Flash Player 10.1 for Android 2.2 Release Notes

Read these Release Notes carefully before downloading Flash Player 10.1 for Android 2.2.

To learn more about the new features added in Flash Player 10.1, go to:http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/. 

The build number for Flash Player 10.1 for Android 2.2 is 10.1.106.16.

System requirements for platforms supported by Flash Player 10.1 are available at http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/index.html#mobile. 

Flash Player 10.1 is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices.

Flash Player 10.1 is available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. 

The consistent Flash Player browser-based runtime is the most productive way to deliver content to users across operating systems and devices. Runtime consistency reduces the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different device, software, network and user contexts and helps improve business results.

To make it possible to deploy SWF content on smartphones and other mobile devices that have limited processing power and memory availability compared to PCs, a tremendous amount of work has gone into to making Flash Player 10.1 “ready for mobility”. This work includes performance improvements, such as rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations, in addition to hardware acceleration of graphics and video. Improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage, and rendering/scripting performance benefit PCs as well as mobile devices.

Flash Player 10.1 also introduces new mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities – including support for mobile input models and accelerometer input -- bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience.

SWF Focus Mode 

Flash Player 10.1 integrates seamlessly with Mobile Browsers that support Touch & Gestures through the use of SWF Focus Mode. The first tap over an embedded SWF will set “Focus” and allow drag events to go to Flash (if the content contains a listener for the event). This will enable users to interact with Flash content as needed, but still pan and zoom around the page as normal.

Mobile Text Input 

Flash Player 10.1 provides support for use of native device virtual keyboards with TextField support if no physical keyboard is detected. A virtual keyboard is automatically raised and lowered in response to focus changes on text fields when editing text on mobile devices supporting a virtual keyboard to enable unobstructed and intuitive text editing. The focused text field is centered in the visible region of the page and appropriately zoomed/scrolled to ensure it is not obscured by the virtual keyboard. Upon screen rotation, incoming calls, or other system events, any already existing text input is retained. The virtual keyboard works with TextField but does not currently work with the Text Layout Framework or other Flash Text Engine text.

Easier Full-Screen Mode Activation 

Because of the smaller screen real-estate on mobile devices, Full-Screen Mode will significantly enhance the user experience for media, game play, and other rich content. A new HTML Parameter, FullScreenOnSelection, will enable developers to allow their users to launch Full-Screen Mode with a single tap over the content.

Long-Tap to Full-Screen Mode 

Users can now long-tap on any SWF and select Full-Screen Mode. The HTML Parameter AllowFullScreen is disabled for this feature, so that a user can activate Full Screen Mode for any SWF on mobile devices.

Optimized SWF Management for Mobile 

Flash Player 10.1 optimizes SWF loading and playback for mobile CPU and memory limitations to provide a better user experience. Instances are loaded or deferred based on SWF priority, visibility and available memory and CPU resources to enable more immediate browsing experiences without waiting for every SWF on a page to load. Developers can indicate SWF priority through a new HTML parameter, hasPriority. Deferred instances are loaded after the HTML page load is complete, and off screen and invisible instances are started when they become visible. Flash Player will also automatically pause SWF playback it is not in view or the foreground application, for example when a call is received or alarm goes off, to reduce CPU utilization, battery usage and memory usage.

Sleep Mode 

The Flash Player timer slows down when the mobile device goes into screen-saver or similar mode to reduce CPU and battery consumption on mobile devices. The timer returns to the default setting when a wake-up event is triggered. There is no interruption in audio/video playback. Incoming phone calls pause Flash Player.

Adaptive Frame Rate 

Flash Player will monitor and lower the SWF frame rate to provide greater processing power for rendering, which can improve content usability and conserve CPU utilization on resource constrained mobile devices. If the frame rate drops below the threshold, Flash Player will drop frames to achieve the defined default frame rate of the SWF.

Global Error Handler 

The new global error handler enables developers to write a single handler to process all runtime errors that weren’t part of a try/catch statement. Improve application reliability and user experience by catching and handling unexpected runtime errors and present custom error messages. When using the global error handler in a SWF running in the debug player, error pop-ups will not be shown. The Global error handler is disabled in the current build, but will be available in a future refresh of Flash Player 10.1.

