Adobe Releases Flash 10 (beta)

Today Adobe released on their labs website Flash Player Version 10 for public beta.

This version of Flash has a few new key 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. 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.

Along with the above mentioned additional features Adobe has also made some visual performance improvements, added the speex audio codex, added support for Ubuntu, dynamic sound generation, large bitmap support and a host of other enhancements.

see the release notes for full explanation of all the additions and enhancements.

Be sure to uninstall Flash Player 9 before installing the Beta!