Why don’t companies like Adobe have RSS feeds for their press releases? They don’t have that many announcements in a month that it would becoming annoying. I’d subscribe. I’d subscribe to other companies as well — especially ones that have products that interest me but might not have much mention in the blogs I read.
(If anyone knows of an RSS feed for Adobe press releases, leave a comment please! I couldn’t find one.)
The battle for the RIA platform continues with Adobe’s pre-release of the next version of Flash 10, code named Astro (details here).
If you’re familiar with WPF — the Flash player is starting to have a near feature parity with WPF. Oh, I know, I know, I’m sure there are lots of things WPF may be able to do that Flash can’t … but I’m more interested in the practical, get your job done things here, so I’ll suggest that the parity is more of a practical/useful feature set match than a specific side-by-side comparison.
For example:
3D Effects – Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.
It looks like it’s easier to do 3D in Flash 10 than it is in WPF by an order of magnitude. Again, practical 3D … not necessarily your 3D for doing a live rendering of a heart — but interactive 3D that could be useful in many applications (as shown in one of the videos).
Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.
Hmm… remind you of the “big” feature of WPF — offloading its work to the GPU? It’s coming in Flash.
GPU Compositing — Combining images, filters, and video in your SWF just got faster. Your video card can be used to do compositing on all raster content. Utilizing the hardware processing power of the graphics card, GPU compositing accelerates compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software on the CPU. GPU compositing is applied when specified in the HTML parameters provided appropriate graphics hardware is available.
And, the little things…
Context Menu — Developers now have more control over what can be displayed in the context menu through the use of ActionScript APIs for common text field context menu items, supporting plain and rich text. The clipboard menu provides access to the clipboard in a safe and controlled way, and you can write handlers to paste text.
You can watch a bunch of demos here (you only need Flash 9 installed to watch the videos).
Easy 3D:
Filters and effects (live with Video support):
Improved Text Rendering… (ligatures are used in the video).
Microsoft: what’s in the box for Silverlight 3.0? I think the Silverlight feature set can be found here. Flex and AIR is only going to become more compelling as a platform.
Convert a byte array to a hex string without using any pre-built functions. The byte array’s length is provided as a parameter to the function (if needed…, some languages won’t require this).
Remember, accuracy is important, but so is performance and memory utilization.
A nice visual summary of some locations to get free icons. Of course, always check the licenses of any images you’re using.
(Although the site talks about Adobe Flex, there’s nothing specific about the icons and Flex, they could be used as Silverlight Icons or WPF icons or on a web page).
It’s a release candidate, but hurray!, a way to actually view DNG files outside of Adobe applications in Vista (like in Windows Live Photo Gallery and the Explorer).
