Software Update: Adobe Flash Player 20.0.0.228 & AIR 20.0.0.204

Adobe has released version 20 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

Android SDK Upgrade
With AIR 20, Android SDK (API Level 21) has been upgraded in the AIR Runtime, we’re now using the latest Android SDK version 24.3.4. Going forward, applications built using the latest AIR SDK will only support Android OS 4.0 or greater. For devices below Android OS 4.0, the AIR 19 shared runtime will continue to be made available on the Google Play store. If a developer wants their application to support OS versions less than 4.0 they will need to maintain multiple APKs live on Google Play store. Please read this article to know how to upload multiple APKs on Google Play store. It should be noted that when multiple APKs are live on Play store, any device receives the latest version with which it is compatible.

SecureSocket API Support for iOS
In this release we’ve introduced Secure socket support for AIR iOS applications. Using this feature, developers will be able to make socket connections using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols.
The supported encryption protocols are those higher than SSL 3.0, and TLS 1.0 and higher. SSL version 3.0 and lower are not supported.
Secure socket support for iOS is available from AIRSDK 20.0. Please use swf-version 31 or greater and namespace 20.0 or greater to access this feature. For more information about secure socket APIs, please refer to our API documentation. No new APIs are introduced with this feature.

AIR 64 bit on Mac OS X
AIR 64 bit provides a major change for the AIR desktop developer. Prior to AIR version 20, AIR only supported a 32 bit Runtime dynamic Library for Mac and Windows. With the release of AIR 20, we will only be providing a 64 bit Runtime dynamic Library on Mac OS X. This means that all new applications created by AIR developers will be running on this 64 bit Runtime on Mac OS X, and all the existing shared, captive, and native applications will continue to work on this 64 bit Runtime on Mac OS X.

Provide Video Rotation Information to Action Script as Meta Data
According ISO/IEC 14996-12:2008 standard, videos must provide information matrices like Track Header Box and Movie Header Box. But the Flash runtime doesn’t process the matrix field values ​​in Track Header Box and Movie Head Box correctly. This results in incorrect positioning or sizing of videos.
This problem is now resolved with Flash Player version 20 by providing video matrix information to ActionScript as a part of meta data object of the onMetaData event (which is a property of NetStream.Client). ActionScript developers can use these matrices to render the videos as needed.

PPAPI Vector Printing
As of Flash Player version 19, Vector Printing has only been available for NPAPI while PPAPI supported only bitmap printing. Hence there was an observable difference in printing quality between NPAPI and PPAPI (with NPAPI being better). Now in Flash Player version 20, we have introduced vector printing for PPAPI on Windows, thus giving a better printing experience from PPAPI supported browsers and applications. Bitmap printing is still supported for content that requests it. We anticipate bringing support for Mac PPAPI vector printing in a future update.

Flash Player “Enable Hardware acceleration” setting for Edge & IE on Windows 8/10
The “Enable Hardware acceleration” option has been introduced to support the manual switching between software and hardware accelerated operations for the following features:

• Video playback
• Stage3D rendering.

The option is intended to allow users to force a software fallback to resolve display problems caused by faulty GPU drivers.

instant drawing
Stage3D APIs has provided developers a great way to render graphics efficiently using a devices’ GPU. Developers can render beautiful graphics using these APIs, but a particular scenario may occur, where a developer wants to render a particular graphical entity, multiple time. For example, what should a developer do if they want to create a forest, having thousands of trees. They might have a few models of trees and from these, they want to create a vast forest consisting of thousands of individual trees. One way to do it is to dispatch as many draw calls as there are trees while changing relevant variables in between. For example, each tree is located in a different spot, each tree can be larger or smaller than the average, etc. Doing this with dispatching separate draw calls can be very inefficient and time consuming.

Fixed Issues

Flash Player

• Flash Player fails to load the .SWF files that comprise much of com2Learn.com’s course content. [4087953]
• Method URLLoader.load fails to load an xml file located within an MHT archive. [4085136]
• Unloaded SWFs with Dialogs:Flash player hangs on clicking “browse dialog” link [4084260]
• usflashmap.com – Flash Player gets hang after clicking on the List tab [4074925], [4081533]
• Embedded Flash objects stop working in SMART Notebook on Windows [4015165]
• The candidate window displayed at wrong position when input some CCJK characters on Windows 10 Edge Browser [4021613]
• Flash in 16:9 video resolution shows green strip (noise) on right of video window on Mac [3945461]

AIR

• [iOS] Worker in iOS will cease execution after URLLoader or Loader .load function is called (4033753)
• [Win][iOS] While publishing a project having more than or equal to 14 + ANE’s, ipa creation failed with error “input line is too long. Compilation failed while executing: ld64.” (4003293)
• [iOS] StageText: add FocusEvent.MOUSE_FOCUS_CHANGE event that allows preventDefault() to cancel focus loss (4057869)
• [Android] [User Issue] App crashes while playing .flv videos on Nexus 7 in GPU render mode, working fine in auto and CPU mode. (4059244)
• [Android] Could not to set alternate Android SDK path using -platformsdk option (3998505)
• [Android] AIR Game Pad is not getting launched on Android M. (4015404)
• Android build tools need to be updated (3846188)
• ADT targeting ane will not work for Java7 (3966813)
• [Window 10] adt is unable to detect ios devices on windows 10 with itunes 12.1 or later showing error iTunes MobileDevice library not found.(4066486)
• [Win][Itunes] : adt is not detecting iTunes 12.3 (4059341)
• [iOS] App crashes on iOS 9 on old devices with signal 11 (SIGSEGV) (4063271)
• [iOS] Keyboard orientation doesn’t take into account app orientation (4058764)
• [Win10] StageWebView not working with native browser option set to true. [4043422]
• [AIR Desktop][Mac] HTMLPDFCapability is giving error with new Acrobat Reader DC. [3969723]

Known Issues

AIR

• [Android 6] : Stage3D AIR application fails to return from background (4083403)
• [iOS] Crash if Class used in Main and Background worker is a CustomClass (4068748)
• ASC2.0 compiled app report Type Coercion crashes with MovieClips in SWC. (3592482)
• [WIN10][StageWebView]Some uppercase letters can’t be entered in a form input [4091451]