Adobe announced the release of much anticipated release of the most widely used cross platform rich content technology, the Flash. The new flash player is loaded with lots of new features like 3D effects, HD video support, custom filters, GPU acceleration and performance enhancements.

Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Platform Business Unit, Adobe Systems, said “We’re providing unprecedented creative control for developers and designers,”. “Another major improvement is the ability to create your own effects with Adobe Pixel Bender, which can be applied to content live to do things that up to now could only be done on the desktop,” Barclay said. The Adobe Pixel Bender also features a multi-threaded calculation engine that can be used for other purposes.

Some new features are :

3D Effects: Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.

Custom Filters and Effects: Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.

Advanced Text Layout: 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 offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Enhanced Drawing API: Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Visual Performance Improvements: Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

The release will be immediately available for Windows, Linux and Mac users with Ubuntu 6 & 7 support! You may download it from the page, http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

For direct downloads:

Windows:
For IE
Non IE Browsers

Linux RPM
Mac