What's New in Flash Professional 8
Mike Downey
www.markme.com/md
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Created:
8 August 2005
User Level:
Intermediate, Advanced
"I haven't been this excited about a new release of Flash since Flash 4." Those were the words of Grant Skinner, a longtime Flash developer who is among the best in the world. Grant told me this after I ran into him in front of our San Francisco office. He had been part of a small group of people advising Macromedia on very early builds of Flash Professional 8, codenamed "8ball," and Flash Player 8, codenamed "Maelstrom."
When one of your top users tells you something like that, you know your team is on track to do something wonderful. This is the type of feedback that my team and I have been receiving for nearly a year now as we've worked very hard to complete and ship the next generation of Flash.
I've been at Macromedia for five years and on the Flash team for the past year and a half. I became a Flash product manager just as the team was wrapping up development on "Ellipsis," the 7.2 updater for Flash MX 2004. Ellipsis was a turning point for the MX 2004 release of Flash because it showed our customers that we were completely committed to improving performance and quality for them, no matter what the cost. Following the well-received release of Ellipsis, the team anxiously carried our enthusiasm and commitment to quality into building 8ball and Maelstrom.
Having been an avid user of Flash since I ordered my first copy of Flash 2, I can say with confidence that I too have not been this excited about a new release of Flash since Version 4. Flash 4 changed everything for me; it gave me new capabilities that allowed me to do things on the web that I had never been able to do before. I think this new release will once again change the landscape of the web.
You Spoke, We Listened
In his keynote speech at FlashForward San Francisco 2005, Macromedia Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch commented that this release of Flash was "the most customer-driven release in the history of the company." This is the result of a new product development process adopted by Macromedia about six months before we started work on the new version of Flash. The process required each product team to visit about 40 different customers from all over the world that represent each segment and region of the product's customer base. The Flash team met with independent developers, educators, corporate and enterprise teams, mobile developers, and a variety of other customer segments.
Through our many meetings with customers and a rigid process of rapid prototyping and feature validation, we came up with four primary themes to focus our feature development on throughout the development cycle.
Expressiveness
The first of these was perhaps the most ambitious in the history of Flash, a theme that we called "expressiveness." This theme was the result of consistent feedback from our customers that they wanted groundbreaking new graphical capabilities from us.
To enable this, the team did some heavy-duty work on the core graphics-rendering engine in Flash Player. The result was a revolutionary leap forward for Flash: precise control over pixels. Flash users have always had powerful control of vector shapes and animation, but never the ability to manipulate and create pixels dynamically. We referred to this as the "Image API" and quickly built a powerful library of effects on top of this. These effects included Drop Shadow, Blur, Glow, Bevel, and several others. These are the most widely used graphic effects in tools like Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop, and we brought them to Flash—but took them to the next level by making them render live in Flash Player 8.
The expressiveness theme also included a variety of other capabilities, such as support for blend modes, a new animation feature that gives animators advanced visual control over easing, enhanced stroke properties like caps and joins, and a variety of others.
Quality User Experiences
The second theme was "quality user experiences." This theme would focus on performance optimizations, workspace and workflow refinements, state-of-the-art rendering technologies, a new feature called Script Assist that greatly simplifies writing ActionScript in Flash, and a variety of features in Flash Player that provide better end-user experiences.
One of the most remarkable features from this category is a new performance optimization feature called bitmap caching. This feature addresses poor performance that results from having too many vector objects on screen at the same time. Since Flash Player needs to recalculate each vector over and over again for every frame of the Flash application, the more objects there are, the slower the performance gets. This feature provides the ability to have Flash Player render the vector shape and then instantly convert the vectors to pixels and cache the content as a bitmap. The vector data is still maintained with the object so it can be uncached at any time to recalculate the vector.
Another breakthrough feature from this category is the new, advanced font rendering engine in Flash Player 8 called FlashType. This engine provides advanced anti-aliasing rendering and control that results in greatly improved text quality in Flash.
Innovations in Video
Our third development theme focused on continuing the momentum of Flash Video by taking both runtime capabilities as well as developer workflows to the next level. We called this theme "innovations in video."
We started by adding a new video codec to Flash that provides superior quality and great performance at small file sizes. Along with this new codec we added support for an 8-bit alpha channel during playback, allowing for a whole new dimension of web interactivity and effects.
In addition to the new runtime, we spent a great deal of time studying how users discover and use video within the Flash authoring tool. We had a big opportunity to greatly simplify and streamline video use in Flash, so we built a new video import workflow that consolidates all uses of video in Flash into a single workflow. We also built a brand-new video player component that is optimized for video developers. It is smaller than our old component and can be easily skinned by both designers and developers.
Mobile Authoring
Finally, given the increasing popularity of mobile devices, particularly in markets like Japan and Europe, we decided that our fourth theme should focus on "improved mobile authoring."
