A little late with this one, but I’ve been changing jobs over the past few weeks, so it’s been a little busy! Apologies
There’s something afoot, something so huge, it will change the way we work and create our Flash applications in the future, yep you guessed it, Macromedia have revealed a mini sneak preview of
Here are some of the main points from Colin Moock’s Blog regarding a small cross section of the enhancements…
-saffron, a new type-rendering engine
-dramatic performance improvements (a sluggish calendar app jumps from 14fps to 125fps)
-real-time bitmap effects (blur, drop shadow, colour matrix etc)
-real-time video alpha channel
Looking at the image at the top of this blog, gives you a taster of the demonstration that was presented of the next generation player, and if you watch one of the video streams , you will be as shocked as I was to see the advances in just a single player version that they have planned in the next version. Just wait till you see the increase in fps throughput of the Flash Player, and the live effects panel!
I’m pretty bowled over by this, and in relation to a previous blog entry regarding the next version of Flash, they are really focussing on the designers this time around in the current product development life cycle.
I’m sure as time moves on and we will see more information coming out in this controlled manner, and if this conference is anything to go by, we’ll all be blown away again!
October 27th, 2004 at 6:10 pm
– quote –
“of the new features to be available in the next incarnation of the Flash Player (v8) “
—–
Of course you mean “the new features that MIGHT be available in the next incarnation”
:-)
Exciting, none-the-less. The performance gains might actually large apps built with the v2 components actually usable. Here’s to wishful thinking!
October 27th, 2004 at 6:17 pm
I saw the demo of Flash’s new features at the “Flash in the Can” conference in Vancouver this past week. The real-time Alpha channel looked absolutely stunning, as did the new rendering engine that was demo’d by Macromedia. The jump in frame rate was insane.
October 27th, 2004 at 11:21 pm
Homestar!
October 28th, 2004 at 12:00 pm
Know what i’d love to see… the stability and persistent bugs FIXED!!! That would be wonderful. New features are great but when flash is unstable and bugs persist for multiple versions, it is unacceptable. Maybe once microsoft releases its rumored ‘Flash Killer’ then macromedia will step up and create a great IDE for designers and developers. If its one thing Microsoft is good for its creating a good developer tool… and this from a hardcore mac user such as myself…
November 10th, 2004 at 3:49 am
There has been a long discussion on the future of Flash over in the Flash forum - you might want to read it. Next Generation Flash!
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:01 pm
The folks at Macromedia’s Flash Product Management team have been saying for over a year now that the next incarnation of Flash would be focused more towards designers than programmers. (Uh, duh, the last 2 version’s updates have been programmer-centric!) It’s nice to see them coming through.
I don’t doubt at all that they’ll follow through on this.
And as for Microsoft’s “flash killer,” whatever. Microsoft talks an awful lot of **** about forthcoming products and rarely comes through as promised. Consider, for example, that eBay just DROPPED PASSPORT today. Don’t hold your breath for the Redmond team. They’re smart people up there, but heavily weighed down by a massive beauracracy.
February 20th, 2006 at 2:27 am
Just a heads up, since this post I haven’t been able to read the Flash blog in my feedreader because of a weird character in the post. Check it out:
http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/category/flash/feed/
Please fix it so I can get back to reading the blog!
March 12th, 2007 at 7:45 pm