Planet Lowyat

Astro? Malaysia pay satellite television network station? No! No! No! Flash Player 10 code-named “Astro,” beta 2 was released on July 02 2008 and includes new features and bug fixes.

Flash Player 10 includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes, including:

* Creative Expression
o Custom Filters and Effects
o 3D Effects
o New Text Engine
o Text Layout Components
o Drawing API Enhancements
o Color Management
* Visual Performance Improvements
o GPU Compositing
o GPU Blitting
o Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1)
o Vector Data Type
* Rich Media
o Enhanced Sound APIs — new with 7/2/08 build
o Dynamic Streaming
o RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
o Speex Audio Codec
* Other Community Requested Enhancements
o Linux WMODE — new with 7/2/08 build
o Video4Linux v2 Support — new with 7/2/08 build
o unloadAndStop — new with 7/2/08 build
o Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access — new with 7/2/08 build
o File Reference
o Dynamic Sound Generation
o Large Bitmap Support
o Context Menu
o GB18030 Compliance
o Ubuntu OS Support

Creative Expression

Flash Player 10 will further the innovative and cinematic experiences users have come to expect from RIAs and rich media, taking web applications to a level previously only seen on the desktop.

Custom Filters and Effects — Expand your creative control by creating your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used to power filters and effects in After Effects CS3. Pixel Bender is a high performance image processing language that takes the pain out of writing custom, multithreaded effects and filters that can be added to web applications without any Flash Player update. Custom filters and effects can be combined with existing native Flash Player filters and applied to all display objects, including vectors, bitmaps, and video while retaining full interactivity. Custom effects can be parameterized to animate and change the effect at runtime. There is minimal impact on application size as complex filters are generally under 1KB.

3D Effects — Add a new dimension to your applications and extend the creative possibilities by easily transforming and animating any 2D display object through 3D space, while retaining all of the interactivity that exists in 2D space. Fast, extremely lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users via ActionScript or Open Source libraries such as PaperVision3D, Sandy and Away3D available to everyone. Create complex effects with simple code by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other. Inheritance makes it easy to rapidly apply changes across objects.

New Text Engine — 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 layout and interactivity APIs to create component-level text objects. The new text engine expands creative freedom by treating device fonts as first class citizens that can be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled and have filters applied as if they were embedded. The new text engine also offers right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Text Layout Components — An extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components, coming in future to Adobe Labs, provides advanced, easy-to-integrate layout functionality that enables typographic creative expression. Layout and style text with tables, inline images, and column flow through components that are compatible with both Flash and Flex, all while getting the benefits of the new text engine. Rich text components allow designers and developers to flow text and complex scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, across multiple columns like a newspaper, around tables and inline images, from right-to-left, left-to-right, bi-directionally, or vertically. Selection, editing, and wrapping of text are handled as would be expected for the different layouts.

Drawing API Enhancements — Enhancements to the Drawing API make runtime drawing much easier with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line. Developers can tweak parts of curves, change styling, replace parts, and use custom filters and effects, delivering improved performance, creative control, and developer productivity. The enhancements extend the current drawing API to allow for read/write rendering andtriangle drawing with UV coordinates, while adding memory and performance improvements that allow developers to create shapes using ActionScript that can be modified at runtime without re-drawing, edit dynamic drawings by modifying paths, and chain methods together to instantiate operations with a single method call. New with 7/2/08 build: Support for repeating bitmaps using GraphicsTrianglePath and drawTriangles has been added.

Color Management — Flash Player 10 employs color management to deliver web applications with the most accurate color possible, so your favorite web destinations look the way they were intended. Opt-in color management allows you to convert SWFs into sRGB (standard RGB), an international standard color space formulated by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Color management works with the monitor’s ICC color profile, turning the entire SWF into a color-managed object. Color management can be toggled on and off at runtime.

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