Tuesday 27 Mar 2007 - 05:07
Flash is the first member of the old Studio 8 to take on the new Creative Suite 3 interface. It’s a definite improvement over the Macromedia interface – still used by Dreamweaver and Fireworks CS3 -- as it’s a lot harder to end up with the usual mess of palettes.
The Web-focussed animation tool has also borrowed some creative tools from Illustrator and Photoshop -- though more important is the fully-featured AI and PSD file import as they’re still much better art tools than Flash. It’s also tied into the Bridge asset management tool, and the Version Cue version management system for small teams.
Unfortunately, Flash hasn’t also nicked the timeline from After Effects, which is faster to use and offers more fine-tuning controls – both directly on the timeline and in the excellent graph editor. Adobe admits that AE’s system is better, but notes that moving old-hand Flash users to a new timeline will be a challenge.
Draw more in Flash
Flash 8’s drawing tools were notoriously weak next Illustrator, Photoshop -- and any other major pro-level creative application you care to mention. Flash CS3 gains the same Pen tool as Illustrator and After Effects (right), which gives you access to Bézier curve-based controls over points and lines -- for both creating elements and manipulating those created in other applications.
Other new drawing tools include Smart Shapes for easier control over more complex shapes with cutouts such as wheels and pie wedges – and nine-slice scaling (see Fireworks for more details). However, creating designs from scratch can be painful if you’re used to Illustrator and Photoshop -- and the import tools (direction) are more useful for this than Flash’s built in ones.
Bring it in
It’s easier to move elements from Illustrator and Photoshop to Flash in Creative Suite 3. As well as sharing similar interfaces, any shape in Illustrator can be saved as a symbol and copy/pasted into Flash.
When you bring an AI or PSD file into Flash, an Import window is opening, giving you a huge amount of control over how individual elements are used. You can choose which layers to bring in, whether they become individual movie clips, what they’ll be called and whether any text is editable.
Working from a new script
Flash CS3 features the third iteration of its ActionScript scripting language, which was introduced in Adobe’s Flex Builder 2 Web development environment – and both share the same debugger. This can be accessed as a number of panels within the Flash interface.
ActionScript 3.0 requires Flash Player 9 to run, by works up to 10 times faster than older code, according to Adobe. It’s designed to be easier to learn – as it adheres to the ECMAScript standard for programming languages (which is based on JavaScript) – and to debug.
Flash ships with a series of Components built from ActionScript 3.0 that you can modify and learn from, and allows you to convert tweened motion to a script so that it can be applied to any object.
Neil Bennett
For more information see the Adobe Web site.
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