It’s just over two weeks until Adobe’s official CS5 launch. If you are curious as to what the next interation of Flash has in store, check out this excellent video overview by gotoandlearn.

Highlights include:

• iPhone export
• swfObject now the default embed method
• New xml based file format
• Custom class code hiniting
• New text layout framework
• Support for RTL languages

There has been a lot of misinformation about the future of the Flash Player recently. Fortunately Jan from the Streaming Centre has avoided the political/fan boy nonsense and conducted an exhaustive performance comparsion between HTML5 video and Flash video.

The bottom line is that if Flash video is hardware accelerated (A feature of 10.1) the performance difference is negligible. Now if Adobe (with the help of Apple) could just sort out the mess that is the Flash player on OSX, the CPU hog perceptions might start to disappear.

AnandTech have put the Flash Player 10.1 prelease through its paces. The bottom line is a massive improvement in video performance. CPU usage is greatly reduced and as a result playback much smoother.

This is great news for Flash developers and well, anyone who watches video online. Since nearly every Nvidia card is supported you will also be able to play Flash HD video on your smartphone.

You can now grab the prerelease of Flash Player 10.1 from Adobe labs. The main new feature is hardware acceleration, but don’t get too excited, this only works with H.264 video and is currently limited to the Windows plugin. The good news is that Adobe have focused on optimization, so your existing projects should benefit from a performance boost. Other highlights include multi-touch\gesture support and local microphone access.