Macromedia Flash Professional 8 is expected to ship in September.
This is definitely one of the most waited releases, claiming to improve a few things that were keeping Flash from being perfect: performance and cool real time effects.
I sure did hope that they would improve the IDE for writing ActionScript ’cause it was not even close to being a serios IDE but by watching the feature tour, it seems that a key phrase is “the scrips assistant […] empowers designers to add interactivity to content”. I guess this is some kind of marketing positioning strategy bullshit. Maybe in Flash9 they’ll improve the IDE too? 🙂
Their marketing strategy mainly focuses on video integration and mobile devices (phones) wich are cool features no so interesting for the kind of developing i’m doing, but probably interesting from a bussiness point of view (money, money, money). 🙂
For a list of demos for new features (built by enthusiasts – because the Flash8 development environment has not yet been released), click here.