I have just been browsing the Adobe Labs, and read that Flash Player 10 RC has just been released! Flash Player 10 is a great step forward for Flash as it includes these great 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 and share 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.
Enhanced Sound APIs – Work with loaded MP3 audio at a lower level in Flash Player 10. The new APIs will let you do application-level audio mixing through ActionScript and even audio filtering with Adobe Pixel Bender.
My favorite feature is the new 3D features. Although you can achieve nearly the same using Papervision in Flash CS3, the new features are more integrated into Flash and easier to use!
There is a complete list of features here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html#features.
If you would like to get started with FP 10, then there are some great tutorials over at gotoandlearn(), here: http://www.gotoandlearn.com/. These tutorials show you the basic of getting started with FP 10. Although this is very interesting, it would be extreamly stupid to use FP 10 features in your project, as views would have to download this to view your site!
There is also a list of know bugs and fixes here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html#known. Fixed issues are here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html#fixed.
Harry.
