Yesterday, Emmy Huang and I announced some of the new features that will be going into Astro (The next version of Flash Player). We got a great response from attendees, and I hope you will be equally excited by what is coming next. If you’d like to see the video, take a look at Aral Balkan’s recording.

So what’s new?

Text:
Astro will have a new text layout engine that will expose low-level primitives. This means that we aren’t adding a new TextField, but instead, we are providing hooks that ActionScript 3.0 components will be written on. Adobe is working on a nice set of components that support bi-directional text (also known as right to left text) and layout flows like columns, inline HTML tables, and improved inline image support.

This demo shows a simple paragraph with some not-so-simple elements. The paragraph shows 10 languages including arabic, hebrew and thai. Emmy then demonstrated that as she re-sized the window, the hebrew text break as it should with the left most word dropping down to the next line when it had to wrap. She also demoed the same example translated in to japanese which has a different line breaking rule system (oh! and it was also fully justified text).

3D Effects
Astro will also be adding support for 3D effects focusing on ease of use. Any display object will be able to be positioned and rotated in 3D space by using new DisplayObject APIs like rotationX, rotationY, and rotationZ (which is just an alternate access to existing rotation property). x and y are going to be joined by the new z property that will resize a display object to be in correct size.

The first example I showed was a video of Natzke running in the FLV playback component. By adjusting sliders, I started the video spinning in the X,Y, and Z axes. I swear I wasn’t trying to condemn Eric to to superman’s prison dimension! I also demonstrated a 3D animation tween API by clicking a button and showing the video animating from any starting orientation to a pre-defined location.

The last part of the example was showing that the playback component skin was still fully functional. I could still click on the play/pause button and even drag the seek slider while the video is transformed. Any display object will be able to be rotated with the interactivity still intact.

To show off the APIs a bit, I also showed a more creative example in the form of a galaxy animation made of three movie clips rotating in 3D space. I thought the effect turned out pretty well, but I learned a lot about even more capabilities of the feature that I am looking forward to demonstrating at future conferences.

Custom Filters
While the first two demos were pretty exciting to me, I think the big feature is Hydra. Hydra is a new programming language that Adobe is working on for pixel shading. With this you can write your own filters to be used alongside the existing built-in filters.

Emmy introduced this feature by bringing back Chris Georgenes’s monkey that we used to demo the original filter. We showed the monkey but now looking a bit warped by a new twirl filter. I then demoed the Adobe Image Foundation toolkit which was posted to Adobe labs yesterday! The toolkit let’s you develop Hydra filters and comes with several great samples. Once you compile the filter it will preview it with live adjustable parameters that will apply the filters to any image that you load into the tool.

Already we’ve recieved feedback from develoeprs that are developing some great filters in less than a day of the toolkit being available. If you develop one, post an image of the filter effect online or send it my way, I’d love to see them!