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AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas

Today we made available the betas for Flash Player 10.1 (on the desktop) and AIR 2. While there’s a ton of features in both runtimes, one of the things that’s coolest to me is the shared work that’s gone in to the core of the “Flash runtime”. Across both runtimes, apps will use less memory and consume fewer CPU cycles just by the nature of the work that’s gone in to the runtime.

Since the cores are the same between Flash Player and AIR both runtimes benefit from the shared work. All this matters even more as we bring the Flash Platform to mobile devices (esp memory and CPU). Plus, features like the global exception handler (something the community has wanted for years, as I understand it) get exposed in the browser and in the desktop.

On the features side, I’m most excited about the support in Flash Player for hardware decoding of H.264 videos on Windows. The demo that our CTO showed at MAX had Hulu HD running on a netbook sipping CPU. On the AIR side it’s a tossup between the new networking features and the new native process APIs. My coworker, Rob, has a full write up at Logged In in the Adobe Developer Connection, so head there to learn more.

Needless to say, congrats to the teams and send us your feedback!