For you code-heads out there, the Flash Player 10 Beta is out!
There are lots of new features:
- The ability to generate sound dynamically! You can thank Andre Michelle and his Adobe, Make Some Noise! campaign for that one. In Flash 9, this was only possible using a clever hack, but now Adobe has added a very nice, compact API to pass data to the sound card. What's this mean? An all-encompassing Flash/AIR media player, and a better visualizer, of course. :)
- 3d transforms! You can now move and rotate interactive DisplayObjects in 3d space. It'll be exciting to see PaperVision, Away3d, et al be updated to take advantage of this.
- Pixel shaders! Finally, we can easily make the directional motion blur we all want. Also, keep an eye out for cool normal mapping type effects. :)
- 'Skeletal' IK animation. I'm personally not too excited for this one, but maybe I'll see some cool demos or animations that'll change my mind.
- Possibly the most boring feature is the most exciting to me: Strictly typed arrays! In Flash 9, arrays were not typed, so each time you accessed an array, you would cause a runtime type check -- slooooow. Creating a typed array will increase performance and promote type safety!
- A few other nice-ities, like being able to fade, rotate, and stretch device fonts. :)
Exciting stuff! I'm anxious to start playing with it, but I'm still crunching on Castle Crashers. Keep up the good work, Adobe!
KupaMan
This is going to be the coolest update of flash ever. I'm super pumped.