Flashing Bright- Features

Macromedia Flash 5 includes many new features like the direct support of MP3 files so you can easily import them. The Zoom list bar lets you change the zoom level of the scene directly from the taskbar to speed up your work. In a constant concern about ergonomy, Flash 5 contains in the status bar a series of icons that users can click to display or hide the numerous palette tools. The new Movie Explorer palette enables users to browse films by searching items for their names so you can edit their properties. In this Movie Explorer you can directly see objects’ arrangement, their position on the layers or on pictures, their properties attributes (graphic, button, clip) and affected actions. Best of all you can choose to display or hide specific category of items like images, etc. in the Movie Explorer.

Flash 5 has always been weak in terms of drawing features: this new release corrects the defect by adding a Beziers tracing curve tool (a bit painful to use since you’ll have to add many anchor points to draw correct curve) as well as an anchorage selector. This release also includes an improved colour selector and sound controller. Note that the selector tool is very interesting to use: indeed what you select is really selected: that is to say if you select part of a frame only the part you selected will be erased if you choose to erase it by example. Creating sophisticated and interactive events without scripting requirements make Flash 5 an easy to use solution that adapts itself to all skill levels.

Flash 5 now supports XML processes so you will be able to create online shops, forms and much more using the flash technology. Flash 5 supports all the tags & instructions of the HTML 1.0 language: creating hypertext links from variables in text labels is now easier than before (we’ll review that in detail later in the review). In terms of graphic support, Flash 5 directly supports more than 22 types of files like FreeHand documents, PhotoShop (it keeps the layers!), TIFF, TGA, Illustrator (EPS & AI), GIF, JPEG, PNG and much more. When your animation is ready you can save it as a flash animation (98% of users will choose this) that requires the free Flash 5 plugin to be viewed (if users’ browsers don’t have this installed it’ll offer users to download it for free in many localized languages).

New to Flash 5 is the ability to export animations using the RealPlayer format: indeed flash can brings to RealVideo films interactivity touch. So you can easily support SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). But you can also export to the animated GIF format and various other formats. Integrating your Flash 5 animation into your webpage is fast and doesn’t require tons of programming as a simple HTML line will be enough to handle both the display of the animation and the eventual need to download the Flash Player.

Note that Flash 5 includes a Publish feature that automatically exports necessary HTML, graphics and Flash Player files in the folder of your choice so you’re ready to upload your new animation on a web server. Like in printed applications you can preview your flash animation directly in the application using the format of your choice like Flash, QuickTime, etc. However this requires the opening of another window and isn’t as convenient as it is with Adobe LiveMotion. Flash 5 uses vector graphics that are significantly smaller than bitmap ones so web page downloads decreases.

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