From the “everybody-knows-that-by-now-but-I-will-announce-it-anyways” department: the Flash Player 7 has been released by Macromedia! It’s a public beta, so it’s not really fit for every user, but developers will surely love it.

Remember when I said I’d love to test my slow stuff on the new player? Well, here’s some tests I’ve ran on my computer.

Pathfinding example – clicking on the sea port (array manipulation, calculation, object creating/setting/retrieving)
Flash player 6: ~1.3s
Flash player 7: ~0.6s

ANSi viewer example, large – ANSi file parsing (large string parsing)
Flash player 6: ~4.9s
Flash player 7: ~2.2s

Metrix 2 – 3d point transformation and movieclip movement
Flash player 6: 8fps (moving)
Flash Player 7: 15fps (moving)

L2 Demo – 3d point transformation and drawing
Flash Player 6: 21fps (moving)
Flash Player 7: 32fps (moving)

Great stuff. So, what’s new on this player?

Apart from the increased processing speed, which was the issue on some Flash Forward presentation, the release notes page at Macromedia’s site descrives several other features. The biggest one – unannounced until now – is the update mechanism. Basically, you can instruct the plugin to check whether a new plugin version has been released; a bit like the Shockwave (director) plugin works. How cool is that? I’ve been dying for something like that since Flash 3.

Of course, there’s also the new features that are available on Flash 7/MX2/2004 which are still unknown for us mortal beings. Hopefully these new features will be announced in the near future.

Update: there’s a log of the objects and methods present in the new player here. Source is, as always, the great FlashCoders list (lost the original message sender).