This article gives us a bit of insider gossip about Flash CS5. There are a few typos in it, and for someone whose English isn’t up to much, like me, it was enough to bring tears to your eyes.
A few things I paid attention to:
Adoption rate
Looking at the current state of the Flash platform, FlashPlayer10 installs are still climbing, and the new figures are expected to reach over 90% coverage in the near term.
Flash CS5 features
The biggest news for developers is that Flash authoring is finally integrated with FlashBuilder. If you’re using Flash CS5, you can export a new FlashBuilder project through a new export dialog.
If you work in FlashBuilder, it goes the other way too — you can point it at a FLA and it will build a FlashBuilder project for it. What’s more, Flash projects can be tested and profiled with the built-in FlashBuilder. Put together, these form a complete and efficient workflow: you write code in FB, then export/test your files with the Flash IDE. (Mousebomb: personally, a lot of my projects right now are code in FDT + export and test in the FLASH IDE, so it looks like the CS5 era will be even more convenient and efficient) ![]()
Editing in the Flash authoring environment has been improved as well, and the team has shifted its focus back onto “making Flash more user-friendly”. There’s now a new code samples panel, aimed at people learning AS3, which is something of a callback to how useful behaviors were in older versions. Click any of them and the code gets added to the timeline, making that part of the job easier for beginners — but since it’s configurable, it’s really more of a built-in Snippets panel for Flash, so you can stuff all kinds of things into it. ![]()
Finally there’s a section on Flash Mobile upgrades that doesn’t really affect me for now, so I’ll skip it. Now that 3G is everywhere, mobile online games are about to become a hot topic — maybe I’ll need to dig into that someday.
