Adobe Unveils Flash Player 10 Beta

Adobe released the beta version of its Flash Player 10. The new player brings native 3D effects, video streaming, and text layout options to the table, along with other developer-centric additions. Support for custom filters and effects is also added and a lot more.

 

The new player comes out with the following features: 

• Rich Text Layout - new text APIs that allows users to create their own text rendering controls; support for bi-directional text, vertical text, and complex scripts along with new layout and flow options. This should meet and exceed what you can do in HTML today and with this release text in Flash Player will no longer be behind.
• 3D Effects - new APIs to let users create 3D effects inside of the player which could result in very interactive experiences inside and animations of 2D planes in the 3D world.
• Custom Filters and Effects - the new Adobe Pixel Bender enables users to create their own filters and effects to use and share with other Flashers. Users can do all kinds of visual transformations and bring those into your Flash and Flex apps.
• Dynamic Streaming - added ability in the Flash Player to dynamically change the video quality depending on the bandwidth while watching it. So users are getting the best quality possible.
  
•  More Hardware Acceleration - added hardware support for bitmaps, filters, video, and blend modes which gives an automatic performance boost for a lot of very graphic-heavy applications. There is also an option that will let users to specify an HTML attribute when embeding SWFs in the browser to “paint” that SWF using the video card on the machine. Therefore users will get a similar boost to the one they gets when they go full screen for video.
• File Access - new File APIs which let users prompt the user with a File Dialog box and instead of uploading it to a server they can take that file and load it directly into the Flash Player. Users will also be able to save content from Flash Player directly to the File system which opens up many cool possibilities.

Adobe expects to ship a final version of Flash Player 10 later this year, and also plans for the new features to find their way into AIR in a future release.

See the release notes for more information regarding this prerelease technology. Adobe has also provided a demo page to preview some of the new features.

Download the Flash Player 10 prerelease now.