Designers finally get a big chunk of Flash's What's New
The last two or three revisions of Flash have been heavily weighted toward developers with extensions to ActionScript, Library, and debugging Flash's scripted animations among other features. Improvements targeted specifically for designers have been few and far between. Well what a difference a little Silverlight makes. This Flash Pro CS4 (I am not sure what happened to plain old Flash) definitely caters to designers.
Three Dimensional Extensions
First on the 3D side there are a number of new features. There are two new tools (see the first red underline in the Flash Pro IDE screenshot below) for making 3D manipulations. Specifically users can now make 3D rotations and other free transformation of essentially 2D objects. This is by no means an Electric Rain Swift3D (and in fact this reviewer would recommend using Electric Rain's SwiftXpress for a simplified direct 3D plugin usable for text and simple objects in the Flash Pro IDE). But this is a start towards bringing Flash kicking and screaming into the 3D world. And 3D for Flash is not an isolated trend - it is notable that one of the new features of Photoshop CS4 is a whole new array of 3D commands and capabilities.
Also ActionScript has been changed so that it is also 3D aware of z-axis co-ordinates in a new set of functions, events and commands. This firmly establishes flash in the management of 3D graphics and displays. Unfortunately I am still not certain whether 3D object imported from say Maya or Lightray can be manipulated in Flash other than as preloaded SWF MovieClips. True one could control the speed of animation and other 3D properties through parameters adjusted when creating the Maya or LightRay Flash movie; but it is certainly not the same as an in-Flash Pro plugin like Swift Xpress.
So watch the 3D capabilities of Flash evolve - and the current Flash Pro to become Flash and a new "premium" Flash Pro to emerge with greater true 3D capabilities.
New Drawing Tools
There are 3 other new design tools in Flash CS4. The first is the Spraycan tools - which hardly seems of import until you discover that it can spray on any stage layer any clip, graphic or symbol with control over scale, rotation, spread and other factors. Suddenly the design opportunities percolate.
The same can be said of the Art Deco tool which allows two symbols or graphics to be manipulated together or responding to various preset curves of symmetry. I must admit I have yet to completely master this tool but the screenshot below based on the theater poser for Color Purple gives readers an idea of some of the graphic innovation possibilities.
Last in our list there are two tools, the Bones Tool and Bind tool for making more advanced kinematics of motion possible. One can distort single symbols and Bind several symbols together. This will be of interest to cartoonists and animators who have do to inverse kinematics associated with joints and body movements. Again, cartoonists will find Toon Boom is SWF capable and more feature rich while Poser does the same for figure animation. But clearly Adobe is starting to lay the framework for more advanced design capabilities directly in Flash.
Finally observe the following improvements to the Flash IDE interface as seen below. Let me tell you it is truly standard across all the Adobe tools - the move to sell Graphics Suites has really brought standard UI layouts across Adobe programs.
First consider that tabs across the top of the screen show the concurrently open animation windows (2 in our case starting with colorpurple.fla). next all the panels have been collected next to the toolbar in a vertical strip along the right side. And this layout can be saved in the Window | WorkSpace | new Workspace command. Flash Pro comes with 8 pre-defined workspace layouts such as Designer or Debug that are very useful. So the improvements to the IDE are welcome since now working among the different tools is easier.
There are a host of other improvements to Flash pro for designers and developers. XMP metadata support has now been standardized across most of the Adobe suite of applications. This means five star ratings, tooltips, and other graphic object metadata will be treated uniformly and API available as XML output. Like XML is the basis of the new integration by means of XFL files for exchanging content between Flash and Adobe InDesign or Adobe After Effects. I have tried the InDesign connection and I am suitably impressed.
As well Adobe has added better H.264 support for video output along with AIR development directly similar to what is available in FlexBuilder. So users now have more direct output options.But the other big improvement, new Motion Tweens, take advantage of AIR and video outputs.
New Motion Tweens
From this reviewers point of view, the ease of doing tweens and animations has been Flash's Achilles heel for several revisions of the product. See SwishMAX for an example of how animation should be done on a timeline interface like in Flash. In SwishMAX almost every mouse operation is allowed while in Flash Pro one must follow a very strict protocol/sequence every time - Jakob Nielsen and other UI specialists would be aghast.
But the new Motion Tweens used with keyframe properties improves animation design - especially refinements quite dramatically. To get this simplification, there a number of give backs versus the newly dubbed old Classic Tweens. But these are balanced by the Motion presets and Motion Editor panels that considerably ease the development of sophisticated 2D animations. As seen above, 3D animations are still quite primitive but at least the basics are now in place.
Summary
Having Microsoft breathing down your neck with Silverlight (lead by a lot of ex-Flash gurus) has certainly had a salutary effect on what is available in the Flash Pro CS4 upgrade. 3D and animation tools for designers abound. The UI interface is both standardized and made a lot easier to use. The integration between After Effects, Flex, InDesign, and Flash Pro is on firmer footing.
But perhaps the biggest improvement is in the revamped animation and motion tweening tools available in Flash Pro. I now can contemplate doing more animation development in Flash then the increasing use of other specialized animation tools as is evident in all the references I have supplied in this review. Flash Catalyst should also help, but our first look was not terribly promising. Part of the problem is that Adobe has not set up a plugins, extensions, and integration strategy that gets 3rd party software vendors whose client extensively export and use Flash on board with Adobe's latest Flash/Flex directions.
The bottom line is that Adobe's Flash innovation could go the way of Sun's Java. Much innovation by Sun ; most of the returns taken by IBM, Oracle, Tibco and others. So likewise for Adobe, much savvy pioneering work, especially in the efficiency of the Flash Player - all of this could be lost, or most profited upon, by Redmond or others. Flash Pro CS4 at least indicates that is aware of this. It is now balancing its strong developer thrust in Flex/FlexBuilder with more for designers and animators in Flash Pro.