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Finally Flash 5

All details revealed at Hammerstein Ballroom
During the keynote at Flashforward today, Rob Burgess, CEO of Macromedia, officially announced Flash 5. Macromedia showed off most of the features we told you about 3 months ago, but here's the full scoop.

Keyword 1: Customizable UI
The whole is fully customisable in Flash 5. Everything that used to require a double-click or a popup window is now organized in separate panels. These panels can be dragged and dropped like in other MM programs. This way, you can make your own groups of panels, depending on how this fits your way of working. All panels can be collapsed (Mac OS9-style), and theres programmable shortcuts for any command found in Flash 5.

Keyword 2:Better integration
Full support for PNG (vector intact, better transparency and more), Also, better integration with Freehand: Objects created in Freehand will keep layer name and attributes, Guides, objects. All objects is fully editable after import and there's full support for drag and drop between programs. And while I'm onto dragging things: Automatic adding of keyframes when you drag objects on the timeline

Keyword 3: VECTORS!
Finally, Flash get full vector support with sub selection-tool. All the tools you know from other vectorbased tools will be in the final version!

Keyword 4: Work faster
Click any object and add alpha, brightness, tint with one click. Forget opening another window and then click the instance tab. Now you can simply click the color you want and the tint will appear. Have you ever spent hours looking for the little piece of text that has a wrong font? If you have a big Flash project, this can be a real nightmare. Imagine changing the font of a whole project in Flash 4. The Movie Explorer will end this. The Movie Explorer shows all objects in the movie, and you can filter with text, objects (graphic, MC, buttons), sound and more. Simply filter away all objects but the text, open the new font panel (with real preview of fonts and the full name visible) and choose the new font for your whole movie!

Keyword 5: Actionscript galore
Flash 5 features new Javascript-like syntax, and it is in fact JavaScript compatible to a certain extent (did anyone at MM read my interview with Adobes M. Ninness in San Fransisco?).

Customizable Cursors
Any Moviclip can replace the cursor. Kevin Lynch showed off an example made by Sascha Walther of Germany that showed a fly-smacking cursor...

Functions
Just like in other programming languages, Flash 5 now supports Functions. This will allow you to make a collection of ActionScript commands, and call them as if they were any other ordinary Flash command, including passing variables.

Objects
Scripts relating directly to the different kinds of objects in Flash. New audio-commands was used as an example. Now you can program stuff like panning, volume, start and stop with Actionscript.

XML
Flash 5 will handle XML natively! Load, read and post XML files. XML sockets let's you open a continous connection to XML databases.

Debugger
Nice inspector with all variables. visible/updated while playing Now theres no more need for clicking CTRL-SHIFT-V all the time or adding debug fields.

Actionscript panel
The scripting window is now fully resizable. The panel has Simple and Expert mode. Simple mode will guide you writing the scripts correctly, while in the advanced mode you can type just like in any text editor. To aid you in this, there's colored syntax. Also: some of the new functions have been made Backwards compatible to Flash 4!

More stuff
Publishing: Added support for Real Player export (SMIL). There's lots new stuff in Flash 5 and we'll add to this article as MM reveals more during this evening.

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (July 05th 2002)