Hey Flash Player - You're a Big Boy Now!

Adobe posted information about and a prerelease version of the Flash Player 10 on Adobe Labs today. While much of the marketing front-end is focused on changes to the visual experience, like 3D and hardware acceleration (which are both very nice), the features detailed in the release notes are much more compelling. Let's take a look:

• Dynamic Streaming: This is a huge change for the way video is streamed to the Flash Player and a major win for content creators who use Flash to deliver video. Currently, the Flash player can't dynamically switch between a higher- or lower-bandwidth stream based on the current state of the user's Internet connection. QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media have all been able to do this for years. It's absurd that it's taken Adobe this long to implement this, but it's very welcome. I realize that a majority of Flash video is delivered via HTTP download (on sites like YouTube and many, many others), but if you stream video, then this is a big change and a big win for the user experience.
  
  
• The Speex Codec: Hooray! Applications which use the Flash Media Server or do anything with microphone input will finally get a long-needed upgrade to the old, poor-sounding NellyMoser codec. This will result in much higher quality voice in voice applications, like Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. If you use Connect, you'll see a big jump in audio quality when Connect 8 comes out (whenever that may be).
  
  Note that both of the above will require an update to the Flash Media Server. Who knows when that update (maybe version 4) will come out, however.
  
  
• Read Files in to an Application: You will be able to now read in a file (say, a .txt or .mp3 or .xls file) in to your Flash application directly, rather than having to upload the file to the server, then read the file back in to your application. You can even save the edited version of the file back to the local hard drive. All of this without having to use the AIR runtime.
  
  
• Text Layout Components: The new text engine is very cool (especially if you happen to use a right-to-left language like Farsi as your primary language), but the layout components which will be coming to Labs in the future will allow for simpler, yet more flexible control over how Flash applications are laid out. No more pixel-by-pixel layouts (unless you want to do that). Instead, you'll be able to let the layout managers do the hard work of spacing and tiling for you, just like what you get in Flex.

These are some serious changes and will open the door for more mature applications to be developed for the Flash platform. Now if only Adobe would do MP3 and mobile-ready export of Connect content, I'd be super happy...