[Q] Advantage of using Flash 8???

[CyanBlue]

Does anybody know of any material that tells you the reasons what sort of advantage you will get if you are to use Flash 8 over Flash MX 2004???

Can you tell me what you personally think would be the advantage???

Thanks... :)

[BernzSed]

I had Flash 7 when Flash 8 came out. As far as I saw, the only major improvements were the ability to do cool stuff with bitmaps.

These seemed like cool toys, but I personally didn't see any really any major reason to upgrade.


Funny story; when a friend of mine first got Flash 8, I found a couple of really cool features I liked while poking around in it. Turns out many of these had been in MX '04, I just never noticed them. :)

[Flash Gordon]

1) Bezier Timeline Tweens via graph
2) ExternalInterface for Flash to JS and back
3) Fixed MovieClipLoader locally preloading issue
4) Clearer text
5) Bitmap stuff
6) New advanced color object
7) Layer modes
8) Can pratically draw like Photoshop w/ shadows, blurs, etc
9) Upload files without a pop-up
10) force download files without having to zip or use a SSL hack
11) Transform Matrix for skewing and such
....

[Cota]

Lots of good stuff in Flash 8. If you have the chance to upgrade, I would say do it.

[Rossman]

2) ExternalInterface for Flash to JS and back
9) Upload files without a pop-up


These two for sure are way up there on my list.

[MichaelxxOA]

Along with what everyone else is saying, there was also support added for dynamically loading various types of image formats (jpg, gif, png), and the addition of the alpha channel.

There was also the move they made with the garbage collector which, prior to version 8, was implemented using reference counting. Now it's done with a combination of mark and sweep and reference counting. The new GC helped prevent alot of the memory issues Flash was previously having due to how it stored objects.

Michael

[Rossman]

Oh, yeah, the improved image format loading is also way up there on my list.

[BernzSed]

Really?

I guess I didn't realize there was so much stuff added.