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Flash 8 Review

Living with Flash MX04 has been a pain, but here comes your new roommate - Flash 8. What is the new program like to work with? What is hot and not? Here's our review.

Let's start this review by pointing out that it is based on the Beta versions of Flash 8, not the final product. The Betas were fairly stable during our testing and we only had a couple crashes during our many days of testing. We assume these things are fixed before release this time around. We don't think Macromedia can afford to repeat all the troubles they went through getting Flash MX 2004 stable (enough). Flash 8 should actually have been out for quite some time now if the 1.5 year product cycle held, but the numerous bugs in the previous version kept engineers tied up. They never got FMX04 entirely right though. There still are times when my Actions-tab refuse to open and other panels refuse to do what they should when buttons are pressed and so on.

This time, things seem very different. A lot time for this release have been spent on looking at how real-life users interact with the IDE. Not only does it feel more solid, it also feels smarter. It does not do many of the funny things it used to do, say when you export a movie from a PC. If you clicked the restore-button after export, you got to see the SWF at full size without things rendered off stage. Problem was that when you did this, your FLA would also assume this "restored" position, messing up your stage layout and requiring some extra clicks to get it back right. No more. Several such annoyances are fixed by just understanding how we use Flash. Why did not anyone think of doing that before? I'm sure that over the years, I could have saved hours just from that single fix.

The most 'public release' ever

Never before have we known so much about an upcoming product from Macromedia before it is released. Throughout this year, Macromedia has teased us with snippets of information about 8ball. First was a video shot by Colin Moock from a Macromedia presentation in Asia. This video revealed most of the core, new features we were to see the rest of the year, and it took Macromedia slightly by surprise. Macromedians have since blogged the new features and there have been numerous articles about the sneaks at conferences around the world.

The last two weeks, Macromedia has done a public beta of the new Flash Player 8. It only took minutes before all the new commands were exposed and people started experimenting with the new features. By using the Flash 7 IDE or Open Source tools, you just write your file containing new Flash 8 commands and then toggle the "Version bit" in the resulting SWF file. The experiments produced are thrilling and shows a totally new expressiveness, exactly what Macromedia has hoped for. Now that Flash 8 is released, the help files will also be available. That'll speed things up seriously, so expect thrilling new Flash content in the days to come. Also expect those that took part in the Beta to start publishing their findings. These have been using the new features for quite some time already.

The new look'n'feel

At first look, the program may look the same. When you look closer, you'll be pleasantly surprised. When you start digging in the menus, you'll find many small and cool things such as the old way to open/close panels. The clumsy sorting introduced in MX04 is gone and the old layout is back.

Mike Chambers "Delete ASO" commands are now built in, the old undo system is back, there's a keyboard shortcut to clear the Output panel (Backspace), you can pin the current library so that it stays on screen, and ftp options are built straight into the IDE... There are so many of these nifty things all over the program. I just love the ability to finally being able to assign Workspace Layouts to custom keyboard shortcuts. This feature alone will save you days if you start using it to switch between coding/editing layouts, rather than moving panels around.

There's a new menu under Modify -> Combine Objects. The drawing tools all now have a new button called "Object Drawing". When this is pressed, every object drawn is grouped together, so that overlapping objects don't "destroy" each other. With this button pressed, drawing is just like in other vector drawing programs so it's easier to explain to someone with former experience. I can't count all the questions I've gotten about this while doing Basic Flash Training. This button will hopefully remedy this. The Combine Objects menu will let you do combinations and subtractions of any two grouped objects, pretty much like in Freehand or Illustrator.

The new features

The primary keyword for this release was Expressiveness. Way too many former Flashforward presenters have quit using Flash. They've turned to Java and proce55ing or other languages that offer more speed and creative possibilities. To stop this flow of creatives, Macromedia had to come up with something good this time, and they sure have!

Flash 8 does not have the extensive New Features List as former versions. With Flash 8, it's not so much about the number of new features, but rather how powerful they are. Just the possibility to draw pixels straight to the screen using commands such as setPixel and getpixel will open up to an incredible amount of new, innovative content. Add to that a set of "Realtime Filters" that can be applied to any object and if you dislike them, you can just program your own! Dropshadows, blur, bevels and glows are just the beginning. Expect to see any filter from Photoshop converted to a real-time Flash filter. Excessive use of these filters will be the new (Skip)Intro.

Not only can we use these new commands to draw bitmaps. We can also use them to process bitmap images. Clever coders have already started to make Eye-Toy alike games using webcams and Flash. Just imagine how much fun that can be? Couple it with a multi-user server and you could have the next big thing in web games.

