Adobe Systems Inc., on Wednesday announced a major update to its Flash Player 10 browser technology, featuring built-in 3D capabilities intended at empowering designers and developers to build Web sites with better video, audio, and graphics.
The latest version 10 was dubbed as Astro, which hardly arrived days after Microsoft released version 2.0 of its rival Silverlight software.
Adobe, in May introduced a beta version of this Flash, which was reinforced to include custom filters and special effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing and GPU hardware acceleration, Adobe said. It also consists of a new text engine meant to provide designers and developers with more text layout options.“A great number of features in [Flash Player] 10 are all about providing interactive designers and developers unprecedented creative control,” said Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager in Adobe’s platform business unit. “Designers and developers…can transform and animate 2D content into the 3D space. That functionality is now exposed in the form of tooling in Flash Creative Suite 4 (CS4) to allow designers to do 3D transformation animation without having to write code.”
Simultaneously with Flash Player 10, Adobe is also releasing Adobe Creative Suite (CS4), sporting 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 aiming on building “communicative” applications for the Web, said Barclay. 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 boasts, 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 is very simple for developers to be able to add 3D,” without knowing 3D math, said Barclay.
For example, with the new “Adobe Pixel Bender,” users can build custom filters to animate effects or transform the effects on rich media context at runtime, Adobe noted. Pixel Bender is a similar technology used in Adobe’s After Effects CS4, which creates motion graphics and visual effects for film and broadcast.
This new player also offers some latest application-level audio processing employing a calibration engine and advanced sound APIs that provide developers to dynamically generate audio and create new audio applications like music sequences, Barclay added. For example, users can extract data from an MP3 file and use that data to create an audio visualizer to show audio waves.
A new text engine in Flash Player 10 provides for 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 is 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 have 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 is hardly a criticism.”
Flash Player 10, a free download also available for Windows and Mac users from Download.com, includes a number of new features:
- Easier-to-use 3D graphics effects.
- Better text handling for more sophisticated layouts combining words and graphics, more refined typography, and better multilingual applications.
- Better sound handling, so that different audio signals can be mixed together–for example, a music sound track with a game’s audio effects.
- High-performance visual effects using technology called Pixel Bender that also works with After Effects CS4 and Photoshop CS4.
- Better abilities to tap into hardware acceleration.
- Adaptable video streaming that can adjust to changing network throughput.
Flash Player is a major part of Adobe’s drive to make Web-based applications more powerful.
Flash Player competes with Microsoft’s recently launched Silverlight technology with 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 intuition of Silverlight is that it is 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.
The launch, which Adobe described as the biggest in the company’s history, includes updated versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, OnLocation, and Encore. Four different flavors of the suite are available with prices ranging from $1,699 to $2,499.
The free-to-download Flash Player is already installed on over 90 per cent of internet-connected desktop computers, according to Adobe. This compares with around 25 per cent for Microsoft’s rival Silverlight technology, version 2 of which was released earlier this week.
In addition, innovations in Flash Player 10 will contribute to the Adobe Open Screen Project, such as work to bring Flash Player 10 to mobile devices, Adobe said. The Open Screen Project is an industry effort to provide rich, multi-screen experiences across PCs, devices, and consumer electronics.