Sneak peek of Flash X - What’s on the Flash horizon?

It was a shocked Flashmagazine.com reporter that called home and told us about the preview of Flash X at the Flashforward conference in Amsterdam. The sneak preview of features that probably will be implemented in the next version of Flash was a surprise to all of the attendants of the conference.

NOVEMBER 2001, by Jens C. Brynildsen Remember: the things mentioned in this article might not make it into the final version. This was only a sneak peek, but it does give you some pretty good ideas on what is to come.

The above picture is from the presentation by Jeremy Allaire (CTO) and Kevin Lynch (CEO) of Macromedia.

The presentation showed a Flash version with a GUI that has been much improved (see page 4) with more dockable panels and some really neat Property Inspectors. These will be much like in DreamWeaver and you will be able to customize these and other GUI components within the program itself.

Layers may be sorted in folders and collapsed and moved around, The SmartClips are now even smarter and interacting with your authoring content. An example was made, making a textField and dragging a scrollbar SmartClip next to it. The Scrollbar snapped onto the textField and instantly worked on the Field letting the user scroll the contents of the field. This is still a SmartClip and you can easily edit it to suit your graphical needs. The only difference is that the SmartClips may interact with the contents itself. If you haven't looked into what SmartClips may offer in terms of speeding the development, drop by the Macromedia Exchange to read more.

Flash on devices
Flash on devices is the 'next big thing' for Macromedia. During the conference, they made available the complete SDK for developing Flash players for virtually any device. (SDK = Software Development Kit. All the needed source files needed to make such programs)


Jeremy Clark (Flash Product Manager) shows off the ShareAmp MP3 player running on a Nokia 9210.

Templates
Many authoring tools require the user to know quite a bit about how to use the program. For new users to Flash, the threshold may be rather high. Due to this, Macromedia are working on a template-system within Flash. These will let you author templates that will let almost anyone author in Flash. Parts of the file may be locked up and only certain fields may be edited and more.
Now, let's take a look at what Flash X looks like today...

Improved Help system
When Flash 5 was launched, everyone applauded the new help system. Compared to Flash 4 this was a major improvement. Still some things were left to be desired. One of the new features we may expect here is syqntax-lookup. Just highlight a word and the help function will go straight to this topic.

Faster XML
Branden J. Hall has authored a nifty little tool called XML Nitro that will speed up the XML parsing in Flash 5. Expect Flash X to boost several enhancements to the XML features. There's a free transform tool, live preview of clips inside the authoring environment, the Back-button is (hopefully) to work within the Browser, better debugging and script editing and much more.

Scripting
The ScriptEditor will be improved. Jeremy Allaire kept on talking about HomeSite every time the scripting was mentioned. Maybe we may expect something with this kind of quality? Macromedia is also working on support for emerging standards such as Microsoft's SOAP.


Macromedia's new "future" site, Compass Travel using lots of Flash and Cold Fusion integration.

Accessibility features
Both The European Union and the US have made laws concerning accessibility for viewing impaired readers. The next version of Flash will most probably support Screen Readers and a couple more features. Macromedia are also working on getting the search engines to index the content of Flash files, much like with PDF's. At least one major search engine are working on this at the moment.

Last but not least
Making a magazine like this may make you hate Flash from time to time. A long awaited feature may save the day for publishers: better control over text flow in text fields! We do not know what it'll be but something is happening about this...

 

 

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