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What's new in Adobe Flash CS3 Professional

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Transcript for video

What's new in Adobe Flash CS3 Professional

Jonathan Duran
(April 6, 2007)

My name is Jonathan Duran. I'm a senior Flash quality engineer on the Flash authoring team at Adobe.

Some of my favorite new features in Flash CS3 Professional are ActionScript 3.0 and the coding improvements. I also really like Copy and Paste Motion and the new Pen tool.

With Copy and Paste Motion, I can actually copy a tween from the Timeline and paste it directly onto another object without having to replicate the keyframes or any of the positioning in between.

Also, I really like the Adobe Photoshop importers. Now I can import my Photoshop and Illustrator files directly to Flash and maintain all of the layering and objects.

I've been using ActionScript since ActionScript 1.0 and I've become fairly comfortable with ActionScript 2.0 because I've been using it for a few years, so the transition initially was a little bit difficult. But then after I'd used ActionScript 3.0 for a few days, I couldn't imagine going back. It's just so much easier. The code is cleaner and it executes faster.

Some of the improvements in moving from AS2 to AS3: It's much easier for me to manage objects in the display onstage. We now have a Display List object that does most of the work that I was doing in AS2 for me, as far as managing the depths of these movie clips onstage.

Also, in Flash CS3 we use ECMAScript for XML for parsing XML. So in AS2 we had to pass in nextChild, firstChild, and all this kind of vagueness that I hated about XML in Flash. Now it is much simplified with E4X. We parse the XML for you into a structure much like an associative array, so that you can address the XML directly.

Some of the tasks that are a bit different from AS2 to AS3 are things like adding code to buttons and movie clips. In ActionScript 2.0 we used to let you attach code directly to a button or movie clip but now there is a little bit more work involved. You actually have to write a function in code, and in code attach it to the button using addEventListener. It takes a little bit longer but in the end the code is much cleaner and executes faster.

I think that the release of Flash CS3 will change the experience of Flash in a couple of ways. On the web you'll start to see applications that are a little more polished. Because we have more room with this performance improvement, we can add bitmap filters so you'll start to see drop shadows and blur effects in applications more. But I think the major impact will be on the developer side in creating these applications. They'll be able to create code that is far more reusable, executes faster and, in the end, once they get into the workflow of Flash CS3 and AS3, be able to create these applications much faster.

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