On Flash CS4

The image above is from a tutorial made by Lee Brimelow demonstrating the Bone Tool (giggidy), just one of Flash CS4's many great features.

You would have to watch the tutorial to see some of the other cool features it has because my head will explode with excitement if I try to list them here. Bottom line is, the new features are more designer friendly. It seems that finally Flash has truly become an Adobe program, as opposed to that Macromedia program owned by Adobe. Flash CS3 was like the transition phase where it still has the layout of Flash 8 and below but it has new more intuitive features. Being able to make your own panels is the only one I can think of right now (but I'm pretty sure not a lot of people know that you can do that).

So what can we expect to see from this newfangled program with regards to future Flash creations? Well, no more 12 FPS banner ads I hope. I think that 12 FPS is always used because it's the default setting of the old versions and people just don't bother to change it even though it's ugly, but not anymore! *geek snort* The default is 24 FPS now! *geek snort* I can also see nicer and maybe more complex animations. But I know, visually, there is still going to be awesomely stretched out type in some shiny gradient doing some sorta bounce motion on the screen announcing that you can win a free iSomething. It's going to be a really nice bounce motion though.

As my good friend Kaz said (just minutes before I started writing this blog): "we can be designers again". Referring to, of course, to me and our other fellow designers (all over the world). But I also think there are going to be people who will get this program and think that they can be designers too. I'm not saying that they can't be, there's a lot of talent out there. I just hope to see a lot of good quality work from designers now that there is less of a barrier between the designer and what they want to accomplish in Flash.

Ok putting the Geek Mode on sleep now.