Adobe announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 10 software. Interactive designers and developers can leverage the new expressive features and visual performance improvements in Flash Player 10 for unprecedented creative control to deliver the most compelling Web applications, interactive content and high quality video to users across multiple browsers and all major operating systems.
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“Designers and developers know if they deliver video, online games, rich Internet applications (RIAs) and other interactive experiences using Adobe Flash Player, they can reliably reach the entire Web,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “Flash Player 10 continues to set the pace for Internet innovation, and we’re excited to see how the community is already using it to create an entirely new class of experiences not previously achievable on the Web.”
Adobe Flash Player 10 builds on the capabilities of the world’s most pervasive application runtime with new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration. Building on over 25 years of Adobe expertise with text, the highly flexible new text engine in Flash Player 10 provides interactive designers and developers with more text layout options and better creative control.
Adobe Flash Player 10 also extends the expressive capabilities of the Adobe Creative Suite® 4 product line (also available today – see separate press release) with new levels of Adobe Flash technology integration to streamline collaboration and enhance the design/develop workflow. Interactive designers and developers can create custom filters
and effects with Adobe Pixel Bender™, which is the same technology behind many filters and special effects in Adobe After Effects® CS4 software. Developers targeting Adobe Flash Player 10 can use these filters, blend modes and fills to animate effects or change the effect on rich media content at runtime. Flash Player 10 also enables new capabilities and performance improvements in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, the industry’s most advanced authoring environment for creating interactive experiences. This includes easy-to-use 3D effects that enable designers to design in 2D and easily transform and animate in 3D.
“Our clients expect innovation,” said Tim Barber, partner and creative director for Odopod, a leading design studio and member of the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA). “With the improved visual performance and awesome new 3D effects in Adobe Flash Player 10, we can now use Adobe Flash CS4 Professional to create cool Web experiences that were previously impossible. For us, this means fewer boundaries to the creative process.”
Adobe Flash Player delivers unparalleled creative options, highly engaging user experiences, stunning audio/video playback, and virtually universal reach across operating systems. Flash Player content reaches over 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops. More than 80 percent of online videos worldwide are viewed using Adobe Flash technology, making it the number one format for video on the Web. Adoption of a previous update to Flash Player 9 set all-time records by achieving nearly 90 percent reach on Internet-enabled desktops in less than nine months and Flash Player 10 is expected to achieve a similar adoption rate.
Innovations introduced in Adobe Flash Player 10 will contribute to future Open Screen Project efforts, such as work that will bring Flash Player 10 to mobile devices. The Open Screen Project is an industry-wide initiative to deliver rich multi-screen experiences built on a consistent runtime environment for open Web browsing and standalone applications across personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. More information about the Open Screen Project is available at www.openscreenproject.org.
To learn more about the new features and read what designers and developers are saying about Adobe Flash Player 10:
visit www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer
Top features
3D effects New
Create more intuitive, engaging interfaces using built-in support for 3D effects. Get started quickly without being a 3D master by designing in 2D and easily transforming and animating in 3D. Fast, extremely lightweight, and simple-to-use APIs, along with 3D tools in Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional software, make motion that was previously accessible only to expert users via ActionScript® language or custom third-party libraries available to everyone.
Custom filters and effects New
Create high-performance, real-time effects for cinematic experiences that quickly engage users. With new Adobe Pixel Bender™, the same technology behind many filters and effects in Adobe After Effects® software, these dynamic and interactive effects can be used both in production with After Effects CS4 and live with Flash Player 10. The Pixel Bender just-in- time (JIT) compiler can also be used to process other types of data, such as sound or mathematical functions, asynchronously in a separate thread.
Advanced text support New
Take advantage of a new, flexible text layout engine that brings print-quality publishing to the web, building on more than 25 years of Adobe expertise in typography. Gain more control over text layout using an extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components to flow text and sophisticated typographic elements such as ligatures across multiple columns, around inline images, bidirectionally, vertically, or chained together. Create multilingual rich Internet applications (RIAs) using device fonts that can now be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled, or build your own unique text components.
Dynamic sound generation New
Use enhanced sound APIs to dynamically generate audio and create new types of audio applications such as music mixers and sequencers, real-time audio for games, and even audio visualizers. Work with loaded MP3 audio at a lower level by extracting audio data and supplying it to the sound buffer. Process, filter, and mix audio in real time through the Pixel Bender JIT compiler to extend creative freedom beyond the visual experience.
Drawing API Enhanced
Perform runtime drawing more easily with restyleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line. Developers can tweak parts of curves, change styling, replace parts, and use custom filters and effects, delivering improved throughput, creative control, and greater productivity. Enhancements to the Drawing API add the z dimension, real perspective, textured meshes in 3D space, a retained graphics model, read/write rendering, and triangle drawing with UV coordinates, while adding memory and improving performance.
Hardware acceleration Enhanced
Use the hardware processing power of the graphics card to paint SWF files into the browser and accelerate compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software.
Vector data type New
Use the new typed array class for better performance, efficiency, and error checking of data.
Dynamic Streaming New
Show exceptional video with streams that automatically adjust to changing network conditions. Leverage new quality-of-service metrics to provide a better streaming experience.
Speex audio codec New
Take advantage of the new, high-fidelity and open source Speex voice codec, which offers a low-latency alternative for voice encoding. Flash Player also supports ADPCM, HE-AAC, MP3, and Nellymoser audio.
File upload and download APIs Enhanced
Bring users into the experience by letting them load and save files from your web application. New file reference runtime access allows local processing of data without roundtripping to the server.
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