Since Adobe Systems’ acquisition of Macromedia back in 2005, no major updates have been made to Flash Player till few days ago. The new Flash Player 10 beta was out on May 15th with a set of new interesting features and enhancements.
Amongst the key new features are the fast lightweight and native 3D Effects. They allow users to easily transform and display objects through 3D space with full interactivity. The new beta also lets users create and share their own portable filters, blend modes and fills using Adobe Pixel Blender - a language and toolkit previously codenamed Hydra – which is the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 files.
The new version offers a new advanced text layout engine, which solves out the poor text support in former versions. The new engine is highly flexible and enables innovation in creating new text controls that offer right-to-left and vertical text layout. “The new player offers low level APIs so that developers can create their own text controls and text layout components” Tom - from Adobe - says, “If they want to do something sophisticated like creates text on a path, they’d be able to do that using the new APIs of the text engine. “
Runtime drawing will be easier and more powerful with new ways of drawing sophisticated shapes without coding them line by line. Expanded use of hardware acceleration and removing some processing tasks from the CPU to the video card will allow for better performance. Adobe promises that with Flash Player 10, applications and videos will run smoother and faster than ever.
Source: Adobe.com and Flashmagazine.com
