May 16

Flash Player 10 (beta) available at Adobe Labs

Flash

Adobe® Flash® Player 10, code-named “Astro,” introduces new expressive features and visualAstro performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences. These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level.

Wow, this is great news. The features list is very impressive. I am especially excited GPU acceleration support. That means greatly improved performance since on previous versions, everything was handled by the CPU alone.

  • 3D Effects - Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.
  • Custom Filters and Effects - Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
  • Advanced Text Layout - A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
  • Enhanced Drawing API - Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
  • Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

And this of course means that Flash CS4/10 will soon follow. And that’s what I will be waiting for like a child on Christmas Eve. :D

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Demos. The Flash demo is not much, but the videos at the bottom of the page are well worth a watch. You need to download and install the beta player, and I have no idea how stable it is.


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