Software Update: Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.160 & AIR 18.0.0.144

Adobe has released version 18 of Flash Player and the Integrated Runtime. With Adobe Flash Player it is possible to play Flash content, mainly SWF files, on the computer. Popular video sites such as YouTube and Google Video, among others, offer their visitors the opportunity to play videos with the stand-alone Flash Player. Adobe AIR provides a cross-platform environment for developing and playing so-called Rich Internet Applications. The release notes for this release can be found below.

New Features

• Improved Flash Player Install Process
  We have had consistent feedback from our customers that they prefer not to shut down their browsers to simply install Flash Player. This feature removes this requirement whenever possible. With Flash Player 18, in the vast majority of cases, the installer will no longer display a dialog to shut down the currently running browsers or applications that are using Flash Player!
  Once the installation is completed, you will be notified that the browser may need to be restarted to use the newly installed version. This requirement depends on your browser’s ability to see the new version. Either way, Flash will continue to work and you can easily force the new version to appear by simply restarting your browser when it’s convenient for you.
• Audio APIs added to Flash Player NPAPI
  We have added the ability for NPAPI-compatible browsers and applications to query the player and detect if audio is currently being played and if it can be muted. This new feature will allow applications to alert the user if audio is being played and give them the ability to mute, even if the Flash content does not.
  This new API is not applicable to ActionScript developers and is only available to browser and application developers that host the Flash plugin.
• Stage3D – Standard Extended Profile for Desktop
  In version 17, Standard Extended Profile was introduced on iOS and Android devices that support GL ES3. In version 18, Standard ExtendedProfile support is added for Flash Player and AIR Desktop. It is represented by a new constant ‘STANDARD_EXTENDED’ in the Context3DProfile class. This constant can be used in the requestContext3D and requestContext3DMatchingProfiles methods of Stage3D. The standardExtended profile can only be accessed if the SWF version is 28 or newer.
• Browser Zoom Factor for PPAPI Plugin and non-Win 8x ActiveX
  We’ve introduced a feature that proposes scaling of Flash content in the web browser in response to web page zoom factor change. This feature was already present for Internet Explorer on Window 8.x. In Flash Player 18, it now supports PPAPI (Opera and Chrome) and Internet Explorer on Windows 7 and below.
• VideoTexture Support for Android
  The hugely popular VideoTexture feature has come to Android! Introduced in version 17 for iOS and desktop, the team has been hard at work and has now brought the full power and functionality of this feature to Android devices.
  VideoTexture is an ActionScript feature that allows hardware-accelerated video to be used as a source texture in a Stage3D environment. Previously, using video with Stage3D requires the use of the Video object, which is not accelerated, and manipulation of the bitmap representations of the video frames. VideoTexture allows direct access to a texture object that is sourced from a Netstream or Camera object. Please see the VideoTexture blog post for implementation details.
• Build Number in AIR iOS
  This feature allows developers to simply update the build number while keeping the version number the same so that their application is available quickly on Apple’s Testflight for beta testing.
• ADT Packaging Time Improvement with Support for Parallel Compilation for iOS
  Air 18 introduces multi-threading support with the compiler for even faster build times. With this improvement, we have gained 20% improvement in packaging time on the top of last improvement which was made in Air 17!
• ETC2 Support for ATF
  With OpenGL ES 3.0 a new texture compression technique, ETC2 (Ericsson Texture Compression 2), was introduced as a standard feature.
  ATF (Adobe Texture Format) is a container format provided by Adobe for different compression formats supported by different platforms. It previously supported three gpu texture compression formats; DXT1/5(desktop), ETC1 (Ericsson Texture Compression 1) (Android) and PVRTC (iOS). In AIR SDK 18, ETC2 support has been added (Ericsson Texture Compression 2) in ATF. Now app developers can use ATF with ETC2 on both Android and iOS devices that are OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant.

Fixed Issues

AIR

• [iOS] ld error “ld: in , unsupported address encoding (13) of personality function in CIE for architecture arm64 Compilation failed while executing : ld64 on packaging with WIN SDK. (Bug 3950027)
• [Android] Cannot obtain contex3d in nexus 6 and samsung note 4 having Lollipop 5.1 (3967293
• [iOS] Error occurred while installing the application:Installation Error: PackageExtractionFailed on iOS from Flash Builder (3963902)
• [Android] “Error #3672: Buffer creation failed” while calling createVertexBuffer() to a Texture on Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (3960859)
• [Android] “Texture format mismatch” while uploading BitmapData to a Texture on Samsung Galaxy Tab (3959595)
• [iOS] App crashes when getting and setting booleans through interfaces. (3964980)
• [Android] Application crashes on playing any flv video using stage video (Bug 3976878)
• [iOS] When a simple App is created with just one List box, it works on the Desktop, but not on iOS. (3979411)
• [Android] Application with video texture applied, flickers on start up. (3965105)
• [Android] Camera thumbnail is display at top-left corner when StageVideo video is playback whereas working on desktop. (3950651)
• [Android] Camera continuous auto focus feature not work on Android even Camera.setMode property set. (3970215)
• [iOS] Parameter firstLine must be non-null” Error on using TLFTextField (3986791)
• [Android] Gamepad does not come up when the device is shaking.
• [Android] Camera flickers continuously on Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Inch ( 3974103)
• [Android] Multiple Hardware accelerated video cannot be played simultaneously (3972400)[Android] FLV video is not working on render modes GPU and Direct while working fine on CPU render mode only with both Mac and Win AIRSDK. (3948210)
• ASC 2.0 -inline=true: Compiler crashes with Exception “Generated byte code contains an operand stack underflow.” (3979134)
• Press Alt+Enter in mx:textinput results in a new line (3936186)
• Multiple security and functional fixes

Flash Player

li>Offline FLV are running too fast Fast forward mode (3982986)
• Unable to view animated shader effect (3990831)
• Camera output shows black screen in Safari (3980552)
• Right-clicking on JWPlayer causes Firefox to hang on Windows 8 (3835579)
• Inaccurate drawing in IE on Windows 8 (3846567)
• PPAPI Plugin doesn’t work on WinXP (3966268)
• Full Screen mode Flash freezes for a few seconds in Safari browser(3916445)
• Starling cannot upload texture from BitmapData in Firefox on Mac (3951802)
• ColorTransform applied to textfield using device font is ignored in Chrome (3959696)
• Zombie Tycoon game show blacked out screen (3924242)Few calendar control present on usflashmap.com stop working (3990982)
• Error #1014 Class flash.display3D.texture::VideoTexture is not found when running on flash player. (3955926)
• StageVideo fails to load error on Mac Firefox on certain configuration (3992751)
• Scrolling on high density displays fails in that child elements do not scroll at the same rate as a parent container. (3746968)
• Multiple security and functional fixes