SAN JOSE, CA — On May 15th, Adobe Systems Inc. made available a pre-release beta version of its new Flash Player 10 software.Code named “Astro,” the beta release provides new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, extensible rich text layout and GPU hardware acceleration, helping to enable a new level of cinematic experiences across multiple browsers and operating systems.

“For over 10 years, Adobe has pushed the limits of creativity and redefined rich interactive Web experiences with Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “Adobe has a long track record of creating technologies that influence market direction, and we believe this beta release of Adobe Flash Player 10 raises the bar once again.”

Wadhwani said the company worked closely with the developer community to incorporate requested features into the new product. For the first time, Adobe has enabled the creation of custom filters and effects that extend and can be combined with native effects for creative control of engaging rich-media content. Custom filters and effects are created with the Adobe Pixel Bender™ toolkit, also available at no charge from Adobe Labs. Adobe Pixel Bender is the same technology behind many filters and special effects in Adobe After Effects® CS3 software, the industry standard for creating motion graphics and visual effects for film and broadcast.

Developers targeting Adobe Flash Player 10 beta now can create their own filters, blend modes and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender by writing small pixel-shading functions that can be parameterized to create animated effects or change the effect on rich media content at runtime.

“One of the best things about the creative features now available in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta is that they won’t slow down performance,” said Grant Skinner, chief executive officer and chief architect of GSkinner.com. “With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more — such as render 3D content and intricate effects and process complex business logic. No other browser runtime has these capabilities.”

Building on more than 25 years of Adobe expertise with text, the flexible new text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta provides interactive designers and developers creative control over device font attributes like as anti-alias, rotation and style. It also provides support for ligatures. More text layout options, such as vertical, bi-directional and right-to-left, support the creation of RIAs in more languages, thereby extending the applicability of the software to additional e-books and other online publications.

Additionally, new dynamic streaming for video between Adobe Flash Player 10 beta and intended future releases of Adobe Flash Media Server automatically will adjust video quality as bandwidth availability fluctuates to provide constant video playback without pausing to buffer. Adobe Flash Player 10 beta also introduces native support for 3D effects, so 2D objects can be positioned, rotated and animated while retaining interactivity.

“The 3D effects and transformations now available in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta enable developers to get started quickly with 3D,” said Ralph Hauwert, owner of UnitZeroOne and a core developer of Papervision 3D. “For interactive designers and developers well-versed in creating 3D experiences, the revamped drawing API and Pixel Bender language will enable an entirely new depth of graphics unseen on the Web today. Interactive designers and developers will be able to create movie-like experiences, with special effects that before weren’t possible on the Web.”

According to Adobe, Flash Player content reaches more than 98-percent of Internet-enabled desktops. Adoption of the previous update to Adobe Flash Player 9, which supports H.264-enabled HD content, set all-time records by achieving 62-percent market penetration in less than three months. More than 75-percent of broadcasters who stream video on the Web use Flash technology.

Innovations introduced in the beta release of Adobe Flash Player 10 will be incorporated into a future release of Adobe AIR (Adobe’s distributed computing project) and will contribute to future work on the Open Screen Project, which is dedicated to delivering a consistent runtime environment across personal computers, mobile devices and consumer electronics.

The pre-release version of Adobe Flash Player 10 beta is available as a free download from Adobe Labs at Adobe.com/go/astro. The product is available for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems.

Pixel Bender Exchange is available at Adobe.com/go/pixelbender.