Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes (2012-02-22)

Flash Player “Cyril”

Following the Flash Player 11.2 release, Adobe plans to do another release, code-named “Cyril”, which is targeted for a release in the second quarter of 2012. This release focuses on enabling features and functionality key for the gaming market, as well as addressing popular feature requests from developers.

Some of the features being planned for this release include the following:

• Keyboard input support in full-screen mode
• Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio
• Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content
• LZMA compression support for ByteArray
• Frame label events

Flash Player “Dolores”

Adobe is planning an additional Flash Player release in the second half of 2012. Code-named “Dolores”, this release focuses on enabling features and functionality for the gaming market, as well as improvements for general Flash Player use cases.

Some of the features planned for this release include the following:

• ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)
• Support for advanced profiling
• Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of hardware accelerated content
• Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS
• Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment
• Release outside mouse event API

Flash Player “Next”

While Adobe is working on releases for 2012, including 11.2 and the subsequent 2012 release, we are also modernizing the Flash Player code base in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes meet the needs of developers over the next five to 10 years. This work is referred to in this document as Flash Player and ActionScript “Next”.

This work includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base
• Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine
• Updates to the ActionScript languageAdobe® Flash® White Paper 6

The primary goal of this work is to provide a modern implementation of the core Flash runtimes and the ActionScript Virtual Machine in order to significantly improve script execution performance and provide a foundation on which Flash can move forward over the next decade.

Currently, initial Flash runtime releases that result from this work are planned for 2013.

[ Full document here ]