I’m a bit overwhelmed to be honest. I haven’t seen this many new features in a new release in… ever.
Dynamic sound generation, basic 3D, IK, Vectors / typed arrays, local file saving, hardware acceleration, pixel shaders, new drawing API, new text engine, peer to peer support. I’ve been playing with the new sound stuff a LOT over the weekend. Wow. Haven’t really had time to touch much of the other stuff, but it’s all very cool.
For a while I’ve been a bit depressed about everyone jumping on the Flex bandwagon and me just having absolutely no interest in it. But all the hot new stuff seemed to be Flex-related. With Flash 10, Adobe is really putting the Flash back in Flash. Take that, Flexheads! 🙂
I see a new book on the horizon…
Where are you getting your FP10 API references? Do you have some inside unreleased Help file? I’ve enjoyed Lee’s gotoandlearn.com tutorials, but I’d love to dig in deeper…if I only knew how.
Thanks,
Eric
with the new text engine, can you load fonts at runtime?
Keith don’t get depressed:
“A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.
“Is the dark side stronger?â€
“No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.â€
“But how am I to know the good side from the bad?â€
“You will know… when you are calm, at peace, passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.”
Both sides of the force are powerful! 🙂
Ted 🙂
The evil Darth Patrick speaks!
Keith that was Yoda training Luke. 🙂
I was a bit dismayed at all the flex hype as well, I am not much for frameworks of that complexity and prefer smaller data management utilities. I do most work in Flash myself, and seeing the feature set for version 10 is getting me amped! Ted, your quote is hilarious, I agree.
haha. the question is, which is the dark side? I thought we reserved that for Microsoft.
Eric, I’d tell you where I got my API reference, but now Adobe is listening. 🙂
No Microsoft represents the autonomous robot cloning in this analogy. They have no force or Jedi for that matter.
Stay on target Keith, Flash Player 10 rocks.
What I find interesting is that FP team has focused on creative enabling features in this release. It isn’t that one feature is amazing but that you can use them seamlessly together in combination. For example, they didn’t create a new textfield in FPX, they added low level API’s to write custom text fields like Vellum. The team was working on lower level features that enable developers and designer to be far more creative and productive.
It will go down as one of the best releases ever.
Ted 🙂
Adobe always listens >: )
Exactly, Ted. And I love the fact that “creative” features don’t mean “non-programmer” features, as well. For instance, you can do all the 3D stuff in the Flash IDE (um… or so I’ve heard), but you can also program to it.
And the low-level approach is great for the sound. It’s only a single event, single property, and I think a single method that were added to the Sound class, not a huge new API. The community will take care of building up the sound frameworks. Awesome.
Definitely THE best release ever.
I jumped on the Flex bandwagon and my general sentiment is this: meh.
Flex is a great framework, but it obviously relies on the flash player to be widely implemented, and Adobe can only keep the lions share of the plugin market by pushing inovation on that front. We need something to chew on whilst HTML 5 and CSS3 are being debated 😉 Promising times.
I’m with you man. Flex just is too high level for me lol. I still think there is a way to combine the best of Flash with the best of Flex.
I could write probably 10 pages of ideas. for 1 make the AS editor a plugin to the IDE so we could have direct FDT integration.
Hi Keith,
Thank you for your post! I so much share your feelings about Flash and Flex; it is great to hear a validation from an expert like you. I am looking forward to your new book ‘Making Things Move and Dance in Flash CS4’. I am a fan of the books that you authored and coauthored, and of your work. I was just looking at your Mandelbrot set app.
Thanks!
Barbara
Well, if you can’t tell me how to get them, then I’ll just have to make my own version of Actionscript.
“peer to peer support”? Where does this info comes from?
http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+10+peer+to+peer
Till now, there was no support for 48Khz bit deoth (audio) in Flash. Even the latest release – which officially accepts and re-samples the sound (poorly, IMHO) will crash if you try to pause, rewind or otherwise start a song in the middle.
So seriously poor, that I learned .NET, and was about to institute Silverlight training in the college I teach at.
Does this latest version address / correct these issues? Can I drop M$ and go back to Adobe?
BTW, Senocular – Adobe may always be listening, but they sure are slow on the response time.
Oh, and Ive heard that there is finally support for RTL languages. That’s a big deal for, oh, a third of the planet. Should go in the list.
No response yet.
Does nobody know if they’ve included a real sound engine in Flash 10? Can it play 48Khz correctly?
For all those reading this blog – don’t get too excited about Silverlight either. Turns out MS is just resampling the 48 to 44.1 and piping it through.
They claim to have a Flash-killer based on Windows media player, and they can’t even get the sound support right *sigh*
No one listens to us 🙁
If the Flash 10 doesn’t add better sound support, I think I’m gonna buy stocks in Java Sparkle.
I don’t think there is support for 48Khz sound. In terms of crashing, that’s why it’s a public beta. Report the bug.
I don’t think that anyone reading this blog is too excited about Silverlight anyway. 🙂
But seriously, Flash is right now adding the most serious sound upgrade in the 11 years it’s been around. Sure, things can always be even better, but saying “If the Flash 10 doesn’t add better sound support…” is rather non-sequitor given what they have just added.
Thanks, Keith, for your reply.
Able to confirm halfway – There will be no support for 48Khz, but there may be support for 24Khz, (Not sure, as I didn’t understand Tinic’s comment on the “Adobe is listening” post).
As far as the crashing – I am referring to Flash 9. [Flash 8 and earlier would not crash, but they would play at the wrong speed, “chipmunking”]. This bug is well documented (I think. It is definitely easily reproducable).
The greatest kudos go to Adobe, not just for their improvements in the sound department, but also for their open sourcing and the people they work with [;)].
I personally have been waiting for the low-level ‘per-bit’ support for years.
However, support for 48Khz has been requested for a very very long time, by a lot of people. There are far, far, more developers needing support for the most common encoding of mp3s than there are for all the stuff they’ve added – put together. And far far more instances where someone will waste time on the new API trying to tweak or fix something that would’ve worked in the first place had the bit rate been supported.
Not to knock a good company, and no rules can be drawn from one example [though I have others]. Nonetheless, if the competition picks up on the commonly used stuff and leaves out the fancy options, they will surpass Adobe as surely as Google surpassed Yahoo. (Not this week, though 🙂 )
Flex sucks, its a big lump of crappy badly written layout code on top of flash.
Just use flash.
Flex sucks.
Write your won damn layout code and don’t use mxml.
Its cumbersome.
It stinks.
It makes me angry.
Looks like Henry got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning 🙂
Happens to be that Flex is not so bad.
However, I felt the same way when I had to use Flex Builder.
Now that I have switched to FlashDevelop, I’m much happier. I say Henry should give t a try.
Considering that you moderate your links, why do you use nofollow to the poster’s site? Even if someone posted for this purpose it wouldn’t hurt your site as long as the comments are germane?
So glad to see Flash 10 putting things back into place.
I did not like that flex stuff and don’t intend to delve into it unless I have a very good reason to do it.
Now that Flash 10 is so promissing, I guess I’ll spend so much time learning/researching/practising the new stuff and I won’t even have the time to think of… uh… er… what was the name? Ah, yes, flex.
im wishing this new release will be capable of more browser renderable image formats. bmp sure isn’t web friendly due to it’s size, but i think it won’t be that much of a problem for them implementing it. photo sites (like flickr) still use them (and sometimes at the wrong extention too, .jpg?)
i’m thinking of mashups where you can place the urls with their favicons beside it.