Flash Team

Well thanks for your diligence. I'm anxiously awaiting the next version. Cheers!

>The ability to switch to fullscreen would be great ! Just like when pressing 'F' in Photoshop...
>Avoid the "timeline un-docked bug" : when "disable timeline docking" is checked, the timeline (sometimes) disapears when creating a new document.
>The ability to add "tool spaces" in the toolbar, because sub-tools are quite boring to acces...
>An enhanced "color selector".
>A separate Help system !

Thanks for reading.

I think that the normal things that people expect from the web (namely html) should be more prevailiant in flash work. Or at least more accesable to developers. For example, the fact that the presentation of scrolling text is so random between flash sites creates a lot of confusion. And most of the time, they don't work as well, such as not using the scroll-wheel on the mouse. The components have helped this issue but I think it could be better, there's still a lot of crap out there.

Basically, I think that anything that's standard in html should be fairly standard in flash, if it will take the next step. A lot of the most simple things are made extremely difficult in the Flash environment.

>I understand the reasoning, but all the new tools/wizards for tweening and what-not for dummies has kinda got in the way of the real work, although that (the heavy-duty tools) has been developing nicely.
>Video has been a great tool, and I think it can help change the web in a real positive way. Thanks for your hard work in that direction.
>I've seen the help system crash a lot of computers.
>Personally, I hate the font size and letter spacing sliders. It's hard to get exact without typing in the value.
>Make it easier to add CSS, like Dreamweaver has. And add the the same text-formatting options for text fields. There's a lot of great opportunities there.

Overall, it's been a great product! Thanks for reading my whining!

my wish

Array.indexOf()
Array.lastIndexOf()
Array.keys()
Array.unique()
Array.sum()
Array.last()
Array.shuffle()
Array.merge()
Array.clone()

String.ucfirst()
String.ltrim()
String.rtrim()
String.trim()
String.htmlentities()
Movieclip programmatic skewing method

RegExp and XPath in the player, not in an external class

Mouse Event fired when the cursor leave/enter the animation

Possibility to capture a region of the anim then send the bitmap stream to the server

sorry for the twice :(

Mike, it was great to have you over in London. I look forward to your next visit!

QUOTE: Personally, I hate the font size and letter spacing sliders. It's hard to get exact without typing in the value.

I second that! :)

#1 big wish: a fool proof method to detect when a an external swf completely loads.

Any reasonaly complex RIA would need to make use of sub swf files that themselves might load other sub swf's. There has got to be a better way to figure out from the Main movie, when the sub swf's have completely finished loading. Using SetInterval to check for this is not a refined solution.

superabe: MovieClipLoader ?

Something really simple, but when I select a bunch of objects on separate layers and create a symbol from them, any chance those layers could be reproduced inside the new symbol?

If those objects are shapes, putting them all on the same layer means it's impossible to then separate them onto layers given how Flash treats shapes that overlap (ie, destructively)...

For what they are worth and off the top of my head:
1. better image placement control in text fields. Right now images float left or right. Things like chat with smileys are therefore impractical. If you have the option to keep an image where it is embedded in a line (as in HTML's image align default) it would solve the problem.
2. you cannot use all the compiled SWCs as subcomponents in your own UIComponent if you use createObject. Either you have to manually place them in your component and initialize them with an onLoad or you have to use the uncompiled components from the standard fla. Some guidance as to when to do what - and how you plan to evolve compiled components (or not) would be helpful.
3. component layout managers you can drop in and use in the IDE to layout resizable components.
4. fix many of the outsanding component bugs like have to redraw() the TextArea to keep the scroll bar at the bottom after scrolling down...
5. improved code editing especially when going back and forth between timeline and as files.
Cheers,
-Brian

A few suggestions...

1. Color Picker be able to choose colors from outside the flash program as Dreamweaver & Photoshop do.

2. "Find as you type" for fonts when choosing a font for a textfield.

3. On a similar note to what Brian Lesser said above, image support in text fields should also support reading of width and height when dealing with scrolling. (According to the scrollbar on a textfield, such as text area or the new scrollbar, an image is only the height of the font size of which the line is on).

