Anyone feel that bittersweet excitement.

[Mctittles]

Ok, sorry I'm in a writing mood today as I think about the new possibilities Flash 8 will bring to the table. There's part of me...the part that is thinking of the personal projects I can work on, namely games and really cool web-sites that is jumping up and down in excitement with the awesome effects and animations I'm going to be able to create with the new Flash. Serious excitement here!
Then there is the other part of me that is scared and saddened by the ease at which some things are done. Mainly because there are some effects I have made before that even experienced flash developers will look at and ask "How did you do that?". Other fine tuned projects I have worked on that do things never before seen on the web before and have spent many sleepless nights tinkering and questioning until I got it to work and not completely lag a machine. Then this update comes around and from what it seems, it's going to deem a lot of my hard work useless. Drop shadows built in, instead of having to program a seperate graphic that moves x/y in relation to the object it's shadowing. Blur effects that won't have to be created using 2,3 or 4 existing graphics to do. Fire effects that don't require complex masking of existing images. Smoke, water and others that although some are possible before 8, it took a programmer with years of experience to pull it off just right. So all said I am excited about the new release, but at the same time saddened to see all my hard work on the prior version becoming obsolete.

[pellepiano]

But maybe the rendering of the new effects are slower than the old methods =)

[Mctittles]

Good point. I was actually wondering what kind of processor load this would take too.
I remember my first taste of Adobe Photoshop back on some couple hundred Mhz machine and how I would pick a filter of some sort then wait for the loading bar to go across the screen before I could see it. Then I moved on to a faster machine and did some work in Adobe Premier where you could apply some Photoshop type effects to a movie timeline and once again waiting for a loading bar to go across before the effect could be applied to all frames. So now, we have a program that can apply effects to an animation in real time. Just how much more processor will that take than say fading from a static blurred image to a clear one?