This next generation of mobile authoring represents a quantum leap compared to what was available previously in Flash.
We added a new emulator that draws on an actual version of the Flash Lite player running on the desktop, providing a much better representation of how users will actually experience content on a mobile device.
Even better, we now emulate on a device level. This means that developers can choose from almost 100 skins to match the devices they are targeting. The emulator configures the Flash Lite player to account for differences in the way the player is actually installed on each individual handset. Items that are specific to individual devices, such as screen size, available memory, navigation models, and button configurations, will be simulated exactly as they work on the nearly 100 phones supported. Overall, this means the test environment within authoring is much more representative of the actual device experience. In order to keep up to date with the changing mobile landscape, we provided the ability to add devices periodically as new phones become available.
Finally, a number of users commented on the challenges of switching back to Flash 4–level ActionScript for developing mobile content. For understanding the syntax used by Flash Lite 1.1 better, the new Script Assist feature provides guidance on supported syntax and does most of the work for you. These improvements add up to a far better development experience for mobile content developers new to Flash Lite.
Customer Reactions
We have showed our expressiveness, quality user experiences, innovations in video, and mobile authoring feature sets to customers and press over recent weeks. Each time we do so, audiences are simply blown away. Beta users are enthusiastic about how Flash Professional 8 enables them to do things with this release that they could never do before in Flash.
In the spirit of this release, and in going back to our core customers, I thought it would be appropriate to end with a quote from one of our beta users:
"8ball makes Flash exciting again! Alpha transparency in video, combined with the new expressiveness features, are going to result in a renaissance that will fundamentally alter the aesthetic of the Internet as we know it. This shift will be as important as the one the world experienced when Flash first allowed designers to break free of the chains of HTML."
The Flash team has worked incredibly hard on this version of Flash and is tremendously proud to read comments like this one. We hope you'll agree, and we can't wait to see what you will do with it!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the author
Mike has been immersed in web technologies since the early days of Macromedia Flash. Since joining Macromedia he has strived to share this passion with customers all over the world. As an experienced instructor, presenter, and developer, Mike has met with thousands of Macromedia's talented customers through field and online live seminars, on demand seminars, conferences, and trade shows. The most exciting part of his job is the constant reminder of the opportunity for innovation and effectiveness on the web. With all of the cutting-edge, emotional, thought-provoking work being developed with Macromedia software every day, Mike consistently reminds people that this is only the beginning.
Mike maintains a weblog devoted to Flash-related topics at www.markme.com/md.
Mike Downey
www.markme.com/md
Send feedback
Get an e-mail update of new articles
Created:
8 August 2005
User Level:
Intermediate, Advanced
"I haven't been this excited about a new release of Flash since Flash 4." Those were the words of Grant Skinner, a longtime Flash developer who is among the best in the world. Grant told me this after I ran into him in front of our San Francisco office. He had been part of a small group of people advising Macromedia on very early builds of Flash Professional 8, codenamed "8ball," and Flash Player 8, codenamed "Maelstrom."
When one of your top users tells you something like that, you know your team is on track to do something wonderful. This is the type of feedback that my team and I have been receiving for nearly a year now as we've worked very hard to complete and ship the next generation of Flash.
I've been at Macromedia for five years and on the Flash team for the past year and a half. I became a Flash product manager just as the team was wrapping up development on "Ellipsis," the 7.2 updater for Flash MX 2004. Ellipsis was a turning point for the MX 2004 release of Flash because it showed our customers that we were completely committed to improving performance and quality for them, no matter what the cost. Following the well-received release of Ellipsis, the team anxiously carried our enthusiasm and commitment to quality into building 8ball and Maelstrom.
Having been an avid user of Flash since I ordered my first copy of Flash 2, I can say with confidence that I too have not been this excited about a new release of Flash since Version 4. Flash 4 changed everything for me; it gave me new capabilities that allowed me to do things on the web that I had never been able to do before. I think this new release will once again change the landscape of the web.
You Spoke, We Listened
In his keynote speech at FlashForward San Francisco 2005, Macromedia Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch commented that this release of Flash was "the most customer-driven release in the history of the company." This is the result of a new product development process adopted by Macromedia about six months before we started work on the new version of Flash. The process required each product team to visit about 40 different customers from all over the world that represent each segment and region of the product's customer base. The Flash team met with independent developers, educators, corporate and enterprise teams, mobile developers, and a variety of other customer segments.
Through our many meetings with customers and a rigid process of rapid prototyping and feature validation, we came up with four primary themes to focus our feature development on throughout the development cycle.
Expressiveness
The first of these was perhaps the most ambitious in the history of Flash, a theme that we called "expressiveness." This theme was the result of consistent feedback from our customers that they wanted groundbreaking new graphical capabilities from us.
