14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe Flash Player 10.2 has been out a month now, but the team has been working on the future release in the meantime, obviously. The initial results of that work are now available to the public with the release of the first Adobe Flash Player 10.3 Beta. While it's only a beta for now, Adobe plans to make the final version available "soon."
Adobe Flash Player 10.3 boasts some interesting new features for developers, publishers and, subsequently, for users as well.
One new feature that should make the life of webmasters a lot easier is Media Measurement, a new set of APIs designed to make it very easy to get analytics data from videos served with Flash.
An analytics tool could be easily implemented, with SiteCatalyst, and the Media Measurement APIs provide a lot more data than it was previously available, in real time.
Audio conferencing gets a much welcomed boost in Flash Player 10.3, a number of technologies have been implemented which should improve audio quality and consistency.
Features such as acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control should all provide a much better experience. The idea is to enable users to have conversations in less than ideal environments even if they're not using headsets and dedicated microphones.
A useful feature, that we've already gotten a glimpse of, is integration with browsers for privacy controls. The local storage feature in Adobe Flash was starting to get abused to create persistent cookies, for tracking, even as users were mostly unaware that this was even possible.
Now, with Firefox 4, IE8, Safari and Chrome, the local storage feature follows the browser's privacy settings and policies.
Flash 10.3 also brings integration at the system level with the Native Control Panel. Users will be able to manage settings and policies in Flash through the Control Panels of their operating system, be it Windows, Mac OS or Linux.
Recently, Adobe also released a preview build of Flash Player via its new Incubator program. That version includes all of the features in the Flash Player 10.3 Beta, as well as the more experimental ones that Adobe wants to test with the incubator.
Adobe Flash Player 10.3 Beta for Windows is available for download here. Adobe Flash Player 10.3 Beta for Mac is available for download here.