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Sneaks from The Beach

During Flash on The Beach, Adobe have sneaked several new features from the upcoming versions and this article sums up the best bits.

by Jens C. Brynildsen The Town Hall meetings are often a great source for news and a great way to get answers directly from the source. These sessions is set up with Adobe employees seated on stage and an open microphone. Anyone can ask whatever is on their mind. For this session, Justin Everett Church, Marc Anders, X and X was on stage, while Mike Downey staged the event and picked who got to ask questions.

Flash 9 sneaks
During yesterdays keynote, Mike Downey showed of the new Illustrator import tool and also told that the vector tools in Flash will now work just as they do in Illustrator. Adobe is very much aware that the code editor in Flash isn't exactly fully fledged and has competitors and they want it this way. Sepy, FlashDevelop and Scite are all great alternatives and Adobe won't do very much with the internal editor. They will do a couple things to it like code collapse and jumping straight to errors from the debug panel. There will also be a way to associate Actionscript classes with FLA files.

Video
Mike Downey said that Adobe has this Shared Encoding Platform and Flash will probably fit well in here. Our guess is that this will probably replace the standalone encoder that now comes with Flash 8 Professional. The internal video import will get de-interlacing and support for importing and exporting cue-points.

Text handling
One thing that has annoyed me a long time is the limitations of the Flash text fields, so I raised my hand towards the end of the session to ask about that. When I asked this question, Mike Downey said "We almost got through a Town Hall meeting without someone asking about text and HTML". I guess it's not just me finding textformat a limitation. X answered my question and said that the next version of the player would support images inside text with padding and bidirectional text. When I expanded on my question to ask if we could have the textfields support Valid HTML so that lists would have UL elements and not use Font tags with odd sizes, he said "We'll look into that". If we got this, we could maybe turn Flashmagazine back into Flash again and drop the current HTML format? (we get this question often...)

Linux
One of the other questions were about Linux. Adobe is generally committed to Linux for playback, but they are unsure about the market for Flex Builder on Linux. Some of the bits are there already such as Eclipse and the SDK compiler, but things such as the Design Mode would require a lot work that must be justified in some way. They did however promise that in the future, the Linux version won't be months behind the others such as it has been the latest years. They won't promise a simultaneous release with Mac and PC versions because of the complexity of developing for Linux, but the next version should be weeks behind rather than months.

Even more sneaks
Mike Chambers and Mike Downey came to Brighton from Belgium and Koen has an extensive writeup of what was sneaked here including UI changes, Quicktime export, the new debugger and JSAPI enhancements. He also has a good article on the new Apollo features.

On Flickr, you can find a large selection of images from the event by searching for "FOTB". Here's Marc Thiele's collection.

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (December 05th 2006)