The lesser-known new features of Flash Professional 8

[chochweets]

I can hardly wait....

The lesser-known new features of Flash Professional 8 (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/md/archives/2005/08/the_lesser-know.cfm)

[toulouse2k]

I'm as excited by the lesser-known as the well-documented upgrades. There are some really welcome changes here.

[Nemesis Enforcer]

Flash 8's gonna be so WHACK.











Just kidding! I can't wait either :) This one may be a keeper! Lovin' the custom 'Undo' Features.

[phantomflanflinger]

MX 2004 was the Worst Episode Ever™ and I uninstalled it after two weeks and have been using MX ever since.

But - all the improvements in his blog all show that Macromedia listen, and Normal mode 2.0 shows that they even admit when they've made a mistake. I WILL be upgrading!

[lesli_felix]

WOW! they've finally decided to keep the library open. I've been waiting since version 4 for that one.

And the improved radial gradient, which I already have use for.

[Nialsh]

The option to render your vectors as bitmaps will be AWESOME. I just hope they integrate that into the AS drawing methods so that things don't always have to run slow when you've got lots of stationary lines on the screen.

[FlashGuru]

Yup, as the drawing api draws inside a movie clip, Bitmap Caching works with the drawing api aswell. Infact it works with anything inside a movie clip.

[lesli_felix]

Yup, as the drawing api draws inside a movie clip, Bitmap Caching works with the drawing api aswell. Infact it works with anything inside a movie clip.

..as long as no changes are made to the movieclip you've bitmapcached. I think you're limited to changing the xy coords. Presumably you're free to use the drawing api as much as you like, then set the bitmap to cache when you're done.

I tried playing around with it myself and you have to be a bit careful, as non-supported transformation can call the bitmap to keep recaching and actually make it slower.

[chochweets]

(o)~~(o)

[Mctittles]

Some of the workspace enhancements like how the library windows will be handled does sound much better than multiple library chunks to open/close. However I'm a little scared with all the window docking I see in the examples. It's getting near as messy as Dreamweaver looks on default setup. I'm not a big fan of docking everything unless you can have hairline thick tabs on the docked windows. Looking at these examples they still seem to use the one inch thick borders on windows, and in a video I watched of Flash 8 in action the workspace became the size of a stamp! I wish they would take a more minimal approach to how windows are organized, because I like to see my workspace.

[cancerinform]

It's a minor point but does anybody know anything about changes in some components?

Recently i wanted to use the menu component like the combobox but the methods are quite inferior so I could not use it.

[chochweets]

Improved performance
Performance of Flash Player has been increased in graphics rendering, text scrolling, component rendering, ActionScript execution, and memory management. Bitmap surfaces have been added to accelerate rendering through caching, resulting in a major performance boost in the display of complex graphical information.

[cancerinform]

Are you working for Macromedia? You sound like that, just kidding :D

[chochweets]

Have you allowed the creation of COM objects from Actionscript?
Could I select a sequence of frames and convert to movieClip?
Does the context menu over-riding work better now? I remember that it did not work when a context menu was applied to a movie clip in a movie clip.
How about bitmap transparency? I currently do the transparency in Fireworks.
Could I write a file without going through a server script?
Could I write text along a path? I currently do that in Freehand.
It's nice to see that png's may now be loaded from script!

[Wok]

Component development is apparently handled by the Flex team, so no developments here as yet.