Flash 7.0 Is Out

If you are looking at creating some .NET/Flash combo RIAs, the new versions of flash have officially been released. Head over to www.macromedia.com and get the latest player while you're at it.

Supposedly performance has been improved by multiple hundreds of percents. I went over to http://www.laszlosystems.com/ to try out their RIAs again, and I'm not quite convienced that the performance has really been improved all that much. Yes, the apps are more responsive than I remember them, but it still isn't as fluid as a DHTML implementation and it looks more like it is just dropping frames now, not like it is rendering any faster (so the animations that the UI uses jump around and are like 3 frame animations instead of fluid transitions). I'm sure someone will do some performance tests before too long and we can see what the real scoop is...

Update from Robert Penner:

Existing SWFs running in Flash Player 7 will see some performance gains, but much greater improvement will come from SWFs that have been generated by the new compiler, which uses optimized bytecode that makes use of the built-in registers.

Ahh good old registers. I remember back in the day when we had “register” variables in C... those were pretty slick. It was sometimes amazing how much performance you could gain by using them.