RE: FN-FORUM Flash 5

date posted 1st September 2000 22:16

Morgan,


"Has anyone out there been able to get their hands on a Beta of Macromedia's
Flash 5.0, and if so what is it like."

Not on the beta, no but I bought the final version and I must say that it's
a great buy, money very well spent.
Flash5 leaves Flash4 way behind.

"I have heard they are unifying thier UI across the range of products, which
should make it easier."

Yes, that's true. It even motivated a ridiculous patent infringement from
Adobe.
It seems that Adobe has been studying Microsoft tactics 101 and decided to
start applying them ;).

"What new tools and commands are there in this new release? I have heard
there is bezier curve tools *CHEER AT BL**DY LONG LAST!* is this true? Also
what new 'gizmos' do they have in the product."

Well the 'What's New' list is loooong...
Some bits from the 'What's new' section of the help files :

"Creating artwork
Enhanced colour controls, including the Mixer panel, Fill and Stroke panels,
Swatches panel, and Fill and Stroke toolbox controls, provide expanded
capabilities for painting artwork...."

"New selection highlights make it easy to identify selected lines, fills,
and groups as well as the colour of selected objects....."

"Draggable guides aid you in arranging objects on the Stage...."

"The Pen tool lets you create precise paths; it works like the Pen tool in
Macromedia FreeHand or Macromedia Fireworks....."
"Workflow
New panels for working with colour, type, actions, frames, instances, and
entire movies make it easy to access options for modifying elements in Flash
movies...."

"Shared libraries let you link to library items as external assets. You can
create font symbols to include in shared libraries, as well as buttons,
graphics, movie clips, and sounds...."

"The Macromedia Dashboard provides a way for you to easily keep up with the
latest information on using Flash...."

"Custom shortcut keys allow you to create your own shortcuts for Flash
commands and functions to customize your workflow...."

"Support for importing MP3 sound files lets you import sounds into Flash
that are already compressed. This reduces the time required for publishing
and exporting a movie with sound, since you don't have to compress the
sounds during export. Using compressed sounds reduces the file size of
completed movies and reduces memory requirements during authoring....."

"Interactivity
Expanded ActionScript provides greatly enhanced capabilities for creating
interactivity in Flash using ActionScript....."

"The Movie Explorer lets you easily view the complete contents of the
current movie and view the Properties panel for a selected item to modify
it....."

"The Print action lets you assign actions for printing Flash movie frames
from the Flash Player as vector or bitmap graphics......."
----End Quotes----

With Flash5 ActionScript was transformed. First of all it's based on the
ECMA-262 specification, so most of your Javascript routines can just be cut
and pasted into
Flash5...
Lot's of Math object support, Date object support and,... drum roll
please..., XML object support including, ... crescendo please..., XML
sockets support.
This is one of those tools you'll quickly find you can't live without.

.redstar.