Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

While I love new features and the new line strokes in v8 are cool, I was curious to know if one particular bug was still present. Tinic had posted up additional infomation the other day regarding the new line stroke capabilities in Flash 8 and I posted my “1px stroke bug” question in his comments. Today, I noticed he put up an entire post on the fix (mostly fixed). Awesome!!

The bug I am referring to is when using a 1 pt stroke and the anti-aliasing in Flash causing the line to “break” or appear to break. You can quickly duplicate this by creating a rectangle with rounded corners and then testing your movie. [ see below ]

The solution is stroke hinting in Flash v8. While he states it doesn’t solve all the problems, it will fix some. A real fix to the problem involves moving Flash away from quadratic curves. Maybe that will come about for version 9?

Anyhow.. Thanks Tinic for the follow-up post regarding my question!!

- John

Screenweaver was one of the first Flash projector tools I ever used, and it was one of the best (in my opinion) for FlashMX work. Darron Schall is reporting that he has been talking to Edwin van Rijkom and we should see an open source version of ScreenWeaver 3 soon (two or three weeks).

Very Cool!!!

I’m about questions today. I haven’t seen much on the components that will ship with Flash 8 Professional. My guess is they are still be wrapped up and MM doesn’t want to show anything that may or may not be in the final product. My hopes are for more components, components that standardized a bit more internally, and partity between the Flex components and the Flash components.

I have watched both the Feature Tour and the “Whats New with Flash Professional 8″ video and so far I haven’t seen any presets or a way to save your favorite easing setups. I am hoping that its there and just hasn’t been shown or that it will be there at release. Otherwise, it will the tool will be a real pain in the a$$ to use. Imagine trying to multiple onscreen elements and have their custom easing match and you are trying to hand-tweak the graphs. Yikes!!!

Maybe someone has seen other demos or videos that show a way to save your custom easing?

As many have reported, Studio 8 is available for pre-order. [ LINK ]

I went ahead and ordered my copy tonight just to get it out of the way. Now I only have to wait until Septembe for it to ship.

I will be interested to start seeing some of the UI screenshots. In particular, I would like to see the new easing tool that is talked about in the specs for Flash8. I know a few designers who would love a better easing tool since they are more visually based. I am also hoping there are some improvments to the components, even as simple as bringing them up to par with the Flex components. Maybe Monday or throughout the week that info will be revealed.