{"id":273,"date":"2008-05-15T07:40:53","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T12:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/273"},"modified":"2008-05-15T07:40:53","modified_gmt":"2008-05-15T12:40:53","slug":"flash-10-should-make-flex-and-air-even-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/273","title":{"rendered":"Flash 10 — should make Flex (and AIR) even better …"},"content":{"rendered":"

The battle for the RIA platform continues with Adobe’s pre-release of the next version of Flash 10, code named Astro (details here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For example:<\/p>\n

\n

3D Effects<\/strong> – 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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).<\/p>\n

\n

Visual Performance Improvements<\/strong> \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hmm… remind you of the “big” feature of WPF — offloading its work to the GPU? It’s coming in Flash. <\/p>\n

\n

GPU Compositing<\/u> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And, the little things…<\/p>\n

\n

Context Menu<\/u> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can watch a bunch of demos here<\/a> (you only need Flash 9 installed to watch the videos).<\/p>\n

Easy 3D:<\/p>\n

 \"image\" <\/p>\n

Filters and effects (live with Video support):<\/p>\n

\"image\" <\/p>\n

Improved Text Rendering… (ligatures are used in the video).<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

Microsoft: what’s in the box for Silverlight 3.0? I think the Silverlight feature set can be found here<\/a>. Flex and AIR is only going to become more compelling as a platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd5QIe-4p","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":565,"url":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/565","url_meta":{"origin":273,"position":0},"title":"Gulp – a WPF-based text editor for Visual Studio 10?","date":"September 17, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"According to this, the next version of Visual Studio (v2008 + 1), will have an editor written using WPF. VS10: new WPF-based text editor w\/ fine-grained extensibility, Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF, a.k.a. COM for managed code), new features support multiple languages A very common scenario where I work is to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Coding"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":172,"url":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/172","url_meta":{"origin":273,"position":1},"title":"Silverlight — it ain’t your papa’s WPF","date":"May 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"John Gossman, architect of the WPF team (desktop and subset taht supplies UI framework for Silverlight), discusses a few of the pain points developers and designers are facing today with WPF to Silverlight portability. From his post: The above example is a bit of a special case, and I don't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Coding"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":145,"url":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/145","url_meta":{"origin":273,"position":2},"title":"Silverlight 2.0’s Resources … not the same as WPF… :(","date":"April 21, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been wanting to post something about the differences between WPF and Silverlight's handling of Resources, but this was just posted at LearnWPF. A nice summary worthy of a quick read if you're not already familiar with the differences. It's too bad that there isn't better feature\/behavior parity between WPF\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Coding"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":477,"url":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/477","url_meta":{"origin":273,"position":3},"title":"Some WPF stuff…","date":"August 22, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"From Chris, WPF Photo Print. The joke at work is often, \"Microsoft designed WPF to fit two niches, photos, and RSS readers.\" Not that there's anything wrong with a photo printer. WPF seems to be good at \"media\", less good at line of business applications. Bil discusses this very issue\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Coding"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1701,"url":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/1701","url_meta":{"origin":273,"position":4},"title":"Windows 8 WinRT\/Metro Missing UpdateSourceTrigger","date":"August 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"If you\u2019ve done WPF or Silverlight programming, you may have found an occasion where using the Binding property UpdateSourceTrigger set to PropertyChanged was extremely useful. (I know I have!) It may have looked something like this: The key feature was the live updating of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Coding"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":633,"url":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/633","url_meta":{"origin":273,"position":5},"title":"A Silverlight 2 TilePanel","date":"December 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"You may notice that the Silverlight TileBrush is missing some key properties which would enable it to actually tile a brush. The WPF TileBrush has properties such as TileMode, Viewbox, and ViewportUnits that can be used to tile an image as a fill or as a background for a UIElement.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Coding"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/image1.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredprairie.us\/blog\/index.php\/wpjson\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}