The new Flash^R Professional CS6 has many enhancements to performance in both the development and testing of applications and in application performance. These new features make app development much easier for creating great mobile apps.

Direct Render Mode
One very important upgrade is the addition of the Stage 3D and Starling Framework which insures hardware acceleration and enhanced rendering. You can now develop applications that run at 60 fps instead of the usual 24 fps available before this upgrade.

I am personally happy to see this addition. When creating storybook apps, rendering is especially important due to the large background graphics on each page of the book. In most cases, each page has a unique background graphic and the standard practice of reusing instances to help performance is not an option. Besides the large background graphics, now at 2048 x 1536 for the retina display, the interactive elements and animations are built from raster graphics, causing performance problems and system crashes on older devices.

It's simple to set the new Direct Render Mode.

1. From the Properties Panel, click the edit icon for AIR 3.2 and your choice of device/desktop.
   
   
2. In the General Tab of the AIR Setting dialog box, set the Render Mode drop-down menu to Direct.
   
   

Adobe AIR SDK
As you know, keeping updated with the newest Adobe AIR SDK was a little haphazard. Adobe has made it a little less so with a new menu option. From the Help menu, you will see the new Manage AIR SDK option to open the Manage AIR SDK dialog box. To check for updates, you simply click the Plus icon in the upper right corner. From this dialog box you can download the new SDK.

Prepackaged AIR Runtime for Apps
Previously, Flash only packaged apps to run as native, stand-alone applications for iOS. Now, you have the option to package the AIR runtime with your android and other applications. This makes it easier to test on several devices and, of course, it's easier for your fans to download and install your app in one step.

To use this new option:

1. In the Properties panel, click the Edit icon for AIR Application Settings.
   
   
2. In the AIR Runtime section of the Deployment Tab, click the radio button to set the Embed AIR Runtime with Application option.
   
   

*Adobe provided a copy of this software to me for review purposes.

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