Flash Player 10 Beta Release

Impressions of Adobe's new Flash beta.
2008-05-15

Adobe has just released the Flash Player 10 release. Having looked at the various blogs, there is a lot to get excited about. The sheer list of features on the release notes is staggering. Where to start? We've got:

• 3D primitives.
• Sound generation.
• Shaders.
• GPU Offloading.
• Better File Reference
• Much, much more.

Two of Adobe's Flash Player blogs, kaourantin and penguinSWF, have been quiet as of late. And suddenly we know why. I'm sure they were heads down working hard. They've both opened up to let us know where they're at, and given us this beautiful beta.

I'm also impressed to see that Adobe is using its resources to make sure there is a Linux beta of this release also. Mike Melanson is one tough developer: not only does he brave the slings and arrows of zealot comments, he's also able to get FP10 to perform better than 9 on his Asus EEE PC.

Sound generation is a huge boon to developers. While sound support wasn't ever bad, it was never very good. Now we have much more control over sound playback and generation. I get the feeling this is about as low level as can be made, since we are even getting the ability to choose a performance trade-off. Alas, we are unable to capture microphone output, but considering the sheer list of features in this release, I'm not complaining (yet).

Have you ever wanted to know what you're uploading? Wouldn't it be great to be able to look at the file before you upload it? Or maybe you don't need to upload it. Yes, now you can prompt a user for a file, and spit them back a file without requiring any server interaction. My main request that I hope was fixed in this version tho is that when you upload to a server that you can get the response.

If you download the beta, maybe you'll notice a green square in the upper left corner on some demos(which I haven't seen yet). This square tells you that the pixels are being drawn by the GPU instead of the CPU. This compositing speed gives you more power in the CPU to do more. And hopefully will make my Macbook Air run cooler.

The demo on Adobe's site shows off the power of the new 3D primitive. So how does this compare to current 3D technologies in Flash, such as Away3D and Papervision? The main difference I notice is that texture transformations are stunning. The bitmaps look smooth and clear, compared to sometimes very jaggy textures in FP9.

All in all this demo is fantastic. Kudos to Grant Skinner. I can't wait to see the things people will cook up. Oh and I might have a trick or two up my sleeve myself.