New Features of Flash Professional 8

Expressiveness

Flash includes many features designed specifically to enable greater expressiveness in the look and feel of your finished projects.

Gradient enhancements - New controls let you apply complex gradients to objects on the Stage. You can add up to 15 colors to a gradient, precisely control the location of the gradient focal point, and apply other parameters to the gradient. The workflow for applying gradients has also been simplified

Adjustable gradient focal point - The Fill Transform tool now includes an editable focal point that lets you position the focal point (center) of a gradient fill applied to an object.

Object Drawing model - You can now create shapes directly on the Stage that will not interfere with other overlapping shapes. Previously in Flash, all shapes on the same layer of the Stage could affect the outlines of other shapes that they overlapped. When you create a shape with the new Object Drawing model, the shape does not cause changes to other shapes that exist underneath the new shape.

Rectangle and Oval Tool Settings dialog box - The new Rectangle and Oval Tool Settings dialog box lets you specify the width and height of ovals and rectangles, as well as the corner radius of rectangles so that you can create rounded-corner rectangles. To activate the dialog box, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Macintosh) to select the Oval and Rectangle drawing tools on the Stage. When you click OK to verify your settings, Flash draws an appropriately sized oval or rectangle where you clicked the Stage.

Enhanced strokes - Joins and caps on strokes are now drawn more cleanly and precisely. A join is the place where two strokes come together. A cap is the end point of a stroke that does not join with another stroke. In addition, the maximum size of a stroke has been increased from 10 to 200 pixels, and you can now color strokes using a gradient fill.

New curve algorithm - The Pencil tool and Brush tool now let you select the degree of smoothing to apply to curves that you draw with those tools. By increasing the amount of smoothing, you can reduce the number of points used to calculate the curve, which results in smaller SWF files.

Text handles - A new, improved method for working with text includes text boxes that you can resize. You can more easily reposition text blocks with text handles

Improved Fireworks importer - The importer for Macromedia Fireworks PNG files now supports a greater number of the properties that you can apply to graphics in Fireworks. When you import Fireworks files into Flash, these graphics properties remain intact and editable in Flash. Among the properties available in Fireworks that you can now import into Flash are blend modes and filters (called effects in Fireworks).

Custom easing controls - New easing controls let you precisely choose how tweens that you apply in the Timeline affect the appearance of tweened objects on the Stage. A tween is the application of a change to an object over a period of time. Easing a tween controls when the changes to the object are applied. Custom easing lets you easily and precisely control these elements through an intuitive graph that provides independent control over the position, rotation, scale, color, and filters used in a motion tween.

Filters - Filters let you create more compelling designs by applying visual effects to movie clips and text. Filters are natively supported and rendered in real time by Flash Player 8. With these filters, you can make objects glow, add drop shadows, and apply many other effects and combinations of effects.

Blend modes - You can achieve a variety of compositing effects by using blend modes to change the way the image of one object on the Stage is combined with the images of any objects beneath it. Flash offers runtime control over blend modes, letting you composite graphical effects that are dynamic and can react to user interactivity.

Bitmap smoothing - Bitmap images now look much better on the Stage when severely enlarged or reduced. The appearance of these bitmaps in the Flash authoring tool and in Flash Player is now consistent.

Runtime bitmap caching - Runtime bitmap caching lets you optimize playback performance by specifying that a static movie clip (for example, a background image) or button symbol be cached as a bitmap at runtime. Caching a movie clip as a bitmap prevents Flash Player from having to continually redraw the image, providing a significant improvement in playback performance.