Flash 10 goes beta

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 16 May 2008 07:35

Technology

A beta release of Flash Player 10 is available for download. What has Adobe got for us to look forward to?

GPU hardware acceleration is high on my list. There seem to be too much Flash content around that consumes a huge proportion of the available CPU cycles to carry out what appears to be fairly simple animations. This probably means they are badly written, but with any luck offloading some of the work to the GPU will free up my CPU for more useful work.

A comment made by an early user is encouraging. Grant Skinner, CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com said "With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more - such as render 3D content and intricate effects, and process complex business logic."

Designers will probably be more impressed with provision for custom filters and effects to augment those provided by Flash. Adobe is also providing the Pixel Blender toolkit to allow creation of these filters and effects.

Flash 10 also features a new text engine to give greater control over the appearance of text, including vertical, right-to-left and bidirectional layout.

If you want to dip a toe into the waters of Flash 10, the beta can be downloaded here and once it is installed, you can see some demonstrations here.

In related news, Google this week announced the Google Maps API for Flash, allowing developers to incorporate Google Maps into Flash projects.