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.
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Adobe has released Acrobat 9, the latest version of its PDF document tool that includes built-in support for Flash and multimedia content.

Acrobat 9 lets users convert MOV and WMV files to Flash content that can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models. The free Acrobat Reader 9 will play the movies, eliminating the need to open other media players.

Adobe released a beta test version of Acrobat 9 earlier this month, along with a new online service called Acrobat.com that includes a Web-based word processor, conferencing and remote access, PDF creation, and 5 gigabytes of file storage.

In combination with the Acrobat.com service, Acrobat 9 lets multiple users collaborate in real-time online to share documents.

The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop documents and multimedia content into a single PDF document, then choose from myriad layout and presentation options.

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