Introduction: What's New in Flash 8

With the latest Flash Player install statistics showing there’s already over a 50% penetration rate for Flash Player 8, this is a good time to start to look at how you can use some powerful new features in your projects.

In this article we’ll look at changes in the Flash IDE for version 8 and some of the things that make Flash 8 a must-have upgrade.

1. Basic or Pro?

As was done for Flash MX 2004, this latest release of Flash is available in two flavours: Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8. However, unlike with the previous release this time they’ve made the distinction between the two packages much clearer.

If you’re doing only basic animation work with Flash you might consider using Flash Basic 8 as it’s a really down to basics version of the Flash IDE. Anyone else will no doubt want to have Flash Professional 8 as that gives you access to most of the features that make Flash 8 worth the upgrade (filters, blend modes, authoring for mobile devices, video alpha channel support, …)

Most features we’ll look at here are part of Flash Professional 8, but if you’re in doubt there’s a comparison chart available to help you out:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/basic/

2. Changes in the Flash IDE

Flash MX 2004 was a huge update for developers with the introduction of ActionScript 2.0 and other goodies. They’ve now recognized that Flash designers were feeling a bit left behind and have made a huge effort to make some changes inside the IDE to make it more usable for creative projects and animation work.

Tabbed panels

If you open up Flash 8 for the first time, what you’ll most likely notice first is the introduction of tabbed panels. This is no doubt a much nicer way to organize the workspace of the Flash IDE.

You can now easily group different panels together, detach them from panel groups etc.

Library panel

The Library panel is now a lot more usable, you don’t need to have multiple instances open for each of your FLA’s. There’s now a very handy combobox that lists all your opened FLA’s and you can copy and paste between them.

While switching between your opened FLA’s the Library panel will automatically switch to the currently active document but there’s also a feature to ‘pin’ the Library panel to the contents of one particular FLA, so you can switch to another document and easily drag ‘n drop assets to the Stage.

Object drawing

A new feature called object drawing refers to the ability to draw shapes on Stage that don’t cut into each other. This was well-known behaviour in previous Flash versions and could also be used to create some interesting effects.

Now, if you want to prevent a shape from being affect by another shape drawn on top of it you can switch on the object drawing mode. This will show a rectangle around your shape as if its grouped or converted to a movie clip, but don’t be fooled its still just a shape that you can manipulate on the Stage.

Stroke enhancements

If you’re familiar with drawing shapes in Flash you’ve probably come across the problem where you can’t have straight corners on strokes, they were always rounded at the end.

This has changed in Flash 8 and you can now draw lines with non-rounded edges and can choose between miter, round and bevel for the shape corners.

Color panel

The color panel also has a couple of small changes that make it much more usable. First of all you can now see the hexadecimal value of the colour you’ve chosen or set the colour by its hexadecimal value.

One other important change is the ability to set the alpha transparency of a colour from within the panel. This is really useful as before you could only do that by opening up the color mixer panel which means quite a few more clicks.

Gradient Transform tool

There is a lot more support for making changes to gradients you’ve applied. You can now easily change the shape, radius and rotation of a gradient fill using this tool. This is very useful for animating subtle lighting effects.

Another new feature related to gradients is the ability to apply them to strokes.

Custom Easing panel

A great new tool for doing animation work is the custom easing panel. When you’ve created a motion tween you can now click the edit button in the properties panel to open up the custom easing panel.

The panel then allows you to manipulate the animation easing curve which gives you much more control. Not only can you edit the easing, you can use the same for the position, rotation, scale, color and filters for the animated object.

Filters

One of the biggest new features in Flash 8 is the addition of filters, these allow you to easily create dropdown shadows, blur, glow and bevel effects. Some less obvious filters like gradient glows, gradient bevels and color adjustments are also supported.

The major advantage with these filters is that, aside from the fact that you don’t have to create them yourself, they are included in the Flash Player so they won’t add additional file size to your final SWF file.

The filters feature also allows you to save presets and apply them on other items throughout your project. You can also stack filters on top of each other for more advanced effects.

