The official release of Flash Player 10 is now available. According to the press release:

Adobe Flash Player 10 builds on the capabilities of the world’s most pervasive application runtime with new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration.

Download the full press release (PDF).

I’ll also remind you of the sIFR bug with Flash 10 we mentioned back in July. When you update your Flash Player, make sure to keep said bug in mind.

We could go on and on linking up reviews and demos of Flash CS4 over the next few weeks, so we’ll just keep adding links of minor importance to this post. Check back from time to time for updates.

• Flash CS4 Actions Panel FAQ
• Extending Adobe Flash Professional CS4
• Advanced Motion Editor and Presets
• Flash CS4 New Features on Lynda.com
• Flash CS4, Big Changes Ahead
• Flash CS4 Actions Panel FAQ
• Flash Player 10 Ligatures Demo

Lee Brimelow posted up a 19-minute feature tour on gotoAndLearn() — you’ll definitely want to head over there and check it out. As he says, it’s just enough to whet our collective appetities until Flash CS4 is officially released. However, it will probably blow your mind.

Today, Aaron Simpson at Cold Hard Flash posted a few videos demonstrating the new Bone Tool and Inverse Kinematics features of Flash CS4.

The Bone Tool basically allows you to group objects together as a flexible jointed object similar to how you’d rig a skeleton in a 3D application.

I recently discovered the Adobe, Make Some Noise campaign blog. Their mission:

We want you and the whole Flash community to be aware of the issue that the current and possible future versions of the Flash Player will lack dynamic audio capabilities. You may ask why this is important but currently a lot of companies are developing online applications for text, video and image processing. We see software moving into the internet daily. Only audio is missing at the moment.

Their site lists out current Flash audio projects and suggests a wishlist for Adobe to consider. I think their cause is a valid one and, being an advocate for music myself, I’d like to see these advancements included into the Flash Player. Audio in Flash has definitely come a long way, but these recommendations could further solidify its already substantial lead.

What is Adobe Flash Paper you ask? Yeah, I don’t know exactly either but as of yesterday Adobe has decided to discontinue the product.

Adobe will continue to sell and support the current FlashPaper 2 version, but won’t be updating the technology to support Microsoft Windows Vista and IE7, which will make it virtually worthless.

If you’re dying to dig deeper, you can read more here.

Word on the street is that Adobe will be revealing CS4 on September 23rd. This is not a launch date, but we should get some juicy details to wet our palette until it does come out. If you were going to buy CS3, it may be worthwhile to hold off for a month or two (if at all possible).

All those testing the Flash Player 10 beta should go download the new release candidate. The August 11th release will update your player to version 10.0.2.26.

Udpate: 10.0.12.10 was released on September 15th.

ZDNet.com reported yesterday on a bug in the Flash Player that will allow the system clipboard to be hijacked. The attack inserts “a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program” into the clipboard that can not be removed without restarting the browser and/or the OS itself. Slashdot, of course, pounced on the story and linked to researcher with a harmless demo of the technique.

While not quite in the “cool” category of Flash industry news, it’s at least good to be in the know. In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively low grade bug. However, it doesn’t help the cause.

Right on the heels of Lee Brimelow’s recent AMFPHP tutorial, it appears Zend will be adding support for AMFPHP. As reported by Brimelow on The Flash Blog:

It is good timing to tell you that AMF will soon be coming to the Zend Framework. Much like AMFPHP, the proposed Zend_Amf component will make communication between Flash and PHP lightining fast.