Flash CS3. It's almost here!

The new Flash is almost here. After reviewing some of the new features, I have luke-warm feelings about it. I am excited over a number of key features that I feel will make development for mobile devices easier as well as fixing a major problem flash 8 had with exporting quicktimes.

Here's my negative thoughts first. I am not 100% positive that the drawing tools that were in flash 8 will stay the same. New pen tools that function in the same way as Illustrator have been added which will be a great benefit for designers. But for people like me who've been using flash since version 3, I practically learned how to draw with these tools and therfore I would hope they will remain untouched. These 'old' tools include the paintbrush and pencil tools. As seen in the first snapshot, you can actually see the pencil tool, so I assume that this tool will be the same.

Now for the good: Flashlite 2.0 came out just last year. It's implementation for mobile devices was clumsy at best, but this was perfectly acceptable to me simply because there were not many devices that were actually available to accept flash. Now there are many and the new version of flashlite will make development easier for these devices. All I can say is: get yourselves a .mobi site today!

Also of great interest to me was how new improvements have been made to flash's new export features for video and Quicktime. Flash video has for the most part replaced standalone players. I'm not going to go into the politics of things, but I will say that I find it highly suspect that the latest versions of Quicktime come with the " allow flash tracks" feature turned OFF, deep within the settings. Translation: exporting flash as quicktime has meant that MOST people would not be able to see it. With the clear understanding of the fact that FLV is far superior to a plain Quicktime, and one has to wonder if there were motives behind Apple's decision to conveniently turn flash options off in their players. What I saw in the Adobe demo looked promising. It appears that exporting as a Quicktime has been addressed. It also appears that exporting in general might be easier. As with the drawing tools, I will have to see firsthand.

Overall, a very enticing product indeed. I personally cannot wait to try it out!


PS: to all the spammers putting crap on my blog. please stop.