You can also apply filters using ActionScript, so its not a Flash IDE only feature. 

Blend modes

If you’re familiar with software like Photoshop you no doubt know about the concept of blend modes which allows you to blend layers into eachother.

Flash now also has this feature and supports the following blend modes: layer, darken, multiply, lighten, screen, overlay, hard light, add, subtract, difference, invert, alpha and erase.

Just as with filters, blend modes are also handled by the Flash Player so they can be applied at runtime and changed when needed to create some stunning effects. 

Script Assist

Normal mode is back! If you’ve missed it in Flash MX 2004, you are now able to use an advanced script assist feature which will guide you through creating ActionScript code in a really easy to use interface.  

Meta data

The document properties dialog of your FLA now has a title and description field which specifies meta data for your SWF. There are API’s available which an increasing number of search engines are beginning to implement so this will allow your Flash content to be indexed and show up in search engine results.

Mobile devices

Developing Flash applications for mobile devices has never been easier. Flash 8 now comes with an emulator so you can test your application with any mobile device that has support for the Flash player.

The emulator allows you to choose what mobile devices you want to develop for and then shows you the Flash movie running inside the skin of those devices. You can use all the buttons and digits in the emulator to see how things react on each different mobile device.

Any time the list of supported devices is updated you’ll be able to download it in the Flash IDE and use the emulator with the new devices.  

3. Changes to the Flash Player

There are also quite a few changes that refer more to Flash Player 8, we’ll look at those next.

Runtime image support

Flash Player 8 now allows you to load in GIF (non-animated) files as well as PNG files with full alpha support. In the past you could only load in non-progressive JPEG files but now that now progressive files are also supported.

Especially the runtime PNG support is incredibly useful to have as it allows you to use its alpha transparency to overlay it nicely with other Flash content.

Bitmap caching

The bitmap caching feature is one of the secrets behind the huge performance improvements of the Flash Player 8.

What happens when you turn on bitmap caching on a movie clip is, the Flash Player renders it as a bitmap. Bitmaps are static image files and don’t need to be calculated on every frame so things moving around the screen will require much less processing power which results in a higher frame rate.

Bitmap API                      

Flash 8 can now give you pixel-level control of your images. This is absolutely huge; while it does require a bit of understanding of transformation matrices you can create some amazing image effects using the Bitmap API.

Its not only useful for creating image effects but also allows you to easily duplicate images or even take a screenshot of your SWF at runtime, read in the bits and have it persisted to an image file using a server-side script. The possibilities are nearly endless.

FileReference upload/download

Another feature that has been on the wishlist of many for years now is the ability to upload and download files using the Flash Player. Before the only way to do it was using some rather complex JavaScript workarounds and popup windows but now finally the Flash Player supports it through the FileReference class.

You can have the Flash Player trigger a file dialog and stream the file to a server-side script which then stores it on the server FileSystem where you can read it in and get information. For security reasons you do need to go via the server and Flash won’t read in the file right away.

The download feature allows you to specify a file for download and it will trigger the download prompt.

ExternalInterface

The ExternalInterface class is the latest solution to FSCommands, it allows you to communicate with the container of your SWF. In most cases that is a browser running an HTML window, but it could also for example be a C# application that has an embedded SWF.

It’s a very powerful feature and allows integration between different technologies such as Flash and AJAX possible.

Video alpha channel support

Video alpha support is also widely reported as one of the key new features in Flash 8. Its no doubt one of the biggest selling points for deploying something using the Flash Player. There are simply no other video solutions for the web that support transparent and semi-transparent video in a light-weight plug-in.

They’ve also licensed a wonderful new codec which produces stunning results and has much better video quality and less artefacts for the same FLV file size.

 

4. Conclusion

This article has covered the most important new features in Flash 8 and Flash Player 8 and should get you excited of all the possibilities it offers you.

If you haven’t done so already, download the Flash 8 trial and play around with it. I’m sure you’ll find a dozen more small changes that make an upgrade more than worthwhile.