LiveBlogging Macromedia
Greg Rewis is in town to talk about Studio 8.
They have included Contribute 3 in the Studio package to help designers and developers do maintenance on the site. They have also included Flash Paper 2 as a solution for printing on the web (as opposed to PDF).
Talking about Flash 8 Player now. New video codec that is as good as or better than anything on the web. Added new font display tools, graphic effects, improved performance and under-the-hood features to accelerate adoption of the new player.
The Flash player graphic performance has been tweaked for better playback - up to 30% performance increase. All you have to do is open old flash movies in Flash 8 and re-export them. New player also has Bitmap Caching, which allows vectors to be converted into Bitmaps for caching, which means that they don't have to be redrawn over and over.
Flash Player handles text better by giving you control for adjusting the sharpness and/or thickness of the text, as opposed to letting anti-aliasing handle it.
It is now easier to add graphic effects on the fly, such as light sources and drop shadows on animations. It is all done by adding actionscripts to text, animations, images, and even video.
Flash 8 also has alpha channel support in video.
Flash Player 8 had 10 million downloads in the first day it was released. But how can you get "your mom" to download the new version. Flash Player 8 has detection that is built in and works. Express Install lets users stay on your site and update their player. Soon, they will turn on AutoUpdate to notify you if there is a new version of Flash Player. This is triggered when you visit ANY flash content.
Flash 8 has no interface changes. Object Drawing mode keeps the fill and stroke intact, which helps it to work more like drawing in Freehand and Illustrator.
When you want to load external images in Flash, you can now include not only JPEGs, but you can also load external PNG and GIF files. You can also apply blend modes and drop shadows to items on the stange without changing the symbol in the library.
Editors Note: The meeting is over now so everything from here on is just my recollection of what Greg talked about.
After covering some of the new features of Flash 8 and the Flash 8 Player, Greg dove right into Dreamweaver 8. He started off showing how easy it was to put Flash Video into a website, supporting most, if not all, of the major video formats. You can even do Flash Video without having Flash installed, using the standalone Flash Video Encoder.
Next he showed us some of the new design features in Dreamweaver. They have gone to great lengths to improve on web standards, WCAG, CSS, and XHTML. Dreamweaver is also and XSLT editor now. They have also implemented a lot of new features, including the ability to zoom in (up to 1600%!) on the design and still edit it. Lots of new features to help with writing and editing CSS, including WYSIWYG design modes for creating alternate media stylesheets, such as Print, Handheld, WebTV, etc.
Truthfully, there are just too many new features to cover appropriately here.
They have included Contribute 3 in the Studio package to help designers and developers do maintenance on the site. They have also included Flash Paper 2 as a solution for printing on the web (as opposed to PDF).
Talking about Flash 8 Player now. New video codec that is as good as or better than anything on the web. Added new font display tools, graphic effects, improved performance and under-the-hood features to accelerate adoption of the new player.
The Flash player graphic performance has been tweaked for better playback - up to 30% performance increase. All you have to do is open old flash movies in Flash 8 and re-export them. New player also has Bitmap Caching, which allows vectors to be converted into Bitmaps for caching, which means that they don't have to be redrawn over and over.
Flash Player handles text better by giving you control for adjusting the sharpness and/or thickness of the text, as opposed to letting anti-aliasing handle it.
It is now easier to add graphic effects on the fly, such as light sources and drop shadows on animations. It is all done by adding actionscripts to text, animations, images, and even video.
Flash 8 also has alpha channel support in video.
Flash Player 8 had 10 million downloads in the first day it was released. But how can you get "your mom" to download the new version. Flash Player 8 has detection that is built in and works. Express Install lets users stay on your site and update their player. Soon, they will turn on AutoUpdate to notify you if there is a new version of Flash Player. This is triggered when you visit ANY flash content.
Flash 8 has no interface changes. Object Drawing mode keeps the fill and stroke intact, which helps it to work more like drawing in Freehand and Illustrator.
When you want to load external images in Flash, you can now include not only JPEGs, but you can also load external PNG and GIF files. You can also apply blend modes and drop shadows to items on the stange without changing the symbol in the library.
Editors Note: The meeting is over now so everything from here on is just my recollection of what Greg talked about.
After covering some of the new features of Flash 8 and the Flash 8 Player, Greg dove right into Dreamweaver 8. He started off showing how easy it was to put Flash Video into a website, supporting most, if not all, of the major video formats. You can even do Flash Video without having Flash installed, using the standalone Flash Video Encoder.
Next he showed us some of the new design features in Dreamweaver. They have gone to great lengths to improve on web standards, WCAG, CSS, and XHTML. Dreamweaver is also and XSLT editor now. They have also implemented a lot of new features, including the ability to zoom in (up to 1600%!) on the design and still edit it. Lots of new features to help with writing and editing CSS, including WYSIWYG design modes for creating alternate media stylesheets, such as Print, Handheld, WebTV, etc.
Truthfully, there are just too many new features to cover appropriately here.
posted by Jeremy at 11:51 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home