Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta, codename "Astro", was launched with a couple of nice features backing it up. Although it is available in many languages, the installers are only in English at this moment. Rich media content and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) will look and act much better from this moment on. Ah, I almost forgot to tell you that it now supports Ubuntu Linux!

Adobe Pixel Blender, the technology that was used for filters and effects in After Effects CS3, is also a part of Flash Player now. It is a very powerful image processing language that eases the work when it comes to creating custom effects and filters for web applications, without updating Flash Player.

A brand new text engine is included, which co-exists with TextField, working together to create new text controls, and device fonts can be anti-aliased, rotated, styled and have filters applied. The text engine also brings support for typographic elements, right-to-left and vertical text layout.

From now on, you can use 3D effects natively, without the need to be an ActionScript expert or to use external libraries like Sandy, Away3D or PaperVision3D. You can apply complex effects by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other, with only a small amount of code.

The Drawing API was enhanced, so the runtime drawing is much easier, with a new mode of drawing complex shapes without writing the code line by line. Among the enhancements, you will find memory usage and performance improvements, read/write rendering and 3D effects.

Flash Player 10 uses color management so you will enjoy the best looks, with the most accurate color possible. You can convert SWFs into sRGB (standard RGB), thanks to the opt-in color management, which also turns the entire SWF into a color-managed object.

Download Flash Player 10 "Astro" right now from Softpedia.