Adobe announces hardware accelerated video in Flash, Apollo's new name, and two new betas
![ryan-stewart.jpg](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/9cf0a761a018bad8cb0d5c711dd1200cafa9e02e/2014/07/22/9ba23418-1175-11e4-9732-00505685119a/ryan-stewart.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&frame=1&height=192&width=192)
We're announcing a whole lot of things today at Adobe so I wanted to give an overview of some of my favorite parts of the news and what it means for people. I'm going to be on a plane when this goes live, so I'll link up other sources as soon as I land.
Update: The news seems to have been well recieved. Scoble chimed with an interesting take, Read/Write Web had solid analysis, TechCrunch posted, and Mashable did as well.
Hardware Accelerated video in the Flash Player We're releasing a small update to Flash Player 9 that takes advantage of your Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) when you're watching video in full screen. As far as I know, this is the first time the Flash Player has done any type of hardware acceleration, so it's a good first step. We've also gone through and optimized some parts of the On2 decoder so that the video will look crisper and perform better.
Introducing AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) - now with Ajax support
Open Source Flex We announced the open sourcing of Flex earlier this year, but today we're releasing a beta of Flex 3 which has a number of enhancements and is also the first iteration of our open source initiative. With this beta we will be opening the bug base to everyone and start providing nightly builds for developers to download. It's not fully open source yet, but we're trying to move to that as fast as we can, so I think this is an important baby step in that process. Ted Patrick has been covering a lot of the new features in Flex 3 but some of my favorites are deep linking (the URLs now change in the address bar as you navigate around a Flex application making deep linking possible) and the new developer-designer workflow that makes it easy to go between the CS3 suite and Flex 3.
On Air Bus Tour
The first leg of the tour starts on July 10th in Seattle. We'll have a live streaming camera on the bus at all times and GPS so you'll be able to track where we are and what we're up to. We've got a Twitter account for the tour, a Flickr group that you can join, and a blog that we'll be updating with information about the tour and reports from the event. Luckily we'll be putting our data cards to good use so there will be lots of blogging and I'll try not to miss a beat.