I just finished uploading a new tutorial that takes you on a tour of some of the exciting new features in Flash CS4. Anyone that suggests that this is not a major release is indeed, quite insane. This video only touches on some of the new features but I think you will agree that they are things that the Flash community has been wanting for a long time. There are only a matter of weeks before you’ll be able to start playing with it yourself. Check it out at http://www.gotoandlearn.com.
Lee
[... I just finished uploading a new tutorial that takes you on a tour of some of the exciting new features in Flash CS4. Anyone that suggests that this is not ...]
[... I just finished uploading a new tutorial that takes you on a tour of some of the exciting new features in Flash CS4. Anyone that suggests that this is not ...]
This blog contains opinions and thoughts that are my own and that are not necessarily shared by the company that I work for. Adobe allows its employees to share their opinions publicly through the use of blogs, Twitter, and other forms of social media.
© 2010 Lee Brimelow
bad link. Proper link: http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=87
Thx for the features demostration video, i can’t wait before it will be released.
The new version is a major release with a lot of cool features.
Awesome features. New Flash CS4 is fantastic. Thank you very much Lee. I’m waiting for next tutorials
It looks amazing. What the path to Flex sdk can be used for ?
Thanks dude, for posting this video online. Nice video.
Again thanks.
Very cool! I want it, I want it, I want it!
wow
pretty nice
i like that kuler has been implemented which i find is the coolest design tool ever.
good to see that designers can now do some more complex animations without code.
good job adobe
Is there any right-to-left text support?
Thank you!
WOW ! surpasses my expectations, thanks for the vid Lee. Think I’ll pre order the lot now.
great.
Very cool. I cant wait to get down and dirty with CS4
Lee,
Any sign of Flash being more developer-friendly code-wise : auto-completion, code hinting ? Or will we still need some Eclipse IDE like FDT of FlashDevelop?
Inverse kinematics and 3D are super cool. Any idea how taxing they are on the cpu? Any estimate whether these will work for the majority of pc’s out there on any given Flash site?
Thanks for this tutorial. It rocks!
Will Flash CS4 be updated with the new version of AS3, AS3.1, AS3.5 or AS4??
Flash now looks like after effects, amazing new features!
So excited to start playing with those animation upgrades!
lee, cs4 supports AS 2.0?
Really nice stuff. Makes me actually want to use the IDE again. Will be interested to see how much of this can be coded on the fly. Thanks for the inspiration!
good job. My favorite line “now a project panel you’ll actually consider using”. What about an AS editor that you’ll want to use?
There will be some AS improvements as well? I guess it will but I couldn’t find some blog or something that describes all those new features. They all will be available only with FP10?
I could see in this tutorial AS2 is still suported, theres some improves on it?
Sorry my english…
Thanx a lot Lee!
Great video Lee.
In the next, show to us the news about the Action panel and the Components.
Thanks for the awesome video! I know that there are many for features in CS4 that I’m sure you can’t divulge to the masses yet, but I was wondering if there are any improvements in the Actionscript Code Editor?
I was just thinking of one of your old posts – http://theflashblog.com/?p=329 – and was hoping that there would be some improvements highlighted in your post.
Thanks!
A new project panel wow! But if we still have to switch to flex or another great AS Editors does this make sense ? i don’t think so.
I think the focus for this release is “Designer” next time it will be “Developer” this is adobe as we know it:-)
anyway…a must have release! Great Work.
Thanks.
Can you nest 3d?
Muito Show!!!
Agora é a vez do Designer!
Brasil_Ceará_Fortaleza
Regarding the hugely improved AS editor in CS4… I hope it doesn’t cause this guy to climb a tree again:
http://tinyurl.com/tree-branch
Oh wow, I can’t wait to start messing with this stuff!
Thanks and keep them coming!
wow, I’m gonna love flash CS4 again, as I prefer Flex at the moment!
is there an ik actionscript class ?
thanks
Thanks Lee!
Lee, I don’t see any JSFL API methods for the new project panel in Flash CS4 in the CS4 JSFL documentation. Am I missing something?
@Steven There may not be any unfortunately. Let me look into it though.
Sorry for the x-posting. I’ll keep the CS4 project panel API convo here.
As simple as the old project panel was, I still used it for my JSFL scaffolding engine in Gaia. Without an API-accessible equivalent in CS4, I’m looking at a *ton* of JSFL coding to write a project panel, which seems silly since Flash CS4 has one. Any info you can provide on this would be appreciated.
