Tinic Uro, senior computer scientist on the Flash Player team, unveiled some very interesting details about the upcoming support for OSX 10.6 Core Animation in Flash Player 10.1.
“Amazing, so many things have happened in the Flash Player engineering team over the past year. Lots I would love to talk about. But the purpose of this post is to deep dive into a subject Kevin Lynch touched upon recently, specifically Mac performance and his comment about Core Animation. Whenever performance is mentioned in the context of Flash it gathers a lot of the attention and some of the technical background is lost in the PR.
So what’s the deal with Core Animation in Flash Player 10.1? Let’s look at how Apple’s documentation summarizes what Core Animation does:
Core Animation is an Objective-C framework that combines a high-performance compositing engine with a simple to use animation programming interface.
Sounds like perfect match for Flash does it not? So yes, Flash Player 10.1 is attempting to leverage this framework to work around a few specific technical issues we’ve had in Safari and all other browsers on OS X.”
“The support for the Core Animation drawing model was originally driven by Apple and we have worked feverishly to finish the engineering work on both sides. Yes that’s right: This was and is a joint effort between Apple and Adobe engineers. Given the now almost perfect integration of Core Animation plugins into Safari I hope that future versions of the Flash Player will take advantage of more capabilities of OpenGL. And that without the requirement of setting any special wmode. I am pretty stoked about it.”
