Typed arrays make debugging and maintaining your applications easier by giving you compile-time type safety when dereferencing an array and they will probably also result in compile type optimizations that will translate to performance improvements at run-time.
Also mentioned was 64 bit support and "device convergence" (with the Nokia N810 given as an example of the types of devices that Adobe will concentrate their mobile efforts on).
My understanding of "device convergence" is that in the future we will see more and more devices supporting the full version of the Flash Player as opposed to Flash Lite. This is already happening in devices such as my N800, which runs Flash Player 9 (and pretty darn well at that, too!)
I don't think Flash Lite is going away any time soon as it has uses far beyond the playback of Flash content on mobile devices (it can be used to create phone UIs, wallpapers, screensavers, etc., and I believe that we will see it used in this capacity for some time to come.) However, I'm confident that we will also see optimized versions of the full version of the latest Flash Player appear on mobile devices, perhaps even alongside Flash Lite, in order to give users a faithful rendering of web pages. Devices such as the Nokia N800 and the Apple iPhone already render web pages faithfully (sans Flash on the iPhone for the time being) and this is going to become a user expectation. I was just talking to Paul Betlem, senior director of Flash Engineering at Adobe, during the break and he confirmed my suspicions on this.
Finally, Richard Galvan, technical product manager of Flash, demoed (for the first time) animated IK in Flash. I'm going upload the video of that in a little bit. Animating bones in Diesel (Flash CS4) is going to be as easy as tweening any other object. In other words, a piece of cake! 
The Astro (Flash Player 10) to get typed arrays, Flash Player device convergence, and animated IK (bones) in Diesel (Flash CS4) article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
That’s too weird. I swear I had no insider knowledge when I wrote this post:
http://www.richardleggett.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/10/22/does_flash_lite_have_a_future
See you later on Aral!
Nice! Any words on Enums and method overloading? These would be my other two most-wanted features.
I hope they add overloading too, but goddamn, when they do, I also hope people don’t go crazy with the possibilities. That is to say that I hate the typical Microsoft APIs where you have thousands of overloads for every method, many of them pretty redundant.
Zeh, isn’t that the same in Java?! For framework development overloading would be extremely useful though.
Sweet about Nokia n810. That is actually on my personal wish list as soon as it comes out. I was hoping to use it for a mobile flash dev platform as well.
well… if Astro support typed Array
then that means it will support AS4 based on ES4
and considering this
http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf
there will be much much more than just typed Array
Josh has a great overview of ECMAScript 4
http://www.zeuslabs.us/2007/10/28/discover-ecmascript-4-the-future-of-actionscript/
I hope that they add overloading… a very important feature in my opinion.
Has anyone else been accepted into the n810 device program?
http://maemo.org/news/announcements/view/1192708879.html
I’m looking forward to building some flash 9 apps for it!
Hey Aral, did you have that video of Astro that shows the IK/bones. I would be very interested to see that I dont’ see it on your site anywhere.
I have a new N810. It rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The internet experience is great.
However, bandwidth for flash files in a browser is a real drag. Thus, playing the files from the device makes sense. Problem is, I can’t get the n810 to play a flash file succesfully. The browser won’t load the file even though there is a ‘open file’ menu setting.
The media player won’t do it either. It would be nice for you guys to develop an ability for the n810 media player to load .swf files as well as Mpeg and the other formats.
Anyone up to the challenge?
Andrew
andrew {at} orrgroup(.)com
You mentioned bones in your article. We actually have already started makin some bones with rudimentary IK. So if your feeling bored please check it out http://blowingthroughlines.com/2008/02/10/flash-as3/automatic-bending-joints-in-as3-simple-bones/
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thanks
thanks a lot.
I have also read all this in a newspaper article but blogging this is really nice.