Thursday brought the unveiling of the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player browser plug-in, further advancing its series of latest graphical features such as 3-D animated effects with a beta version of Flash player 10 in an attempt to stay the best in its field.

With no set final release date, the new Flash player has several new features in aid of maintaining the plug-ins dominance (its penetration is over 98%) during a time of ever expanding Internet application platforms and development methodologies, including Microsoft Silverlight, JavaFX and Ajax.

“Adobe has a long track record of creating technologies that influence market direction, and we believe this beta release of Adobe Flash Player 10 raises the bar once again,” David Wadhwani, general manager and VP of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe, said in a statement.

Adobe has now added support for three-dimensional animated effects. Graphical objects can be manipulated and rotated, so that, for example, a developer can create a digital, three-dimensional array of two-dimensional Laptop images that appears to revolve around a central axis to help consumers decide what Laptop to buy from an online store.

One of the other new features of Flash Player 10 is an extended group of filter effects that use Adobe’s free Pixel Bender Toolkit, currently in testing, to easily create filters that can embed effects such as a twirled view of Flash media like video, text, or graphics, into any Flash application. An advanced filter feature was requested most for Flash Player 10, which was code-named Astro.

By enlisting the user’s graphics card to render Flash graphics, performance increases substantially and by employing dynamic streaming, video quality changes automatically with network performance.

Adobe has gone all out and completely rewrote the text engine to add new layout support and font manipulation capability. Implementing a better interface for Flash Player’s Drawing API, hand coding will not be needed for complex shapes and more low-level access to rendering features to encourage third-party rendering software development for Flash.

The beta version of Flash Player 10 will run on several versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Adobe says all of the features in Flash Player 10 will also be available in a future version of the company’s AIR platform for rich Internet applications that run outside of a Web browser. It’s unclear when that will be available.

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