Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta is open for anyone wanting to play with the latest release of the Flash Player. The Flash Player 10 Features are mentioned as:
- “3D Effects - Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.
- Custom Filters and Effects - Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
- Advanced Text Layout - A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
- Enhanced Drawing API - Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
- Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.“
The beta download is available for Windows Vista, Windows XP , Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Mac OS X, and Linux.
I don't know if Adobe Flash Player 10 is at all a threat to Microsoft Silverlight, but there are a lot of Adobe Flash developers out there who may not feel compelled to move to Silverlight if Adobe Flash 10 is at all as feature rich and easy to use.
You can learn more about Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta here.