Globalization Support 

New ActionScript globalization APIs allow Flash Player to use the values chosen in the operating system preferences to process text and lists and present information based on location context, without any knowledge of locale requirements. Choose a specific format independent of the currently selected locale on the operating system. Locale specific information and processing can include: date, time, currency and number formatting; currency and number parsing; string comparison for sorting or searching for text; and upper/lower case conversions.

Enhanced Browser Integration 

Flash Player 10.1 offers enhanced conformance to consistent browser usability guidelines, ensuring optimized user experiences.

Out-of-Memory Management 

Flash Player 10.1 prevents out-of-memory browser crashes by shutting down instances where a SWF attempts to allocate more memory than is available on the device. When a SWF tries to allocate more memory than is available on a device, Flash Player 10.1 adds logic to shut down Flash Player to prevent the browser from crashing. Users will receive notification to restart the SWF, or will see a notice to refresh the page if all instances must be shutdown. In the former case, Flash Player displays a Click-to-Play icon in place of the SWF. In the latter case, Flash Player displays an insufficient resources warning.

Flash Player 10.1 includes a number of media quality of service improvements and is ready to take advantage of upcoming Adobe media servers that will provide new ways to deliver rich media experiences and create new business models. With new HTTP streaming capabilities, Content Providers can use their standard HTTP infrastructure to stream media. Streaming performance is also enhanced with improved support for live events, buffer control and peer assisted networking.

Peer-Assisted Networking (requires “Stratus” on Adobe Labs)

The RTMFP protocol now supports groups, which enables an application to segment its users to send messages and data only between members of the group. Application level multicast provides one (or a few) -to-many streaming of continuous live video and audio live video chat using RTMFP groups.

HTTP Streaming 

HTTP streaming enables delivery of video-on-demand and live streaming using standard HTTP servers, or from HTTP servers at CDNs, leveraging standard HTTP infrastructure and SWF-level playback components. The addition of HTTP streaming will enable expanded protocol options to deliver live and recorded media to Flash Player. 

Note: Content protected using Adobe Flash Access™ is not supported in Flash Player on Android 2.2.

Stream Reconnect (requires FMS 3.5.3 server)

Stream reconnect allows an RTMP stream to continue to play through the buffer even if the connection is disrupted, thereby making media experiences more tolerant of short term network failures and enabling non-disruptive video playback. When a connection is re-established the stream resumes playback. Developers can add re-connection logic in ActionScript to re-establish server connection and resume streaming without any disruption in the video.

Smart Seek (Requires FMS 3.5.3 server)

Smart seek allows you to seek within the buffer and introduces a new "back" buffer so you can easily rewind or fast forward video without going back to the server, reducing the start time after a seek. Smart seek can speed and improve the seeking performance of streamed videos and enable the creation of slow motion, double time, or “instant replay” experiences for streaming video.

Buffered Stream Catch-Up

Buffered stream catch-up allows developers to set a target latency threshold that triggers slightly accelerated video playback to ensure that live video streaming stays in sync with real time over extended playback periods.

Fast Switch (previously called Dynamic Streaming enhancements) (requires FMS 4 server)

The Dynamic Streaming capability introduced in Flash Player 10 and FMS 3.5 is enhanced to improve switching times between bitrates, reducing the time to receive the best content quality for available bandwidth and processing speed. Users no longer need to wait for the buffer to play through, resulting in a faster bitrate transition time and an uninterrupted video playback experience, regardless of bandwidth fluctuations.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1.92.8 includes security enhancements described in Security Bulletin APSB10-16.

AdobeFlash Player on Android 2.2 supports the same H.264 profiles as Flash Player on desktop platforms. On Android, the hardware H.264 decoder is used when the hardware decoder is available (not already in use) and capable of decoding the H.264 video stream; the software decoder is used in all other situations.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1.95.2 includes a fix for an issue with H.264 video playback that caused audio to play back at slow speeds on certain devices.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1.105.6 includes security enhancements described in Security Bulletin APSB10-26.

