Flash Player 8.5 and Actionscript 3.0

06.10.2005

Macromedia has announced the new release of the next Flash Player 8.5, the public preview will be available on the 17th of October. This new Flash Player will include Actionscript 3.0.

The Actionscript Virtual Machine has been build from the ground up for a better performance and script execution. I hope this means that the script execution for the mac version of the flash player will dramatically improve, which has been lagging in the previous versions.

Some of the improvements and functionalities:

Better preformance
Extended expressiveness capabilities (filters, advanced gradient controls, rendering performance, and so forth)
Video support enhancements (higher quality codec, alpha channel support)
Regular Expressions - Pattern Matching
E4X - Native XML Datatype
Binary Sockets - Make Flash talk many protocols
Runtime Error Reporting
Updated Event Model
And a lot more

Flash Media Server 2 Beta Release

02.10.2005

Macromedia has announced the release of their new communication server. In this release there will be improvements on the video encoding level, which will give a higher video quality with a higher compression, due to the On2 VP6 codec. I hope that in this release the bandwidth limitations will be removed, they are in the public beta release.

I will report more about the new Flash Media Server when I have tried it out in the beginning of next week.

More information about the Flash Media Server can bee found here.

The Public beta release of the FMS can be downloaded here.