach is going to allow us to test Flash Player under different configurations and help us get early feedback from our customers; which ultimately will improve the user experience and drastically improve the Flash Player and AIR robustness and increase product stability.

The runtimes team is excited to continue to work with you and we are looking forward to your feedback and seeing the amazing experiences that will be delivered through Flash Player and AIR.

In the past we’ve given guidance on the usage of ELS in both blogs and our help documentation, suggesting that developers should not depend on ELS as permanent data storage because it “can be lost for a variety of reasons.” While our position on this hasn’t changed, we understand that some applications have come to depend on this data and we are actively working on a fix for the problem.

In the interim, Adobe is going to turn off automatic updates for the AIR 3.4 runtime so users will not be prompted to update to AIR 3.4 until we solve this issue.

Application publishers and developers, who are affected by this change in behavior of ELS, need to inform their users who have already installed AIR 3.4 to uninstall AIR 3.4 and install AIR3.3 using the instructions below:

Uninstall Adobe AIR 3.4 runtime from windows and install AIR 3.3:

1. In the Windows Start menu, select Settings > Control Panel.
2. Select “Programs and Features from control panel.
3. Select “Adobe AIR” to uninstall the runtime.
4. Click the “Uninstall” button.
5. Install AIR 3.3 runtime http://download.macromedia.com/air/win/download/3.3/AdobeAIRInstaller.exe

Uninstall Adobe AIR 3.4 runtime from Mac and install AIR 3.3

1. Browse to Applications : Utilities
2. Double click on “Adobe AIR Uninstaller”
3. Install AIR 3.3 runtime http://download.macromedia.com/air/mac/download/3.3/AdobeAIR.dmg

Please note that AIR 3.4 SDK will continue to be available for any developer wishing to take advantage of the new features contained in this version.  Developers should deploy these applications using our “captive runtime” capability to ensure the application functions as expected.

Going forward, we plan to re-implement our ELS changes in a future version of AIR to remove dependencies on 3^rd party libraries and improve the stability and security of AIR applications. Applications that continue to use ELS as persistent storage could be impacted. We will give advanced notice and make releases available on labs. Please report any other issues you may experience together with reproducible steps here.

In addition to concurrency, Flash Player 11.4 adds other core features, including webcam support for StageVideo so Flash Player can utilize GPU acceleration to render better performing webcam video streams. And now Stage3D content can run in hardware accelerated mode on broader range of desktop GPUs/ hardware, particularly on the Intel GMA chipsets, thanks to Stage3D constrained mode. In addition, the Starling framework has been updated to be constrained mode ready.

You might ask, how many end users can enjoy these new release features? Over 400 million users have already installed Flash Player 11.2, and with background auto-update, a feature we released in Flash Player 11.2, these 400 million connected users get updated within 6 weeks of every new release. And there are many more factoids on Flash Player reach here.

With the release of AIR 3.4, we are introducing several enhancements to our support for iOS app developers. Key features include iOS push notifications, iOS 5.1 SDK support, compressed texture with alpha for stage3D and Webcam support for StageVideo. Click here to learn more about AIR 3.4 features including features that apply to the iOS platform.

A great platform requires great tooling so we are also providing a Flash Builder 4.7 beta on labs in the last week of August. It will have support for Apache Flex 4.8, support for Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4 and many improvements to iOS app development workflows including USB debugging, iOS simulator support, and direct on-device deployment.

Screenshot of iOS feature in Flash Builder 4.7 Beta

A Flash Professional updater will be released in early September and will have many exciting features for you to choose from and experiment with, including ToolKit CreateJS 1.1, support for Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4, improved iOS app development workflows including iOS simulator support, and direct on-device deployment.

Screenshot of iOS Simulation in Flash Professional

We’re excited to see what you build with these new releases. For more information on gaming development, please visit the Adobe Gaming site.