To enable this, the team did some heavy-duty work on the core graphics-rendering engine in Flash Player. The result was a revolutionary leap forward for Flash: precise control over pixels. Flash users have always had powerful control of vector shapes and animation, but never the ability to manipulate and create pixels dynamically. We referred to this as the "Image API" and quickly built a powerful library of effects on top of this. These effects included Drop Shadow, Blur, Glow, Bevel, and several others. These are the most widely used graphic effects in tools like Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop, and we brought them to Flash—but took them to the next level by making them render live in Flash Player 8.
The expressiveness theme also included a variety of other capabilities, such as support for blend modes, a new animation feature that gives animators advanced visual control over easing, enhanced stroke properties like caps and joins, and a variety of others.
Quality User Experiences
The second theme was "quality user experiences." This theme would focus on performance optimizations, workspace and workflow refinements, state-of-the-art rendering technologies, a new feature called Script Assist that greatly simplifies writing ActionScript in Flash, and a variety of features in Flash Player that provide better end-user experiences.
One of the most remarkable features from this category is a new performance optimization feature called bitmap caching. This feature addresses poor performance that results from having too many vector objects on screen at the same time. Since Flash Player needs to recalculate each vector over and over again for every frame of the Flash application, the more objects there are, the slower the performance gets. This feature provides the ability to have Flash Player render the vector shape and then instantly convert the vectors to pixels and cache the content as a bitmap. The vector data is still maintained with the object so it can be uncached at any time to recalculate the vector.
Another breakthrough feature from this category is the new, advanced font rendering engine in Flash Player 8 called FlashType. This engine provides advanced anti-aliasing rendering and control that results in greatly improved text quality in Flash.
Innovations in Video
Our third development theme focused on continuing the momentum of Flash Video by taking both runtime capabilities as well as developer workflows to the next level. We called this theme "innovations in video."
We started by adding a new video codec to Flash that provides superior quality and great performance at small file sizes. Along with this new codec we added support for an 8-bit alpha channel during playback, allowing for a whole new dimension of web interactivity and effects.
In addition to the new runtime, we spent a great deal of time studying how users discover and use video within the Flash authoring tool. We had a big opportunity to greatly simplify and streamline video use in Flash, so we built a new video import workflow that consolidates all uses of video in Flash into a single workflow. We also built a brand-new video player component that is optimized for video developers. It is smaller than our old component and can be easily skinned by both designers and developers.
Mobile Authoring
Finally, given the increasing popularity of mobile devices, particularly in markets like Japan and Europe, we decided that our fourth theme should focus on "improved mobile authoring."
This next generation of mobile authoring represents a quantum leap compared to what was available previously in Flash.
We added a new emulator that draws on an actual version of the Flash Lite player running on the desktop, providing a much better representation of how users will actually experience content on a mobile device.
Even better, we now emulate on a device level. This means that developers can choose from almost 100 skins to match the devices they are targeting. The emulator configures the Flash Lite player to account for differences in the way the player is actually installed on each individual handset. Items that are specific to individual devices, such as screen size, available memory, navigation models, and button configurations, will be simulated exactly as they work on the nearly 100 phones supported. Overall, this means the test environment within authoring is much more representative of the actual device experience. In order to keep up to date with the changing mobile landscape, we provided the ability to add devices periodically as new phones become available.
Finally, a number of users commented on the challenges of switching back to Flash 4–level ActionScript for developing mobile content. For understanding the syntax used by Flash Lite 1.1 better, the new Script Assist feature provides guidance on supported syntax and does most of the work for you. These improvements add up to a far better development experience for mobile content developers new to Flash Lite.
Customer Reactions
We have showed our expressiveness, quality user experiences, innovations in video, and mobile authoring feature sets to customers and press over recent weeks. Each time we do so, audiences are simply blown away. Beta users are enthusiastic about how Flash Professional 8 enables them to do things with this release that they could never do before in Flash.
In the spirit of this release, and in going back to our core customers, I thought it would be appropriate to end with a quote from one of our beta users:
"8ball makes Flash exciting again! Alpha transparency in video, combined with the new expressiveness features, are going to result in a renaissance that will fundamentally alter the aesthetic of the Internet as we know it. This shift will be as important as the one the world experienced when Flash first allowed designers to break free of the chains of HTML."
The Flash team has worked incredibly hard on this version of Flash and is tremendously proud to read comments like this one. We hope you'll agree, and we can't wait to see what you will do with it!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the author
Mike has been immersed in web technologies since the early days of Macromedia Flash. Since joining Macromedia he has strived to share this passion with customers all over the world. As an experienced instructor, presenter, and developer, Mike has met with thousands of Macromedia's talented customers through field and online live seminars, on demand seminars, conferences, and trade shows. The most exciting part of his job is the constant reminder of the opportunity for innovation and effectiveness on the web. With all of the cutting-edge, emotional, thought-provoking work being developed with Macromedia software every day, Mike consistently reminds people that this is only the beginning.
Mike maintains a weblog devoted to Flash-related topics at www.markme.com/md.
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