Grant Skinner, started off with his overview of IDE, AS, and Player enhancements in Flash 8.
Showed off blur effect and image compositing, IDE enhancements to Library panel (including switching between open libraries with a dropdown menu, much as you’ve been able to do in Director for — oh &mdash 10 years. The new Help panel includes Boolean searches and literal search phrases (set off by quote marks).
The script editor now checks syntax for packages and can show hidden characters, which is useful particularly when you’re copying scripts from other sources.
Gradients have increased in complexity from 8 to 16 control points, which means you can set more positions within the gradient for specific colors. Radial gradiants can also have their centers offset, so the full spectrum of gradient colors is always displayed between betwen the gradient origin and endpoint.
The ‘9slice’ function that allows items like dialog boxes to be easily rescaled looks to be very useful, as are the new btmap blend models.
He expressed some concern about the potential overuse of the new image filters (drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, gradient glow, gradient bevel, adjust color, convolution, displacement maps). The last two are only available through AS.
He briefly discussed the new runtime bitmap caching. There were a few items where I think he made some slight mis-statements, but most people don’t really know what they’re talking about here, so….
There’s a new font rendering engine in Flash. Kerning on dynamic text, a wider array of controls over anti-aliasing, and more.
New On2 video codec, new encoder with the ability to create cuepoints, alpha challel compositing, easier to get video into Flash, etc….
Timeline tweening now has independent curve editing for position, rotation, filter, and other properties.
If you’re interested in
how search engines deal with your Flash movies, there’s a new Publishing option for making your Flash content more searchable.
Mobile development, JSFL, blah, blah, blah….
Skinner moved into the ActionScript stuff in the last minute of the scheduled talk. He demonstrated a Goo-type bitmap distortion and animation goodie created in Flash 8.
He quickly demonstrated file upload and download capabilities. I need to look more closely at that.
I’m missing things as I type.
Programmatic skewing.
Load GIF, PNG, PJPG, (no Animated GIF); new garbage collector; auto-update for the Player; show Redraw Regions option to display areas where screen updates are happening.