Adobe ships Flash Player 10

Adobe Systems is shipping Wednesday its Adobe Flash Player 10 software, featuring built-in 3D capabilities as well as the ability for developers to add their own special effects.

Concurrent with Flash Player 10, Adobe is shipping Adobe Creative Suite (CS) 4, featuring tools for building creative content, the company said. Tools like Photoshop and Illustrator are featured, offering such functionality as vector graphics.

With Flash Player 10, Adobe is focusing on building "expressive" applications for the Web, said Tom Barclay, Adobe senior product marketing manager for Flash Player. Applications can be deployed including online video, rich Internet applications, online games, and other interactive experiences, according to the company.

Built-in support for 3D is featured, as opposed to the third-party support previously offered. Developers can work in 2D and transform 2D objects into the 3D space, Barclay said. Developers also can build their own 3D libraries, he said.

"It's very easy for developers to be able to add 3D," without knowing 3D math, said Barclay.

Version 10 also features the ability to build custom filters and effects via Adobe Pixel Bender technology, which previously was featured in Adobe After Effects CS4 software. Developers can build motion graphics and special effects.

A new text engine in Flash Player 10 offers multilingual text capabilities and flowable text that can be laid out vertically and horizontally. Other major features in version 10 include dynamic streaming for video playback, supporting multiple bit rates, and advanced audio processing, which enables development of applications like music sequencers.

Early impressions of Flash Player 10 were mostly positive.

"Almost every single feature that's in Flash 10 is going to have a direct impact on what we can do with our product," said Mitch Grasso, CEO and co-founder of SlideRocket, which provides presentation software in a SaaS format.

Just about everything in Flash 10 solves a problem or takes SlideRocket to a different level of performance, Grasso said. Pixel Bender offers special effects capabilities, he said. Typography control for layout of text in presentations also is beneficial, he said.

"The performance improvements that they've done for 3D and full-screen effects really help us," said Grasso. "I would have liked to see them go a little further with the hardware acceleration but that's hardly a criticism."

Flash Player competes with Microsoft's new Silverlight technology in the rich Internet application space. While acknowledging he has not had an in-depth look at Silverlight, Grasso did endorse Flash over Microsoft's offering.

"My impression of Silverlight is that it’s just not where Flash is yet," Grasso said. It lacks such capabilities as integration with Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), for running online applications offline, Grasso said.