Flash 10 Astro comments

This is old news by now, but for those that don't know Adobe has demoed some new features that will make it into Flash 10 at Adobe's MAX conference. The highlights:

• Support for really basic 3d transforms of 2d display objects. Basically you can rotate on X,Y and Z axises. I'm not too excited about this since it's still not hardware accelerated which is where adobe really needs to be focusing their efforts (even if it will mean re-writing all their rendering code). Maybe this feature will help speed up Papervision3D though.
• A new stream processing language for writing bitmap shaders that run as fast as macromedia's bitmap filters. These *may* be able to be offloaded to graphics cards. This is kinda cool and could allow for more advanced 2D effects which will be nice for games. Also it should be easy for people to share filter code.
• New, advanced Text box - supports multi column. This has been needed for some time and is a welcome addition. What would be nice is if they expanded their HTMLText rendering to include more tags now or take the HTML component from AIR...

As for me, I am still using Flash 8 for everything at work. Flash 9 penetration is pretty good, but some things are still easier to whip out in Actionscript 2.0, and not everyone here knows AS3 or has CS3 installed.