Introducing Adobe Flash Player 10

By Justin Everett-Church:

As senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player, I am really excited to tell you about Flash Player 10. But before I drill into new features and improvements, I want to encourage you to download Flash Player 10, code-named Astro, from the Flash Player Download Center.

Now that you’ve downloaded Flash Player 10, I am ready to deliver the inside scoop. As you can imagine, we receive a lot of feature requests from designers and developers and from Adobe employees. My favorite part is selecting features to include. And of course, my least favorite task is identifying features that will be delayed until the next release. With all the great ideas for Flash, both the in and out lists get pretty long. One of the best ways for a feature to make the cut, however, is for it to open up new possibilities.

As an example, we get plenty of requests from customers for new gradients, new filters, and new blend modes. Each user had specific goals in mind and would champion a conical fill or the need for a directional blur. Honestly, we could have made Flash Player 10 all about filters if we had tackled each request individually. Luckily, a centralized team at Adobe created a fantastic technology, Adobe Pixel Bender (requires Flash Player 10), which lets us incorporate the ability for designers to add their own fills, blend modes, and filters to their SWF files instead of having to bake them into Flash Player.

More info at:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/jchurch_flashplayer10.html