Adobe just released this quarter’s plugin penetration results. Its another great quarter for Flash Player with 74% adoption of Flash Player 10 as of mid march. That is just five short months since we shipped.

So if you’ve been wanting to start working with the new sound APIs, 3D or Pixel Bender, now is the perfect time!

People are probably getting tired of me saying that Flash Player 10 is my favorite version of Flash Player ever (even though I keep wanting to tell Flash Player 8 to cover its ears when I say that). Today though, I can really see that a lot more people agree with me. After releasing Flash Player 10 on October 15th, we started seeing a great adoption of Flash Player 10.

When it came time to run our December study, which runs for two weeks at the beginning of December, we were at only a month and a half of deployment. By the end of the study it was a nice round two months. Until Flash Player 9, the normal expectation would be a report of about 20-30%. In the Flash Player 9 days that would be in the 30-40%.

For Flash Player 10, the new number is 56%. That means that over half of the Internet connected world installed a new technology within 6-8 weeks! I’m really just floored. I’m also pleased to say that in the month and a half since the study was run, we are still deploying Flash Players like crazy, so we are really way past 56% as of today. How far past? I have my guesses, but I’d rather wait for the March wave of the study.

What I do think is a safe bet is to start developing for the Flash Player 10 profile whether you use Flash Professional or Flex. Go forth and transform the web with 3D transformations, custom filters and effects, dynamic sound, and all of the other features it takes me about an hour to list off.

In the last couple of months, I’ve gotten a lot of questions around multi-core support. Most of that has been around PixelBender, but there have also been questions around the rendering support added in 2007, and about ActionScript, which still runs on a single thread.

In a much belated continuation of my series “Why it works that way,” I wanted to share with you a quick question I was asking Flash Player engineering. The question was: “Why does ActionScript always run on the first core?” This was really getting at: “Why can’t we spread the love around and round-robin ActionScript to a different core based on how many Flash Players are running at once?”

I figured that if ActionScript were running on processor core A for one SWF and processor core B for the second SWF, the general performance of both SWFs would be better right? Well, it turns out I had a incorrect assumption here, and by clearing that up showed something interesting (at least to my naive self). It turns out that it isn’t always the first core. ActionScript runs on the same core as the HTML page that hosts it.

If you happen to have two pages, or two tabs running in different processes that happen to be running on different cores, the ActionScript will be running on different cores. While there isn’t much (anything) you can do to get people to run Flash instances on different processors, I found the reason for why it runs on the same processor as the browser is both interesting and sort of “duh” at the same time.

The reason for both the browser and Flash Player running on the same processor is to specifically keep ActionScript synchronized with the page. This allows for the SWF and the page to interact through ExternalInterface. By having the two systems on the same core you won’t run into lots of strange errors where an application that relies on both AS and JS works one time, but not the next on the same machine because a slight difference in timing.

This demo is a combination of the new drawing API features like drawTriangles combined with an object made from APE (ActionScript Physics Engine). The texture that is mapped across the shape in this demo can be an image, video, pixel bender or simple color.

In the color demo you can see that the cloth has two sides. This is done with the concept of backface culling. When drawing triangles, you can specify if positive or negative triangles should be bypassed in rendering. This means that for a 3D app, you don’t need to double render, but for this far simpler example you can draw the negative triangles with a different texture by doinga second fill process where you don’t draw the positive triangles.

more to come!

BTW, if you are using APE and want to export to for Flash Player 10, you will need to go through and rename the Vector Class to something else since it will conflict with the new Vector data type.

This evening, Flash Player 10 went live on Adobe.com. With it comes a new definition of what Rich Internet Applications will look like on the web.

Flash Player 10 introduces creative expression features like 3D Effects, Pixel Bender filters and effects, enhanced drawing API, a new text engine, new sound APIs and color management. While each feature is impressive on its own, it is really the combination of the features with each other and with the existing capabilities in Flash Player that show the range of the Flash platform.

When we add new functionality to Flash Player, we add it in two ways. First, we want to make features easy to use, so people at different levels of technical or design expertise can make use of them. The next step though is to also provide low-level APIs that allow developers the flexibility to create their own functionality. We’ve done this in numerous ways throughout the player.

A good example is 3D where you can use simple ActionScript APIs, Flash CS4 Professional 3D transformation tools, or build a sophisticated 3D library on top of the the new drawing API drawTriangles. No matter what level you come to Flash Player from, you can make great experiences and applications.

On a personal note, I joined the Flash Player team almost two years ago, when we were in the early phases of planning Flash Player 10. In going through the requests from the community, the technology we had access to from Adobe, and the great ideas from the Flash Player team, I was blown away by what an amazing release this would be. Throughout the process as we met with customers in large and small groups, as we sneaked features at conferences and finally unveiled the player in May in public beta, I saw with delight the growing positive reaction that our hard work was worthwhile and that this will be the best release of player to date.

I’ve joked with my co-workers that as much as I’ve loved working on Flash, this Flash Player makes me want to go back out in to the community and get back to making games, advertisements, and wacky UIs. While I’m keeping my day job, I hope you enjoy Flash Player 10 as much I have, and I look forward to seeing what you create!

Adobe Flash 10 Camp is a free event in the “unconference” style, focused on developers creating rich interactive experiences using the new Flash Player 10 features.

This event is inspired by BarCamp, iPhoneDevCamp, and the Adobe Hackathon, to develop inspiring content and applications using an advance copy of the Flash Professional CS4 authoring tool.

Attendees will include Flash and Flex developers, mobile developers, UI designers, and testers, all working together over the weekend. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event.

Participants will be able to:

• Learn about new Flash Player features
• Create Flash Player 10 content and applications
• Test and optimize content and applications for Flash Player 10

Of course, there will be a Contest, featuring some great prizes including — you guessed it — Adobe Creative Suite 4! In addition to the prizes, winners of our Contest will be featured as part of our subsequent CS4 launch.

We are hoping to accommodate about 200 people at Adobe Town Hall in San Francisco. See our Agenda before you register to attend.

Register early! Spaces are limited.