Flash CS4 Professional shares many of CS4’s new interface features such as tabbed documents, but it hasn’t received quite the overhaul that the rest of the applications have. It lacks, for instance, the Application bar facility, and the Workspace switcher doesn’t have presets.
As such, the biggest practical interface change is the relocation of the main Properties panel to the vertical docker. This opens up valuable space for the Timeline at the bottom of the screen, highlighting Flash CS4 Professional’s rediscovered focus: animation.
With this release Adobe has tried to make animation simpler, allowing you to apply tweens directly to objects – a process that used to involve manually creating symbols, keyframes and motion guides. You can even apply simple preset animations from a Presets panel and create your own to quickly apply the same effect to multiple objects.
Flash CS4 also makes it possible to add new types of animation. Star Wars-style perspective effects and spinning logos can be created using the new 3D Translation and 3D Rotation tools. And with the new Bones tool you can create armature layers that allow you to animate puppets using Inverse Kinematics (drag the foot and the connecting leg moves too).
Most importantly, using the new Motion Editor panel you can view and edit the individual properties of a tween as Bezier curves. This allows expert users to produce smoother, more natural results. The problem is that this isn’t true property-based animation: the new control is grafted on top of the awkward, underlying system of layers, keyframes, symbols and tweens. The result is more power but also more complication.
Fortunately, vector animation is no longer the all-important feature that it once was; web video has become Flash’s trump card. Here, Flash CS4’s Import Video command has been reworked to make it simpler to embed FLVs or load them into a playback component. Flash CS4 also adds support for video based on the more efficient H.264 codec. And if your original video isn’t Flash-compatible, the import dialog offers quick access to the Adobe Media Encoder where you can convert it.
Video handling is an important part of Flash’s much-trumpeted role as a platform for RIA (rich internet application) delivery. This has been a major focus of recent releases, but with CS4 the only significant advance is the ability to output projects as cross-platform desktop AIR apps – a feature already available to Flash CS3 users via an extension.
Instead, Adobe offers the Deco tool. Click with this in its default Vine Fill mode and your screen fills with a trellis of interlocking branches. Alas, it’s just about useless for real work, and the Grid Fill and Symmetry Brush modes are only marginally more practical. This is bizarre. Has Adobe given up on its vision of Flash as the RIA platform for the future? This release’s focus on animation and “flashy Flash” makes it look that way.
In fact, Flash and rich internet is more important to Adobe than ever, but to make Flash fit into that future platform Adobe is having to reinvent it in the context of its Flex developer framework. In particular it is moving Flash away from the old SWF and FLA formats to more open, XML-based, object-based, programmer-friendly FXG and XFL.
As such, the biggest Flash-based development in CS4 comes from outside Flash CS4 Professional, with Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks able to write to FXG, and InDesign and After Effects able to create XFL files. FXG is of limited interest as Flash doesn’t yet support the format. More exciting is that Flash CS4 Professional can open XFL files directly. This means you can take InDesign and After Effects projects, give them some Flash-based sparkle and output them to SWF for use on the web.
Deeper and wider support will no doubt come. And FXG and XFL should prove ideal for working with Adobe Flex in developer workflows and eventually direct rendering in the player.
Exactly this sort of power is already available in the form of Microsoft’s XAML. And compared with the streamlined, modern power of Expression Blend, Flash CS4 Professional looks awkward.
But with this release Adobe is repositioning Flash, turning it into a universal platform for rich online delivery for all the CS apps – a screen-optimised equivalent of PDF. The fact that, in the process, Flash CS4 Professional’s role as central authoring application becomes less important is a bonus.