Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Adobe Flash Player 10 Public on Beta Now

Adobe Systems has made the latest version of Adobe Flash Player 10 software available now in beta on Adobe Labs boasting new features for interactive designers and developers to build richer and more immersive Web experiences.

Code named “Astro,” Adobe Flash Player 10 beta, has new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, extensible rich text layout and GPU hardware acceleration — helping to enable a new level of cinematic experiences across multiple browsers and operating systems.

“For over ten years Adobe has pushed the limits of creativity and redefined rich interactive Web experiences with Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has a long track record of creating technologies that influence market direction and we believe this beta release of Adobe Flash Player 10 raises the bar once again,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

“Working closely with the community, we are delivering groundbreaking creative features that will be transformative for interactive designers and developers, and revolutionary for end users.”

For the first time, Adobe is enabling the creation of custom filters and effects that extend and can be combined with native effects in Adobe Flash Player for unprecedented creative control of rich content to more fully engage end users.

Custom filters and effects are created with the Adobe Pixel Bender toolkit, also available for no charge on Adobe Labs. Adobe Pixel Bender is the same technology behind many filters and special effects in Adobe After Effects CS3 software, the industry standard for creating motion graphics and visual effects for film and broadcast.

Developers targeting Adobe Flash Player 10 beta can now create their own filters, blend modes and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender by writing small pixel-shading functions that can be parameterized to create animated effects or change the effect on rich media content at runtime.

The pre-release version of Adobe Flash Player 10 beta is available immediately as a free download from Adobe Labs at http:www.adobe.com/go/astro

It is compatible with most operating systems including Vista, XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Mac OS X, and Linux.