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September 19, 2005
First Impressions of Flash 8
I installed the trial version of Flash 8 and am, so far, quite impressed. The application definitely seems more capable than its creaky predecessor, although I've yet to do a project of any significance in it. I opened a few old projects and exported them and everything seems tighter.
New stuff:
- Supposedly bitmaps work much better within Flash than they used to (which is a little like saying FEMA this week is improved over two weeks ago -- the baseline is not high). It looks like there's still some nasty dot crawl on scaled JPEGs, but time will tell how much better it works. I'm not convinced yet.
- Security warnings seem much more effectively voiced. Macromedia's done a good job at making sure that Flash movies can't do anything nefarious to your system, but haven't always been very good about telling developers how to let Flash do things you would like it to do on a local system. Looks like they done some work so that when things fail, the system lets you know.
- Scalable live effects (drop shadows, blur and whatnot) work pretty well, even on bitmaps. Will be interesting to see what performance hit one sees. Moving and scaling bitmaps in Flash is usually a pretty expensive process, often pegging the processor even on small bitmaps. If you try to move more than three simultaneously, the universe reapproaches singularity.
Despite the clamor of many developers last year at Max, the beginner mode for the ActionScript editor window remains long gone. (Thanks, Chris) -- beginner mode is back, but has been moved to the "Script Assist" button in the Action window. Many will be pleased by this.- Flash now integrates with Dreamweaver 8's "sites," letting you manage them from within Flash. Not sure how useful that is, but it's there.
- New video encoding stuff. Yay! Looking forward to seeing the quality vs. the old version. There's also a QuickTime plug-in. Creating Flash video in the old days was a real PitA.
I do wish it would allow you to specify MX 2004 as the default filetype for saving. As it is now, you have to do a Save As... if you want to attain backwards file compatibility, which is stupid. If Photoshop can have a compatibility setting, so can Flash. Saving anything in the native format is an unnecessary lock-in.
More to come..
Posted by Lee Clontz at September 19, 2005 3:50 PM