Features:

Screen Orientation Lock:

Content authors can now choose to lock content displayed in Full-Screen mode to a single orientation.  This will prevent content from being scaled and rotated when the user rotates their screen.

International Language Support for Input Text and IME:

Flash Player now supports the entry of international text for Input Text and IME.   This feature also introduces a number of general usability enhancements to improve western text entry on devices with on-screen keyboards.

Fixes and Enhancements

Audio:

·         Loading WAV files via HTTP no longer causes the browser to hang.

Input:

·         Improvements to touch accuracy correct instances where small objects were not correctly responding to touch events.

·         When a user clicks on a TextField when in Full Screen mode, Flash Player will exit Full Screen mode to facilitate text entry.

Rendering:

·         Values for stage.fullScreenHeight and stage.fullScreenWidth are now correctly updated when the screen orientation changes from landscape to portrait.

·         Crashes related to playing content while zoomed in have been resolved.

Video:

·         Improved Hardware Video Decoding Support:

        - All H.264 encoding profiles are now supported on the HTC Nexus One

        - All H.264 video except 720p is supported on TI OMAP 3630-based devices (Motorola Droid 2, Droid X

        - H.264 baseline video is now supported on TI OMAP Motorola Droid

·         Multiple optimizations improve video playback performance and quality on Android 2.2 devices

·         Locking the screen orientation to portrait mode during video playback now works as expected.

General:

• When an URL containing & or % is saved to a SharedObject file redirectSO.sol all of the parameters after these characters are stripped off. (1909140)

   

• CSS styles should not cascade across sandbox boundaries. (2261815)

   

• startDrag and stopDrag do not work when the target is a 2D child of a 3D parent. (2200972)

   

• POST requests with no body reverting to GET. (2223288)

   

• XML.appendChild does not function correctly when published as SWF10; works fine as SWF9. (2340839)

   

• Last SWF Loaded sets scriptTimeLimit. (2500755)

   

• [FP-1569] AS3 Timeline: Child Sprite ADDED_TO_STAGE event is fired twice. (2300936)

   

• AS3 Timeline: First frame of Movie Clip animation played twice when created and added to stage with ActionScript. (2520095)

   

• [FP-4423] onEnterFrame gets called more often than necessary. (2614589)

   

• Automation APIs are only available on Windows and Android platforms. On unsupported platforms, runtime errors may appear when these APIs are called. 

   

• When searching for objects (not strings) in Dictionary objects using the 'in' operator, if the object is not found in the Dictionary object, it will be searched for in the delegate objects. With 10.1, the toString operator will be called on the Object if not found in the Dictionary. This can cause problems with Proxy objects who need to define the callProperty function or it will generate a RTE. A simple example that failed silently in 10.0 but throws an error in 10.1:

• var p:Proxy = new Proxy();

   

• var d:Dictionary = new Dictionary();

   

• trace (p in d);

   

• Error: Error #2090: The Proxy class does not implement callProperty. It must be overridden by a subclass. 

   

• at Error$/throwError()

   

• at flash.utils::Proxy/http://www.adobe.com/2006/actionscript/flash/proxy::callProperty() 

   

• at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/foo() // at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/frame1() 
  
  

Accessibility:

·         The Flash Accessibility API is not supported on Android 2.2.

Audio/Video:

• AAC Decoding uses Android's native AAC Decoder.
  
  

• This licensing requirement imposes a number of limitations on the types of AAC streams that can be decoded, which differ from desktop versions of Flash Player.

   

• Only Mono and Stereo AAC Streams are supported on Android 2.2.

   

• Flash on Android 2.2 supports the following AAC profiles: AAC-LC, HE-AACv1, and HE-AACv2.

   

• Android 2.2 supports the following AAC sampling rates: 48000, 44100, 41000, 32000, 24000, 22050, 16000, 12000, 11025, 8000

   

• The recommended sampling rate for Flash audio is 44,100 Hz because it is the internal format used by Flash's sound mixer. Flash must convert other sampling rates to 44,100 Hz before playback.
  