The Bitmap caching feature alone will increase the redraw speed of both animations and applications if used correctly. The new player also benefits from the new bitmap features in other ways. Bitmaps rotated at runtime now looks better without adding significant CPU overhead. We guess that some new bitmap scaling routines exist in the new player, allowing for prettier rendering of bitmaps.

Another new feature that will be a favorite among designers is Blend modes. Normal, Layer, Darken, Multiply, Lighten, Screen, Overlay, Hard Light, Add, Subtract, Difference, Invert, Alpha and Erase can be applied to any object in the Flash IDE using the Properties-panel. Not only that, all these modes can also be programmed at runtime. Together with the new Custom Easing Controls, this will take Motion Graphics in Flash to an entirely new level.

Another feature that we all have wished for a long time is better looking text in the Flash Player. The new FlashType technology is the answer from Macromedia and it looks really good. Not only is the look of text changed. The text fields themselves have gotten a minor makeover, making them easier to resize and position. Yet another small, but neat feature and Flash 8 is filled with these.

There are more new features than this review can cover. Read New For Designers and New for Coders to find what is new in "your department"

Video

The video features that came with Flash MX and MX04 were very much "bare bones". The import and export options were seriously limited and you really had no choice but buying Sorenson Squeeze. In Flash 8, this is different. The new Import Video Wizard not only gives you full access to all the advanced settings (Size, quality, cropping and trimming), but it also embeds a complete video playback interface from a well stocked list. You can choose from simple layouts with just a Play button and a volume slider to fully featured video controls. No programming required. You just follow the steps in the Wizard and there's a good looking video player plus the encoded video file. Brilliant!

Another thing is the possibility to use video with Alpha channels. We're yet to see where this will take us, but I keep thinking about the clever use of blurring between video layers used in the latest game in the Myst-series. That gave a great illusion of depth and focus.

One of the new features you'll find under the advanced settings are cue points. Using these, you may trigger custom events at certain times while the video is playing. The events can also pass parameters, so setting up things such as captions and info-popups should become a much simpler task now. If you do a lot of captioning, keep in mind that there exists software made especially for Captioning Flash Video.

The Import Video Wizard can also be run as a separate program so that you can use it for batch processing. It does not support Watch-Folders so you will not be able to automate this fully, but who knows? Maybe a little JSFL will do the trick? Any takers?

We've had some great fun experimenting with the quality of the new video using source files from Microsoft's HDTV presentation. The clips here are already compressed to MS Video 9, but if you use the 1080 files to create lower resolution files, you'll have a great starting point. The quality vs bitrate we are able to squeeze out of Flash is truly impressive! Just take a look at the comparison between the old (Spark) and new codec (On2 VP6) below:

Click to display at 100%

We recompressed one of the files to both Sorenson Squeeze and the new On2 VP6 codec. The source file was 1440x1080 pixels and we scaled this down to 960x720 at 1500Kb/second. Both of the FLV files ended at about 5.5 Mb in size, but what a difference they showed in quality! As expected, the Sorenson codec did not look good at all. Almost all of the images in the Sorenson video showed serious amounts of "blocking", but the new VP6 file looked absolutely gorgeous! Video with this quality at 1500Kb/Sec? The other competitors in the online web video market are going to be really scared when they see how good this is. Flash 8 can actually stream HDTV quality video over a fat DSL. All we can say is: WOW! This is going to change the web! (maybe even TV?)

Mobile authoring

Macromedia really want to win the race for the mobile world. Included with Flash 8 is a new Device Emulator. The emulator requires you to select at least one or more phones from a list of supported devices. When you export to test your movie, that device comes up with your Flash movie, rather than the traditional export dialogue. From what we can see, this allows you to test keyboard input/navigation and the compiler outputs special debug information for the selected device. Practical indeed, but like a friend keep telling me, a device emulator that does not emulate the processing power of the device is of limited use. You will still have to do a lot of uploading to the phone for real-life testing.

Click to zoom

The list of devices will of course expand with time and Macromedia intend to publish updates for this separately.

Documentation

With this release, the help files are yet again reorganized. Don't get angry right away. The new way its organized actually works well, and better than in MX04. The documentation will most probably improve a lot in the weeks to come, as Flash 8 now is "feature complete". Much of it looks good already though. There are even illustrations for some entries. With MX04, most of the documentation arrived after the launch and the "Download Help Content"-button in the Help System worked in most cases, but not all. I hope they found those bugs, for I never got the Component Reference downloaded. It only displayed white, empty pages and I was forced to use the online version (LiveDocs).

A small prayer to Macromedia: please take the time to transition comments from the Flash 7.2 documentation, rather than just upload the new set of Flash 8 help files.

File upload

This is one I have wished for such a long time. Flash can replace HTML in so many cases, but especially for applications it just looks plain stupid to open a browser window just to upload a file. In the opened file, the user then clicks a Browse-button and that opens the Select File dialogue. Now our application has 3 open windows and that can easily confuse users.

