Office applications Toolkit

Flash 8 Professional review

8.0

Editors' Rating

Setup & interface		8.0
Service & support		7.0
Features		9.0

Jon L Jacobi & Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 15 Sep 2005

Macromedia's Flash 8 gives designers a platform to create cartoons, videos and games that make Web sites sing and dance, and it does so with ease. This upgrade facilitates an evolution in the animated Web experience, and it's a must-have for serious site developers. Flash authors should warm to the numerous work-flow and design-tool improvements, including new runtime blend modes, filters and effects, support for alpha-channel video and a rebuilt video codec to shrink file size and playback time. Hobbyists wanting to put Flash content on their personal Web pages should opt for Flash Basic, although it lacks the more alluring new features offered by the more expensive Flash Professional 8. You can also buy Flash Professional 8 packaged with the Macromedia Studio 8 suite for about £699 or upgrade for £299 from a previous version of Studio.

Setup & interface
Although it has a 190MB footprint, installation of Flash 8 (including the Flash Player) required only a few painless minutes in our tests. Once installed, the Flash 8 interface retains the intuitive look and feel of previous releases, including a timeline across the top, a viewing stage in the middle, tool icons along the left side and various menus along the bottom and the right edge. New to Flash 8 are separate Undo functions for objects and documents, as well as the ability to customise the work space by rearranging and naming panels. Flash 8 includes a better-organised preferences dialogue box, more storage space on the desktop for objects not currently in use, and better-organised libraries. And like Dreamweaver 8, you can collapse the menus to save screen space.

Unlike Flash MX 2004's myriad of mysterious ways to import video, version 8 reduces the process to an elegant dialogue and a helpful wizard. Flash 8 offers Script Assist, a visual interface to help newcomers without much coding experience get up to speed on ActionScript. Flash 8 also provides tabbed file browsing in its Mac edition.

Features
Flash 8 Professional introduces a host of new animation features that make this a vital upgrade for Web animators itching for new toys. Want to make a car fly in front of a city for your own Blade Runner knockoff? Support for 8-bit alpha-channel video within Flash 8 allows you to superimpose objects over existing content. Flash 8 also expands the boundaries of runtime animation; it caches vectors as bitmaps to reduce rendering time but retains vector data. You can add shadows, blurs, colour adjustments, glows and bevelling at runtime. There's more control over strokes and gradient fills, which is vital to making objects look three-dimensional. The new Object Drawing mode lets you group and overlap objects, as allowed by vector graphics applications such as Adobe's Illustrator. And the ability to copy filters from Fireworks and Adobe's Photoshop is handy. Plus, you can make animation using transparencies without having to cut out objects on the page.

The new FlashType text-rendering engine delivers better anti-aliasing for more elegant text, similar to that of Adobe ClearType; fonts are smooth even at small sizes and are easier to adjust. The addition of a graphlike 'easing' tool lets you control the animation speed, rotation and scale of objects -- essential for making motion look more natural. Embedded cue points let you trigger specific behaviours, such as playing back video, adding captions and breaking up movies into scenes, so that viewers can navigate through your content. Another sorely needed improvement to Flash 8 Professional is a standalone encoder for batch operations, which is helpful for design teams.

To better compete in the streaming-video arena, Macromedia renovated the Flash Player from the ground up, using On2 Technologies' VP6 audio and video compression codec. We experienced faster and smoother animation than with Flash MX 2004; our Flash 8 animations were on a par with or better than those delivered by QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. The improved optimisation of Shockwave Flash (SWF) files gives the Flash 8 Player an advantage over such rivals. To view Flash 8 files, end users will have to upgrade their browser's Flash player with a free download.

Macromedia is also aware of the emerging handheld and mobile phone market. Mobile-content developers will enjoy the Professional version's support for mobile devices, including previews that represent the interfaces of handhelds and smartphones. These mobile features, as well as alpha-channel video, easing controls, 25 new blend modes and filters are available in the Professional version only.

Service & support
Flash 8 includes an extensive help file plus access to an excellent online support centre. The reorganised help section allows searches by phrase, as well as and/or terms, with results ranked by popularity rather than alphabetically. The online support centre includes numerous well-written FAQs, tutorials and forums where you can chat with other users for free. Given the visual nature of this program, we're surprised by the lack of animated tutorials, although Macromedia promises to include them with the Developer Center on its Web site.

Unfortunately, live telephone support can get pricey in a hurry. Although Macromedia lets you call technical support for four 'getting started' incidents (a call and follow-up calls for the same issue) within 90 days of purchase, afterward you're left with a daunting price list. A post-90-day single incident will set you back $99 (~£54), while extended support plans start at $449 (~£246) per year.