As promised yesterday, Adobe has released Flash 11.0.1.152 for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris along with version 3 of AIR, it’s cross-platform development environment. Both products bring with them new support for Stage 3D, the overall name for hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics that Adobe claims can result in up to 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash 10 and AIR 2. The updates also bring new mobile features for Android, Blackberry OS and — in the case of AIR — iOS.
Flash 11 now features native 64-bit support on all three major platforms, and adds H.264/AVC software encoding for cameras. Also included is content protection support for mobile devices, meaning broadcasters can protect content without the complexity of a license server, and add advertising into streaming Flash programs.
The update also sports a number of developer improvements, including native JSON support, G.711 audio compression for telephony use, enhanced high-resolution bitmap support and TLS Secure Sockets and Protected HTTP dynamic streaming.
Adobe AIR 3 now includes native extensions for AIR, captive runtime support, Android Licensing Service support, new front-facing camera support for Android and many of the same developer improvements as Flash 11, with the addition of Stage Video hardware acceleration, H.264/AVC camera encoding, native text input for mobile devices, digital surround sound for TV devices, background audio support for iOS devices, encrypted local storage and 16- and 32-bit color depth for Android among other tweaks and changes.
The Adobe AIR download is approximately 22MB (varies by OS), while the Flash 11 update is approximately 14MB. For Macs, both require an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.
