It’s a little tough when you live inside the Adobe bubble to step back on release day and talk about all the “new” stuff (and some bug fixes) that you’ve been talking about for months. But Flash Player 10 is a big release, so I’ll do my best. As I’ve said a bunch over the past couple of months, I felt Flash Player 9 was a developer-centric release. We rewrote the virtual machine, introduced ActionScript 3, released Flex 2, and essentially laid the groundwork for rich Internet applications. We created the train tracks for more complex, interesting, and sophisticated applications in the browser. We’ve since extended those train tracks to the desktop with AIR and into the world of real time collaboration/communication with things like BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services.

Flash Player 10 on the other hand, is in some ways about getting back to the core of what made Flash great in the first place – really creative people. We’ve got Pixel Bender which companies like Picnik are already using to enhance the graphical capabilities of their photo editor. We’ve got new 3D APIs that will help make it easy for anyone to add a 3D-like effect to their applications. We’ve got new drawing APIs and primitives that enable some very interesting visualizations and will go hand in hand with a lot of open source projects out there that were previously pushing the Flash Player further than most. We’ve also got new low-level text APIs that for the first time make text as rich as other aspects of the Flash player. I was showing off some of those text APIs a couple of weeks ago in Asia and they went over very well. It’s going to help the Flash Player become truly global.

With the importance of video we also added a lot of video enhancements. “Movestar” was our big video release with support for H.264, but in Flash Player 10 we’re enabling dynamic streaming which means your users can get the best possible picture that their bandwidth will support. That means smoother video playback and a better video experience.

So now that Flash Player 10 is out we’re providing the platform on which to build some very cool stuff. A way to blow people away with your creativity and vision. That’s going to be a major theme next year, I think. Adobe is a design company at its core. We make great design tools and we answer to designers. That provides us a big advantage in the increasingly design-heavy world of the web. Creative Suite 4 and Flash Player 10 are a great example of what’s possible. Flex 4 and “Thermo” are going to build on that so that when it all comes together it’s going to be the best platform around for great looking, fast, and cutting-edge applications. And if our penetration story sticks, in 6 months we’ll have upgraded the web again so you can just take it for granted and deploy those apps without a second thought.