I knows it’s been a while since I have blogged but I just read something that made me very, very happy.

Flash Player 10.1 hardware rendering is automatically enabled on supported devices, and it’s not necessary to add the wmode=gpu embed parameter to enable it. However, when working with Flash Player 10.1, the wmode=opaque or wmode=transparent embed parameters will disable hardware rendering, causing the software to render the graphics.

This tasty snippet was found in an article on hardware acceleration on Adobe’s developer connection, specifically on the 4th page

Unfortunately this is device specific but in the future we can, possibly, look forward to great hardware acceleration in the desktop player.

The article goes on to say:

Avoid using wmode=transparent or wmode=opaque in HTML embed parameters. These can result in decreased performance and a small loss in audio-video synchronization under both software and hardware rendering. Also, many platforms do not support GPU rendering when these modes are in effect, significantly impairing performance.

Why does this excite me? wmode set to anything other than window (the default) interferes with Flash Player’s communication with MSAA and can also have some unpredictable, seemly random effect on keyboard access. So my hope is that one day in the future developers will move away from using wmode in order to benefit from hardware acceleration.

What have I been up to? Well for at least the last 6 months I have been getting into devices development – in areas that range across a selection of the different Flash Players and of course the iPhone :) As a result Flash Player 10.1 is of great interest and excitement to me and you may see me blog a little bit more frequently.

I’m not saying I’m back… but expect to see a little more from me going forward.