Just a quick note to let those who haven’t heard yet, that the Flash Player 8 (codename eightball) is now finally up for public beta. If like me you thought Macromedia was keeping us in the dark with new updates to their products after the deal with Adobe, this may come as a good surprise.

If you have no idea of what’s new on Flash Player 8, have a look at the presentation in tokyo about the new features, back in October 2004, at mookblog.

Anyway, on to what’s really important, I gave this a test run and it looks like performance does increase a lot, particularly on the Mac platform - if you’re on a Mac and you use flash frequently you know just exactly how much of a pain in the ass (and in the CPU) running intensive Flash applications can be. I saw a serious decrease on CPU activity and rendering some things seems to be a bit faster. If there’s any important stuff to note about this update, I’ll make sure to post about it. For now, this looks pretty good.