One of the things that the Project Panel allowed was the ability to publish an entire project using project.publishProject(). This would publish all of the .fla files in a project without opening them, which was MUCH faster than having to manually open each Flash file, publish it and close it.
With JSFL automation, looping through a list of .fla files, opening themm, publishing and closing them was MUCH slower than using project.testProject(), which would launch the last file when it was finished.
While many people did not use the project panel, I found it an invaluable tool when doing JSFL automation. I can’t find any API methods that allow you to publish a .fla file without opening it.
Sorry about my last comment, I was in a rush. Here it is in full: Can you nest 3-D movie clips inside each other at authortime like you can in actionscript? I think that can serve as a really good way to bypass the fact that Flash can’t do “real 3-D models” (take 6 squares, rotate and position them, voila, you have a cube, etc.).
Flash CS4 is indeed a major update, the Inverse Kinematics and 3D features are huge time savers but the most powerful is the motion editor, this gives total control over the tween.
Btw, I’ve noticed that using bones to shape tween a regular shape makes the file size very large compared to regular shape tweens, any particular reason why this behavior is such?
I’ve been using Flash CS4 for a while now and it is certainly a massive update – but I am still a bit uncomfortable with the timeline at the bottom after all this time as well as the new motion tweens (the ‘Classic Tween’ doesn’t work the same way as the old Motion Tween either unless that is a bug). I also think that it is a bit too grey, but I am getting used to it after a few months. Here is the layout that I have decided on for the moment:
http://www.jamesthompsondigital.com/personal/images/adobe/flcs4.jpg
Also, is offline help planned? I much prefer the new help (that opens up in the browser – http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Flash/10.0_UsingFlash/), but it would be nice if it had a panel in the IDE.
I still use MC CS3 for most of my development (and when I’m helping people at the GTAL forums), but there is a lot in this update and I can’t wait to get my hands on the entire master suite after playing around with Flash for so long! I’m sure there will be some great tutorials here to help the masses with the transition.
Thanks,
James
PS – the Classic Tween is working fine (not sure what was happening last time I tried), but I don’t think I’m going to be using that very much at all – it is almost painful to use now!
Hey Lee, any update on the JSFL for the project panel? Or, is there a way to achieve the same functionality the old project panel had (publish a file without opening it)?
Thanks!
No slight to Grant Skinner here, but I was never a big fan of gProject. It was fine for what it was, and a lot of people liked it, but I expected that Adobe would have bought it and improved on it. It now looks like they just dropped it in.
gProject was not what I would consider to be a polished product (understandably, Grant doesn’t have all the time/money in the world to work on a niche JSFL panel), and, unfortunately, it can’t do what Flash’s Project Panel did because it’s not native and it’s limited to JSFL API commands. Sure, it does some things that the Project Panel doesn’t do, but the things that the Project Panel did (a .flp file that would open Flash, quick, clean UI, simple use, testProject, publishProject) it cannot do.
Lee, why was a decision made to completely scrap the Flash Project Panel and the .flp file type in one version with absolutely no warning? A native panel has been replaced with a swf-based panel that has some utility but is missing other, important ones that it can’t do unless you had it leveraging C, which it isn’t doing. Even then, since it isn’t native, it won’t ever feel like it’s part of the UI.
At the very least you could have put SOME effort in and implemented Grant’s ideas into a native panel, and if you didn’t have time, then all the more reason to not rip out the old panel. I really wish you guys didn’t rip it out like that, and I’m not alone.
Hi Lee,
I’ve been looking for clarification on which new Flash CS4 features will be supported when publishing for Flash Player 9. It will be quite some time before FP10 penetration reaches the point where we can adopt it, but our content team is itching to work with a lot of this new functionality.
Can you please shed some light on this?
here is a good question. Is FL 4 going to make SWFObject easier to use?
Steven you’re totally right,
It’s totally weird that the old project panel or at least the JSFL API has been removed. The old project panel wasn’t totally completed but you could make your own project panel, thing I did, allowing choice of FLA to compile, using MTASC or Flash for compilation, different folders for publishing, etc.
Added to the ton of bugs, the slow IDE, the unstability and rendering bugs, this removal finally convinces me to go back to Flash CS3…
Adobe really needs a guest-friendly complaint/suggestion box. Anyway, I think the next version of Flash really needs: 1. An option to unlink the position properties in a tween span 2. Eases only applied to a certain length of time within a tween, giving the option to make eases span less than the entire span 3. Better 3D bitmap rendering. If anyone can give these suggestions to Adobe, that would be great, but I don’t know any other way besides starting a forum thread or something.