FlashGuru Blog

Attendees at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago were today shown a sneak peek of some of the new features coming in Flash Player 10 (Codename Astro).

On show was the much anticipated advanced text layout with bi-directional text support (at last), 3d effects (a new ‘z’ axis property on DisplayObjects) and something you can play with right now, support for custom filters and blendmodes.

Custom effects are written in a new image processing language (Codename Hydra). You can play with custom effects right now, by downloading the new Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit Technology Preview which was released on labs today.

People have already being releasing source-code for some effects that they have written with the new language, after only a few hours of it being available. Check them out.

Ted Patrick mentioned recently that Adobe will be showcasing some big new features due in the next release of the Flash Player, codenamed Astro, at MAX in two weeks time.

Since i wont be going to Chicago for MAX, i will be anxiously checking the blogs for news, heres what i am hoping to find:

1. I want to be able to load any files into the flash player without having to send it to the server first and have access to the raw bytes of the file. IMHO the user has explicitly granted permission to access the contents of the file, by browsing around their file system for it and then clicking the ‘Open’ button, so there are no security issues.
2. The ability to create a file inside of the player with a bytearray, set its mime-type and use FileReference.download() to have the user put that file onto their filesystem, again without having to send the bytearray to the server-side script.
3. The usual request for bi-directional text support, both display and input.
4. The ability to get the sound spectrum of the Microphone input.
5. DisplayObject quads (similar to quads in Director).
6. Typed Arrays, gotta be some more speed improvements to be had from these.
7. Mute context-menu item (banner ads with sound are so annoying!).
8. Overhaul of the system settings dialog box.
9. Ability to have sub-menus in the context-menu.
10. Last but not least, bring the audio feature set of the player up to par with everything else, complete with an api that allows to create and modify sounds at run-time.

*G* Flash Player 8 is so old already!