Beta release for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2

Beta versions of Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 have been announced by Adobe. Flash Player 10.1 is able to make use of H264 video hardware decoding on systems running Windows and is the first runtime release with cross platform support of Adobe's Open Screen Project. OSP aims to offer a consistent interface with Flash and AIR on different devices. Both Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 now offer support for multi-touch and gestures, on mobile devices and on the desktop.

Other enhancements in the Flash Player include improvements to streaming, better RTMFP support and Adobe Flash Access 2 support. Developers will also find support for reading accelerometers in mobile devices, an improved text engine and a new globalisation API which supports internationalised layouts for date, time and currency and appropriate sort ordering.

The new releases are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, but 64 bit Linux users wanting Flash support will have to continue using the previous version's "prerelease" 64 bit version. Details of the new Flash Player are available on the Adobe Labs site. AIR2 details and download are also on the Adobe Labs site. Flash Player and AIR are both proprietary, but the ubiquity of Flash content means that it is commonly installed on free software platforms.

(djwm)