The Year Ahead For Flash

2010 is looking to be an exciting year in the world of Flash. For the first Flash Friday post of the New Year I thought I would go over some of the big new things I am looking forward to in 2010.

Flash Player 10.1

Flash truly goes mobile this year and this is made possible by many of the changes in flash player 10.1. Many performance optimizations have been made to the player to allow better performance and this will help out, not only mobile, but all forms of the flash player. Mobile devices also require new interface methodologies and thus flash player 10.1 will be able to handle multitouch events and gestures. This is huge in mobile but will also be making a difference on the desktop with another thing I am looking forward to AIR 2.0.

AIR 2.0

Flash Player 10.1 is at the heart of the newest version of the AIR runtime. Along with some of the other benefits of Flash Player 10.1 such as gesture events there are some AIR only improvements. As a former audio professional the access to the Microphone sound is exciting. Other stuff I'm looking forward to are global error handling, detection of USB devices, more sockets and file promises.

Flash Builder 4

Flex builder is being rebranded as Flash Builder and there are lots of changes. I've been a fan of Degrafa for a while so the new graphic changes are something I'm looking forward to. The new spark architecture will take some getting used to but the design flexibility will be nice.  Though I've got an e-article available on Amazon that will be mostly worthless, the better integration between Flash Builder and Flash CS5 will make my life much easier.

Flash CS5

The big thing with this new version of Flash CS5 is IPhone application development. Unfortunately, at this time it looks like that's the closest that the I-platform is coming to having flash in 2010 unless something major changes. Everyone else having flash in the mobile market may be the  catalyst that makes this happen. Speaking of a catalyst...

Flash Catalyst

I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Better integration between a design tools and Flash Builder. I've loved using Flex Builder since Flex 2 and Flash Catalyst will ( hopefully ) make a dramatic change in our office workflow. Also, this could be a boon for user experience architecting if all is done correct.

So what else is coming? What are you looking forward to? I've only touched on what Adobe has announced here but maybe you've heard a rumor. [ad#Adobe Banner] If you liked this post please subscribe to my RSS feed and/or follow me on Twitter. If you only want to see my Flash Friday posts you can follow the subscribe to the Flash Friday feed. How's that for alliteration :) Until next time keep on coding.