Adobe Systems announces the availability of Flash Player 10, the latest version of its RIA (rich Internet application) creation and d-ployment platform. Flash Player 10 comes just a day after its primary competitor, Microsoft Silverlight 2, was released to the Web.
Following directly on the heels of the release of the latest version of its primary competition,
Adobe Systems announced the availability of Flash Player 10.
Microsoft announced the impending release of
Silverlight 2
on Oct. 13 and then made the technology available on Oct. 14. Then on
Oct. 15, Adobe announced the availability of Flash Player 10, the
company's software for creating RIAs (rich Internet applications),
interactive content and high quality video to users across multiple
browsers and major operating systems. Flash competes directly with
Microsoft's Silverlight.
Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Platform Business Unit, Adobe Systems, said
Adobe Flash Player 10
delivers enhancements and new features such as new support for custom
filters and effects, native 3-D transformation and animation, advanced
audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration. In addition, the new
release builds on Adobe's expertise with text to deliver a new text
engine that provides interactive designers and developers with more
text layout options and better creative control.
Click here for images of Adobe Flash Player 10.
Barclay said Flash Player 10 is being made available at the same time as
Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4), which takes advantage of Flash Player 10 technology.
"We're providing unprecedented creative control for developers and
designers," with Flash Player 10, Barclay said. In addition, he said
the new release is available immediately on Windows, Mac and Linux,
including new support for Ubuntu 7 and 8. "Linux is a first-class
citizen for us," he said.
Barclay said users can take advantage of the 3-D capabilities through easy-to-use APIs and with an enhanced drawing API.
"Another major improvement is the ability to create your own effects
with Adobe Pixel Bender, which can be applied to content live to do
things that up to now could only be done on the desktop," Barclay said.
The Adobe Pixel Bender also features a multi-threaded calculation
engine that can be used for other purposes.
Indeed, Adobe Flash Player 10 extends the expressive capabilities of
the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product line with new levels of Flash
technology integration to streamline collaboration and enhance the
design/develop workflow, Adobe officials said.
Users can create custom filters and effects with Adobe Pixel Bender,
which is the same technology behind many filters and special effects in
Adobe After Effects CS4 software. Developers targeting Adobe Flash
Player 10 can use these filters, blend modes and fills to animate
effects or change the effect on rich media content at runtime. Flash
Player 10 also enables new capabilities and performance improvements in
Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. This includes easy-to-use 3-D effects
that enable designers to design in 2-D and easily transform and animate
in 3-D.
"Our clients expect innovation," said Tim Barber, partner and
creative director for Odopod, a design studio and member of the Society
of Digital Agencies (SoDA). "With the improved visual performance and
awesome new 3-D effects in Adobe Flash Player 10, we can now use Adobe
Flash CS4 Professional to create cool Web experiences that were
previously impossible. For us, this means fewer boundaries to the
creative process."
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