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.
Don’t jump the gun re:video and mobile. Some of the new features are amazing and cool, like the bitmap/motion recognition for video and the straight-to-mobile development tools. Imagine playing a flash video game using the web cam as the only control device. Or navigating through a website using just a web cam, or even a phone cam. Try this:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2005/08/flash_8_webcam.html
And that’s only one example.
Ovidiu, I admit these are cool features and I didn’t say that Flash8 is a dissapointment or anything. I was just noticeing that the two things that they are selling right now are of no interest to me.
How often will you play games using your webcam as a control device? Be honest.
I was just hoping that they would have improved some things that bothered me as a game developer and as a user-oriented-applications developer. I wished for a cooler IDE for ActionScript, that’s all. I wished for better performance on mathematical calculations (sorting and all that stuff) but I don’t know if they got that too.
I am waiting for the development platform to come out and test it. Until than, I was just expressing some random thoughts.
Yeah, I agree on the IDE. I have been using Scite, Sepy… even Homesite for ever. I hear Eclipse has developed an AS2 plugin also. Anyway, I saw some screenshots of Studio 8, and no, no real improvements on that end. But there are other things that they fixed, like the docking of libraries, bitmap caching, improved forms etc. In terms of mathematical calculations, oh well. I may be wrong, but I know they are trying to keep the player as small as possible and that’s where I believe it conflicts with the performance. I once read an interview with the programmer who lead the development on AS, and he had to fight for every piece of extra functionality because the Macromedia guys where overconcerned with the size of the player.
“most waited release” :))