Check out Adobe Labs to download Flash Player 10 beta, take the new demos for a spin, and watch videos about the new features.

The key features for Flash Player 10 beta include:

• 3D Effects - transform any display object in 3D with easy to use ActionScript APIs while retaining full interactivity.
• Custom Filters and Effects - In addition to the native filters in Flash Player you can also make your own using Adobe Pixel Bender. These filters, blend modes and fills can be scripted and animated using ActionScript.
• New Text Engine - Bi-directional text, vertical layout, styeable device fonts are all part of the capabilities of the new text engine. In addition, this generic engine will power a new set of text components with really mazing typographic and layout functionality.
• Visual Performance - through two new wmode settings you will be able to take advantage of the video card to speed up rendering and blitting.
• Vector - A new ECMAScript 4 data type that is very much like an array but only accepts one type. By knowing what type will be stored in the array access performanc is dramatically faster.
• Runtime FileReference access - With Flash Player 10 beta you can open a file dialog box to ask a user to select a file and load it into the runtime. You can also save content from the runtime to the desktop.

There is a lot more in this release, and I look forward to posting more about it soon!

Just got in to Toronto for FITC. I’m looking forward to presenting tomorrow during the keynote on all of the cool things that we’ve been working on for the last year, and the even cooler things to come.

I’m also looking forward to Joa Ebert’s talk on Hydra and Flash Player’s own Jim Corbett who will be giving an updated version of his popular talk from MAX, “Flash Player Internals.” If you want to know how Flash Player works and what really happens when you run ActionScript, do a tween, or use a filter, make sure you make it to this session.

The sessions overall look great (as always for FITC), so I’ll try to get some blogging in along the way.

If you are at the conference, say “hi.” I should have Flash swag with me at all times

I’m in the process of upgrading wordpress and will soon be moving the site to a newer, faster server, so if you experience issues with the blog, please do try back soon.

I’m also going to be trying some new anti-spam plugins, so if your comments are blocked, please let me know through the contact link above.

Ray and I bought a loft up in San Francisco! Ok, well, we actually bought a loft in October. The late post on the subject is that six months later we are finally moving in!

This morning I left home in Fremont and will be going home to San Francisco. What? Not Alabama as my post title implies? Well, our little slice of the city is on Alabama St. in the Mission district so I thought I’d share the punniness with everyone. It would be getting old already if it weren’t for the fact that we are just so darned pleased to finally be home owners.

The loft is 2000sqft. with two levels, two bedrooms and two bathrooms (pictures to come once the whole process is done. There is also a laundry room (Whee!), and a big loft area. The rest of the space is an open floorplan with the kitchen, dining, and living room combined and leading out onto a big patio. There is a lot of wall space for our art, and TONS of storage. The rooms have pretty good closets, but there is a full closet under the stairs, an enormous walk-in in the loft area, the laundry room has a lot of storage space, and there is also a storage space in the garage. It is a pack rat’s dream come true.

If you are looking for a place up in the city, I would highly recommend our Realtor, Kathryn Williams. Kathryn is very knowledgeable about San Francisco real estate and what is on the market. She gave us lots of information, but didn’t try to sell us on every little detail with flowery adjectives. We told her what we were looking for and she pointed us to great places that really did meet all of the guidelines we set.

So if you are wondering why it took so long for me to give up my 3 hour commute each day, it was because we thought. “This is our first place, let’s make it look the way we want.” Looking the way we want meant paint, carpet, and enough lighting to make our artwork start to smoke. Design consensus 1 month, lighting shipment delay 2 months, Painting (DIY) 1 month, me traveling way to much 1 month, carpet delays 1 month. Since that totals 5, let’s just add one month for Gay Standard Time (GST) conversion.

Things I learned:

• Ray makes a really great general contractor (thanks sweetie!)
• An interior design consultant is better than future couples counseling
• I now have a really great electrician contact
• Fear of heights can be partially overcome to avoid paying insane painter costs in SF
• ActionScript Developers should earn more by moonlighting as painters ($.60-$1/sqft of paint!!!!)
• If in doubt, budget $3,000 for any single budget line item.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the new Yahoo! Finance (Beta) including the new charts built in Flash. I think the finance team did a beautiful job on the new Flash charts. At the beginning of the project, Finance didn’t have any Flash developers. Rather than going down the hiring route for getting Flash expertise, they trained themselves and really knocked everyone’s socks off here.

You may also notice that the side panel of the charts is HTML-based. The finance group decided to go with a hybrid AJAX/Flash application. While I prefer Flash solutions overall for a variety of reasons, I think the overall feel is excellent. Without right clicking I wouldn’t know where one technology stopped and the other begins, just as it should be.

To check out some of the features of the charts, try comparing some different stock symbols, the graphing styles and most importantly the technical indicators. The technical indicators are very interesting modules that provide different perspectives on the displayed data. In addition though, they actually give information for novices such as me to know just what the heck I am looking at.

I am very pleased to say that Yahoo! is forming a Flash Platform team to work as part of the Presentation Platform. It will be a team of six made up of myself, an architect and four kick-ass Flash developers. We will be working accross the company to make tools, components, classes, and policies that promote fast, elegant and otherwise perfect Flash development.

Would you like to be part of this team? If so, submit your resume through the post on hotjobs or your favorite Yahoo! employee (we do hiring bonuses). Click on the job title links above to see the job descriptions.

For now, if you are interested in the architect position, please go ahead and apply to the developer position. When I get the architect position up on hot jobs I will modify the post. Regardless, all of the resumes are coming my way and architect candidates should really stand out.

These positions are all full-time, on-site positions in Sunnyvale, CA (map). I’ve been at Yahoo! now for four years, and I can say that it really is a great place to work. You will work with some truly brilliant people, we offer great benefits, and some strange but interesting perks.