Adobe releases Flash Player 10

Adobe Flash Player 10 is available for download from Adobe Labs. Code-named Astro, the latest Flash Player is available not just for the MACs but also for the PCs and the Linux users. The general public can now beta test Flash Player 10 and file in their bug reports.

The latest drop includes some of the highly anticipated and requested Features;

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. Now, you would be able to easily move @DisplayObjects@ in 3D with Actionscript.

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 – Fully supported Bi-Directional Text Support. 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.

Dynamic sound generation – Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object. Tinic Uro have more details on this – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

File Reference runtime access – Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server. You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

GPU Compositing – Hardware compositing takes advantage of the tremendous memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU, reducing the load on the CPU, and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications, resulting in more fluid, realistic and responsive user experiences.

GPU Blitting – Paint SWFs into the browser using your video card by choosing this new HTML parameter. Your content can run faster and give you the freedom to do more. Developers can enable or disable GPU surfacing to perform hardware blitting for each SWF within a web page without having to recompile the SWF.

Download, discuss with the community or read the FAQ about “Astro” Flash Player 10.