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Posted by Travis Newbury on 09/18/05 15:34
Well we upgraded to Flash 8 and it is truly a welcome upgrade. A few of
the things I really liked:
1: Support for dynamic displaying of progressive jpgs, png, gif, and of
course swf and jpg. This will keep the swf size even smaller.
2: File uploading and downloading using the host OS.
3: The parent application can now communicate directly with the swf
rather than through fsCommand.
4: The new video stand along encoder (though I wish it supported a camera)
5: Video alpha channel support (now we can get really fancy)
6: Skinable Video component.
7: Support for photoshop filters (on Text, Movie clips and buttons)
8: You can now treat your vector graphics as objects (like Illustrator
or freehand)
Things I don't like:
1: They brought back the "actionscript helper". I think this is a bad
thing because it facilitates not learning actionscript.
2: They need more codex support !!
3: The development interface still blows.
4: They need to support only strongly typed variables.
Flash 8 is a welcome upgrade. It allows an swf to have a little more
communication with the host computer supporting host level file
uploading and downloading. The new support for communication between the
host application and the flash is very welcome indeed. This allows for a
very easy integration of flash with a browser or with a executable
application. And the video is better than ever (though thy need to go
further). Now with the alpha channel support you have the ability to
blend your video with other objects. Plan on seeing for pretty awesome
video integration into SWFs.
It was a little pricey ($300) for the upgrade. But the functionality
was worth it. Macromedia has made the jump from a cute little animation
thing to a very nice application development tool that lets you design
application that work across multiple platforms with a single code
source (kinda of what Java would have liked to do). Creating an
application that looks and functions identically on any OS desktop,
browser, PDA, or cellphone is now a reality.
--
-=tn=-
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