  

• Browser may not always resume video playback automatically when interrupted by a phone call.

   

• Platform-specific driver issues sometimes cause crashes during video playback.

   

• Playing multiple videos simultaneously will not perform well.

   

• When changing phone orientation and entering/exiting full-screen mode during video playback, playback may pause briefly.

   

• Pausing progressively downloaded video for more than 2 minutes may cause video to restart from beginning when resumed.

   

• Video embedded in a SWF does not always resume from pause.

   

• The Android 2.2 player will not support preloading large videos completely through NetStream. The video preloading size is limited by the circular buffer size (currently 8MB). If the video exceeds the buffer size and the content depends on the video being fully downloaded before playback starts, the content will never start.

   

• The .f4v files created by Adobe Media Encoder CS5 cannot be called by onXMPData. (2603890) 

Browser Integration:

• You cannot scroll the browser window if a Flash-based TextField has focus.

   

• Loading Local Files is not supported on Android 2.2.

   

Context Menu:

• Context Menus are not supported on Android 2.2.
  
  

Input:

• Opening the software keyboard causes the HTML content to scale down to the remaining available size in the window.

   

• Alt and Caps Lock Keys do not send KeyDown or KeyUp events from Soft Keyboard.

   

• On touch screen devices, the mouse position is moved to Infinity when the user's finger is not touching the screen.

   

• Tab Focus is not supported in Flash Player on Android 2.2.

   

Installation:

• Upon installation, a mismatch between new Java libraries and the version of Flash running in memory can cause a crash. Navigating to a page without Flash will cause the player to unload, and the next instance of Flash that is loaded will be the updated player.

   

Memory Management:

• Flash Player attempts to determine and place priority on the most important SWFs on a page; however, depending on the contents and construction of a given HTML page, this is not always possible to do correctly without hinting from the content itself. In some instances, Flash Player will mistake ancillary content as the primary content and switch everything else to “Click to Play” when encountering a low memory situation. 

Media:

• Camera and Microphone support is not included in Flash Player on Android 2.2.

   

Performance:

• Rendering 3D objects with large numbers of vertices will not perform well.

   

Printing:

• Printing is not supported in Flash Player on Android 2.2.

   

Rendering:

• Flash Content is always displayed on top of all HTML content, including pop-ups.

   

• Overlapping Flash Content may not consistently render at the same depth.

   

• In some instances, black flashes appear on SWF content when scrolling.

   

• Perlin Noise and Displacement Map bitmap filters will perform poorly on mobile devices.

   

• Several successive pinch-zooms in a single direction can cause Flash Content to not render.

   

• PixelBender Shaders are Not Supported on Android 2.2 but may be partially enabled.

   

• Occasionally, SWFs are incorrectly positioned at the upper-left corner of the screen.

   

• Flash Content in Transparent WMODE will obscure content below it.

   

• The number of concurrent Flash instances is limited to 30 on Android 2.2.

   

• Flash Content is always rendered in Medium quality mode.

   

Text:

• Font fallback support is not supported for Thai, Hebrew and Bengali.

   

• [FP-1982] appendText when appending from another text field does not append in the correct location when the source string contains "\n". (2341522)

   

• Classic Text: Large font sizes are not drawing correctly on stage on in exported SWF Movies. (2483664)

   

• Scale text with Free Transform scales text incorrectly goes beyond text boundary and is cut off and too big. (2486588)

   

Found a bug? Please send the detailed bug information via the online Adobe Bug and Issue Management System.

SWF-based H.264 video may be decoded by your graphics hardware. There may be video bugs that can only be reproduced with your particular video card and driver. When reporting a bug involving video, it is essential to note your graphics card and driver, along with your operating system and browser, so that we can reproduce and investigate issues. Please be sure to include this information as described in Instructions for Reporting Video Bugs.

Note: Due to the high volume of email we receive, we are unable to respond to every request.

Thank you for using Adobe Flash Player and for taking the time to send us your feedback!