Adobe this week released Flash Player 10 beta 2, an early preview version of the nearly ubiquitous media plugin for browsers and for Flash/video playback. Version 10 of the player, code named "Astro," brings custom filters and effects, 3D effects, and a new text engine with text layout Components. Most importantly, however, it will bring a huge performance boost for Mac users: "If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster. How will this affect you? Well, OSX device text rendering got a huge performance boost. If you use lots of device text you will see a big difference." In addition, version 10 adds drawing API enhancements, color management, and visual performance boosts, including GPU Compositing, GPU Blitting as well as an anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1), a Vector Data Type, dynamic streaming, RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), the Speex Audio Codec, and dynamic sound generation. The Beta 2 build now supports enhanced Sound APIs, Linux WMODE and Video4Linux v2, the ability to "unloadAndStop", and limited full-screen keyboard access. The pre-release version is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms and is "being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues." The Flash Player 10 beta is available in all supported languages; however, the pre-release installers are only in English, Adobe noted. |
