If you haven’t heard about it already, Adobe® Flash® Player 10, code-named "Astro", has reached open beta! And has a whole plethora of new and exciting features for Flash developers, including:

• 3D Effects - Flash is finally incorporating 3D. This feature is long overdue, 3D has always been out of reach for those people without advance knowledge in programming and maths. Here’s what Adobe had to say about it:
  "Fast, extremely lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users via ActionScript or Open Source libraries such as PaperVision3D, Sandy and Away3D available to everyone. Create complex effects with simple code by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other. Inheritance makes it easy to rapidly apply changes across objects."
  Hopefully it will live up to their hype.
• New text rendering & Text layout components - "The new text engine expands creative freedom by treating device fonts as first class citizens that can be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled and have filters applied as if they were embedded. The new text engine also offers right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures. … Layout and style text with tables, inline images, and column flow through components that are compatible with both Flash and Flex, all while getting the benefits of the new text engine. Rich text components allow designers and developers to flow text and complex scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, across multiple columns like a newspaper, around tables and inline images, from right-to-left, left-to-right, bi-directionally, or vertically."
  If I read that correctly, it means that Adobe have finally overhauled Flash’s horrible text rendering. The two things that currently annoy me the most with the current text handling in Flash are: not being able to create numbered lists in html text, and not being able to copy anything to the clipboard apart from plain text. Fingers crossed that these issues can be resolved.
• Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1) - "An update to the Saffron anti-aliasing text engine increases performance and quality of anti-aliased text, particularly for Asian character rendering."
  Flash alaising has always been a problem, this should be a step in the right direction.
• File Reference runtime access - "Bring users into the experience by letting them load files into your RIA. You can work with the content at runtime and even save it back when you are done through the browse dialog box. 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."
  This should open up a whole world of possibilities.
• Dynamic Sound Generation - The ability to generate sound through code! Bring on the new wave of Flash games that have rich sound effects and music at no increase to file size!

Flash Player 10 Beta has many more exiting enhancements, which you can read more about here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Also, you can find the release notes here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html

More indepth posts on the features to come.

Filed under: Adobe, Flash, Flash Player