With the new upload functions, the Browse-dialogue can be triggered directly from Flash using the simple command "browse();" That's it. Only two windows for novice users to relate to. There's plenty of events to listen for such as "onProgress" that will allow you to make progress bars and "onHTTPError", "onIOError" and "onSecurityError" to allow for error handling.

Some issues remain

Despite you already being madly in love with Flash 8, there are some problems that are not resolved with this release. When talking to Flash Product Manager Mike Downey during the Flash 8 press call, I told him about my worries. He said that "time was limited and they had to prioritize". While I understand this, I still wish some things were fixed for this release.

My primary concern is the Debugger. The Debugger is the single piece of the IDE that can tell a programmer where he made an error. When the debugger does not show the actual state of the Flash files running, it has little or no value. In both Flash MX and Flash MX04, the only surefire way to debug Flash is the List Variables, List Objects commands or tracing out objects manually. The Flash 8 debugger seems more stable, but we have been told that it has not been a focus for this release. To reproduce a faulty state in the debugger in Flash 8, make a new file, open Publish Settings for Flash and enable debugging. On frame 1 enter code to create an empty text field:

_root.createTextField("t",10,0,0,150,20);

If you test the file using the menu Control > Debug Movie, the text field shows up as it should. If you use Control > Test Movie and then choose debugger from the right-click menu, the text field is nowhere in sight. This simple test makes us fear that not much have changed.

(UPDATE 18 Aug: we have now confirmed that all the issues in the debugger remain, but in Beta 2 the List Variables command is also broken. If that problem is not fixed, the trace-command will be your only way to debug Flash...)

(UPDATE 12 Sept: We have now tested the release version. Here the bug is actually even worse, BOTH List variables og List Objects are now broken. Both commands now list the contents of the variables, but they do no longer tell where those variables reside? We really hope this does not mean that something fundamental is broken and that this is just a bug in the debug player...)

(UPDATE 14 Sept: Rest at ease. The bug is fixed in the trial versions available from macromedia.com. Must have been an error at Macromedias press site so the version we got was not the "final version" as claimed)

(UPDATE 24 Nov: Have gotten a couple new reports indicating that the error may still be in some trial versions. Odd...

Second: I am disappointed over is the sorry state of HTML rendering in text fields. The list of supported tags has not changed the last three releases and display of text is nowhere near standards compliance. Setting Font-tags is really not what I want to do in 2005. I want to load a CSS file and attach it to a text field (which I can), but I also want to edit that same text field (which I cannot). How can Flash be so powerful and still - the best coders among us fail to make a working WYSIWYG editor in Flash? If this was remedied, Microsoft's ActiveX Control for editing HTML would have gotten some serious Cross Platform Competition.

We can only hope that during the Adobe/Macromedia merger, someone from the InDesign team will be allowed to tell the Flash Team what linked text fields are and how to make text stick where it should within boxes complete with text flow around images. That way we could start making Flashmagazine in Flash again.

Third: The internal Editor has not changed much (if at all) in this release. I just assume Macromedia has given up on this and surrendered the task to SEPY, PrimalScript and others.

Our verdict

Faster, tighter and better could sum up what we think of Flash 8. Macromedia has taken every effort to avoid the mistakes of the last launch and the product looks really good. Never before has a version of Flash gotten more input from real-life users, and you can really feel this! The program is so much more how "I want it" rather than how the engineers thought it should be. More of this please!

With Flash MX 2004, the designers where I work never cared to update their Flash license. There simply was nothing for them in MX04 and the software was a nightmare to use on their G4 Powerbooks. This time around, I'm sure both coders and designers will get new licenses ASAP.

Practical info

Flash 8 will come in two versions, Flash Professional and Flash Basic. Flash Basic is targeted at the hobbyist/illustrator rather than Flash Professionals. It lacks all the cool, new things such as Blend Modes, Filters, Custom Easing Controls and of course all the tech stuff like advanced components, Standalone Video Encoder, Alpha Video and Mobile Development. This time it's much clearer who should get what version of Flash. In reality, most organizations will end up buying Flash Pro to both designers and coders, just to avoid working with different versions.

Flash Basic will be priced $100 lower than the current $499 price of Flash MX04. There will be no upgrades or educational versions of Flash Basic, just the one package at $399.

Flash 8 Professional will cost the same as FMX04 Pro - $699 with upgrades starting at $299. Educational versions will be available from $149.

For now, you can pre-order at the Macromedia Store. The software should ship some time in September. Click here to Pre-Order your copy of Flash 8 today.
While you are waiting, visit 'Studio 8 - Meet your match'

Review by Jens C Brynildsen (August 2005)