Flash CS5 Features Revealed

At the recent FOTB (Flash on the Beach) conference, senior Adobe Flash product manager, Richard Galvan, revealed some of the new features of Flash CS5 - due to come out who knows when. Hopefully, not that soon. The information is sketchy at this point, but Adobe is continuing its efforts to tighten up the Flash platform and address the slow adopting of AS3.

In the sneak peak, Galvan showed integration (finally) of Flash and Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex - although most Flex developers will still refer to it as that). You can now export from Flash your projects as Flash Builder projects and you can go from Flash Builder back to Flash. I think this is a key strategy in pulling together the technologies, since this has kind of presented a split in the Flash camp between designer/developer.

For AS3, there's a new code samples panel, which acts similar to the behaviors panel - which was made useless in a Flash AS3 project. Well, now you can actually use these samples (snippets) in your projects using ActionScript 3. I think Adobe's really trying to get everyone to adopt AS3, so they can continue developing its features.

Finally, there have been improvements made to the text features in Flash to aid text layout. This is a long-time coming thing. Editing and placing text in Flash has been pretty painful in the past and the functionality is different from something like Adobe Illustrator, different enough to make you scratch your head. There's also changes that have been made to the Art Deco tool. I didn't even think that would be a primary focus for anyone in the Flash world, but apparently, Adobe thought they should make it better.

There are more mobile featurs in this version and they announced increased adoption of Flash Player 10 to a figure that's over 90%.

I'm really encouraged by these changes and I can't wait to get my hands on a beta copy and start deconstructing it. Hopefully, this new release will get developers to realize the power of AS3 so they can start utilizing its features.