BIOS: Technology Means Business

Flash 8 facilitates an evolution in the animated Web experience, and it's a must-have for serious content developers working on the Internet, mobile phones, PDAs, handheld gaming devices, and consoles. In addition to the wealth of new video options, Flash Professional 8 also offers a variety of new creative features. These include built-in filters that can be applied to text, buttons and movie clips. To view Flash 8 files your site visitors will have to upgrade their browser's Flash player with a free download, but it's worth it.

Pros: Excellent video & mobile content tools; improved encoding
Cons: Expensive; steep learning curve

Flash Professional 8 (Best Current Price: £181) is the latest version of the Macromedia's popular graphics authoring tool. Used by designers and developers to create rich interactive content for Web sites, interactive presentations and mobile devices, Flash 8 offers advancements in video and mobile content authoring, such as new real-time effects, alpha-channel video, improved text rendering, as well as content for mobile devices. Macromedia has also done a ton of bug fixes for this release.

The software is available in two versions: Flash Professional 8 (reviewed here) and Flash Basic 8 (£299 ex. VAT). The main differences between the two versions are that the Professional version includes tools for authoring content for mobile devices, its video tools are more extensive (there's Alpha Channel support for example), and it offers filters (graphic effects). There are also Blend modes, advanced easing controls for animation, data components, and a project panel.

Macromedia has recently updated its entire range of professional Web design and development tools, including Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper. Each of the programs are available as a stand-alone product or as a component of Macromedia's Studio 8 (£699 ex. VAT), which comprises Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3, and FlashPaper 2. Longtime users of Macromedia Studio MX and Studio MX 2004 will immediately notice the big swap in Macromedia Studio 8: FreeHand is out and Contribute is in.

Some of the key new effects include drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, and colour adjust, allowing you to create more compelling designs with improved control and precision. The new custom easing tool also enables better control over animation, and the FlashType font-rendering engine helps to produce clearer text - similar to that of Adobe ClearType, fonts are smooth even at small sizes and are easier to adjust. The new video tools and workflows offer more scope to integrate video with designs, there are batch-encoding options, and added support for 8-bit alpha channels at runtime means you can now combine semi-transparent video with other video, graphics, or digital assets.

Also included is a new Flash Video plug-in for professional non-linear video editing systems so you can export video directly for the Web in Flash Video format. Flash Professional 8 also includes core tools to aid developers who want to create and deploy content and applications for mobile devices using the as well as a Flash Lite player for creating content for mobile devices and interactive device emulators that make it easier to build content once and test it on a wide variety of devices using preset, updatable profiles.

In terms of user experience, Macromedia has addressed the fact that Flash-based movies of old often resulted in large file sizes that required long download times - even with a broadband connection. To tackle this important issue, Macromedia has introduced several advances in Flash 8 that allow for even richer content while also lowering the file size of the finished Flash project. Just take a look and the company's Web site and you'll see some great example of fast-loading video content.

One of the most important architectural changes with Flash 8 authored content is that rendering work is now offloaded to Flash Player 8. Using tags in the Flash project, the player can now render filters in real-time as the user interacts with the project. As a result, Macromedia has been able to include built-in filter effects like drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, gradient bevel, and colour adjust to make a richer user experience. These filters or visual effects can be applied to movie clips and text fields in the Flash project and then passed off to the player when the project is executed on a Web page.

Flash and the free-to-download Flash player now work more efficiently together, and Bitmap Caching allows you to designate any movie clip symbol as a bitmap, which gets cached by the Flash Player at runtime. These instructions are passed to the player at runtime, saving processor cycles that would typically be spent on recalculating vector shapes. The neat thing is that even though the object is being cached as a bitmap, vector data is still maintained, allowing you to convert the object back to vector again at any time.

Macromedia has completely re-written the old 'Normal Mode' feature from Flash MX and called it Script Assist. It does everything that Normal Mode used to do plus a lot more. This feature really helps simplify scripting for people who don't like to hand code their scripts. The changes made to the Undo feature of Flash MX 2004 have been addressed, and there's now an option to switch between document-level undo (Flash MX and earlier Flash MX 2004) and object-level (Flash MX 2004 Flash MX and earlier). The text tool can now reflow text from the left-side handles as well as the right side, and the Library now stays where you left it when you re-launch the application. It is also now saved when you create your own custom panel sets.

Panel management is vital to workflow and productivity, so it's great news that the improved panel management lets you optimise your workspace to fit the way that you work. Bringing a popular feature of Dreamweaver and Fireworks into Flash, there's the ability to group panels together in tabbed-panel sets. Now you can reduce on-screen clutter by grouping your most commonly-used panels together.

You can also assign custom names to each panel group. For projects that require large graphics that extend far beyond the size of the stage in Flash, you can now view objects much further off-stage. To expand the size of the pasteboard, just drag your object close to the edge and it will automatically grow to fit. [9]