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Adobe to transform Flash with Hydra

Nick

Nick

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The original Hydra, being clubbed to deathAdobe Flash Player is now one of the most ubiquitous applications on the net powering everything from YouTube to ultra slick gaming apps. It’s about to experience a significant transformation however according to Adobe developer John Nack who says that Flash is going to be bolstered by an entirely new graphics programming language called ‘Hydra’. The language has been specifically created by Adobe for Flash and according to Nack, will allow Flash to run an unlimited number of imaging effects.

This opens up many exciting new possibilities for Flash according to Nack:

Hydra is tuned to run ridiculously fast on modern graphics cards (GPUs), and it’ll be tuned for multi-core CPUs as well. The same Hydra technology is being used to power the fast filters in After Effects CS3. Therefore an AE plug-in developer could effectively also develop runtime effects for Flash, while a Flash developer could leverage her work inside AE.

For those who can’t wait to experiment with the new language, you can download a preview from Adobe Labs. However, according to some developers who’ve already given it a test-run, it’s still prone to several bugs. Manuel’s Coding Blog points out that many image-type functions are not working properly and most annoyingly, it hogs your system resources whilst rendering, even when minimised. Nevertheless, this sneak peek of Flash Player 10 featuring Hydra from the MAX Chicago conference indicates that there are some exciting times ahead for Flash:

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