Flash Player 10 codename "Astro" goes beta

We made available a prerelease version of the Flash Player last night which has a lot of new features. There isn't yet a tooling release (we just posted a new Flex SDK that works) to support the Flash Player beta so for the time being this is primarily so that you can test your current Flash content and make sure everything renders and plays correctly. Shortly we'll be releasing a compiler that will allow you to actually program with some of the new features. We do have the new Pixel Bender toolkit available for download which allows you to create your own filters based on a new fileformat that syncs up with Adobe After Effects.

The new features in the player focus primarily on video and rendering performance by offloading some of the processing to the video card and enabling new 3D functionality:

• 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.
• 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.

In addition to the new graphics features we've also added functionality into the player that should make it easier for developers to customize the experience. We've added things like a new advanced text layout engine so that you'll be able to create your own text controls and access APIs that enable right-to-left text (Hebrew, Arabic) as well as vertical text layouts. From what I understand you could basically create support for any type of text you want (maybe Klingon?).

We've also added some limited File access to the player so that instead of having to make a server trip to upload content into the Flash Player, the Flash Player can talk directly to the file system and load that file. There is also some new Peer-2-Peer functionality that I'm still working the details out on.

Flash Player 9, the last major release of the player, reached about 90% penetration in 12 months so within a year people were able to deploy Flash 9 content and be pretty confident that most people could see it. Flash Player 10 has even more features than 9 did (because we focused on rewriting the compiler in 9) so I'm excited to see what the growth curve looks like when this version is released.