Adobe Flash Player 10, code-named "Astro," introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences. These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level.

This public prerelease is an opportunity for developers and consumers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content. Once you’ve installed Flash Player 10 beta, you can view interactive demos. You can also help make Flash Player better by visiting all of your favorite sites, making sure they work the same or better than with the current player.

Key New 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.

See the release notes for more information regarding this prerelease technology.

Flash Player beta 10, feature demos and videos, are now available at labs.adobe.com:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

::: Are you ready for a creative power? ::: : : .

[Nutrox]

I just sat through all of the feature tour videos, and I have to say that FP10 looks and sounds fantastic. I'm really looking forward to the new (inevitable) Flash/Flex updates so I can get stuck into the FP10 features. The new text related stuff, 3D API, local file loading/saving, and hardware accelerated bitmap rendering are going to make a huge difference to Flash based websites.

[plotzer]

Hello folks,

This is my first example with astro. What it does is rotate the video in X, Y and change the length in Z. The url is: http://blog.plotz.cl/?p=4.

What I love of this new version of flash player 10 is the performance of the animations.

Anyone know where can I get the flash player 10's as docs?

Thanks in advance.

[Nutrox]

There are no API docs yet.. no public ones anyway. This version of FP10 is for making sure existing Flash contents runs ok, it isn't really supposed to be used for development.

Nice demo by the way.

[Polaco]

Has anyone tried the new "wmode=GPU"?
I have recompiled an application that I had that used something like Papervison3d to FlashPlayer10 with the Flex SDK and enabled the GPU mode. With this enabled the app runs slower and the text and some images are not rendered.
In this swf I'm using the Sandy3D's function to tesselate a movieclip into several triangles to allow free transform distorsion.
Does anyone knows some example of this new mode and where it a suitable scenario to use it?
Using the "wmode=direct" it runs pretty nice.

greetings,

Polaco.

[Nutrox]

This is what I understand about the wmodes at the moment:

Using the gpu wmode requires the SWF content to be designed to run in that mode, in other words the content needs to be optimised for the gpu. The details from Adobe regarding this seem pretty sketchy at the moment but I am guessing that the gpu wmode is going to be suitable for SWF files that contain a lot of raster images, or content that is pixel rendered and not rendered as vectors. PaperVision and Sandy do pretty much everything using vectors which is probably why you are experiencing the slowdown. On top of that, gpu wmode requires at least DirectX 9 to be available on the user's graphic card, and it is very resource heavy so CPU and memory usage will probably shoot up.

On the other hand, the direct wmode seems ideal for most things. It basically bypasses the browser's default renderer. In most cases SWF content should run closer to the speeds you get from the native/desktop Flash Player.

[Polaco]

Ok! Thanks Nutrox
There is a release date for Flash 10?

[pataggo]

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok! Thanks so much.

[nrg]

Update: Flash Player 10 beta 2 was released on July 2nd and includes new features and bug fixes.

[Nutrox]

FP10 is going to rock, no doubt about it. Anyone heard any news about Flash CS3 and Flex Builder updates that will allow FP10 publishing? I know it can be done with Flex Builder at the moment but it is a bit hacky.