Diesel - Flash CS4

It looks like Flash CS4 will arrive in 2009. My last post I was talking about the Flash player 10 and the features that we’ll see in the player. Today though I have read over some interesting blog articles about Flash CS4 and what they have planned for it.

It looks like the Flash CS4 environment is going though a major overhall. Instead of the main time line you will be able to place objects on the stage, right click them, click add motion Tween and then move your object to the end location, and whala all done. By the sounds of it Flash CS4 is going to be even easier for the end-user who is design oriented to perform even more actions with out having to code a line.

Some of the features that look like there on the agenda for Flash CS4 are:

inverse kinematics (Things like capturing the movement of a human arm)
A new Tweening model. (Which should make it even easier to make animation)
3D capabilities (Like I said in my last post about 3D in Flash 10)
Advance text components
XFL a new source format

These features alone are going to take the new Flash authoring environment a hell of a lot easier to use.

Out of the features above the one that catches my eye is the new XFL source format. The reason for this is the *.fla format can only be used by the Flash authoring environment. This new source format, which is a XML document, will be contained in a zip archive with all the assets of the Flash project. Having the source format like this will lead to other applications being able to open up the Flash project for editing. For example say Photoshop could open the source format and inspect each component in the Flash project. You can then edit each image asset in Photoshop and when you open it back up in Flash CS4 you would see the changes made.

This makes Flash framework more flexible for the community. If a bunch or even a developer got cracking they would be able to create a Flash authoring environment that could be made out of Adobe AIR and coded in ActionScript 3.0. So you would be developing content that was created in the content that you are creating in. (That sounds right….. yeah I think so. [Brain freeze])

June 30, 2008
Tags: Adobe, cs4, Flash, xfl