4. As some others have said above, much better support for html (more importantly, xhtml) and css. This would greatly improve how people use the program by allowing better content management solutions with wsywyg editors for clients.

5. With the team pushing the use of external .as files, an easier way to publish a file without opening the actual .fla file would also be beneficial.

1. I would like to see flash ship with a standalone actionsccript editor that has a "Build/Compile" function OR... some sort of "publish" executable that my text editor (i use BBedit) could call to compile the AS and Fla I am working on.

2. The ability to control what parts of a component get published... when using a slider, menu, etc... I often have no use for have of the functionality, yet can't choose to publish a "lighter" vesion of the component.

3. Built in connectivity to MySQL databases

4. I'd love to see MM incorporate the functionality of MPorjector or SWFStudioPro v2 into the IDE... a bit more power for publishing my RIAs without the need for a third party app.

A method I was looking for today but doesnt exist

MovieClip.getCurrentFrameLabel();

Built in pixel fonts would be nice as well.

MovieClip.getOriginalFileName();

Maybe I just missed it but I went looking in the docs the other day but I couldn't find a way to determine the URL of the page that loaded the swf. In other words the referrer. You can get the information from the swf when it connects to FlashCom but not - as far as I can see - inside the swf itself. It would be somewhat helpful in discouraging people from hijacking swfs.
Yours truly,
-Brian

One of the most problematic missing features for me is the inability to have super/subscript in dynamic textfields.

Player level regular expressions would be really really nice.

An option to have old style undo's perhaps? While it might be good for new users it causes me no end of headaches.

External loading of GIF or PNG would be very useful... I think you might have heard that suggestion before though. ;)

Thanks :)

I've sent a note to wish-flash before but I figured I'd recap my top three:

1. JSFL control of/access to the ActionScript editor. I'd like to be able to capture the text before it makes it into a keyframe or onto a clip (use the editor to parse valid AS syntax, then stick the code inside a function generated by code).

2. Access to the current library items from within a component. The idea is to allow attaching graphics to a component from the current library, at authortime.

3. A NOTES layer that does not get compiled into the SWF. Everyone uses guide layers to get something similar, but guide layers disappear outside of the timeline they're in -- I'd like to see the notes layer stay there. This is useful for selecting invisible movie clips or movie clips in a dense environment, surrounded by other clips. One could use the stuff on the NOTES layer to select the clip easier (because the stuff on the NOTES layer could be outside the fray).

-jonathan

Guys and Gals

1. can you add a feature that allows me to return to the last line of the code. eg in actionscript editor.. I am typing a code realise i need to move back up all the way to refer a variable. I copy the variable.. hit page down page down and more page down and look for the exact line the code was and paste it. Wouldnt it be nice if i actually have a keystroke, hitit and it brings me back to the previous post.

2. Show messages from flash on the status bar at the bottom of the browser. That will be cool.

3. OT : add a component to load Breeze, Flash Paper more easily.

4. Template to load PowerPoint more easily with the title of the xml. That will be cool for presentations.

5. Flash Video - allow me to set externalstyle to flash video player, eg size, color and stick to it throughout the entire website. (okokok this should go to the dreamweaver flash video kit team)

Just a few here. I probably have a few tons of it somewhere else. Thanks anyway for the great job.

Melvyn - just my thoughts and some things i would like to do.

I'd like to see the drawing system improved, specifically it is easy to generate artifacts if you do a lot of drawing and/or scale lines up by very large numbers (like 10000%). Proper quadratic beziers would be nice as well.

it´d be nice if onion skinning could be handled to work faster.
let´s say i want to onion skin 300+ frames,then i have to drag the onion skin startpoint marker at the top of the timeline to the start frame and the endmarker to the last frame.if i want to mark several frames,it takes ages to drag the endframe marker to the desired frame (when starting dragging at the start frame).
it´d be cool if you click the onion skinning on button,the hold down shift and click on a frame once to set the start frame marker for the onion skinning and then click a second time on another frame to set the endpoint

oh yeah,please undo f7´s undo feature ;)
it´s also be great if you add a few more tools like the ones in freehand for 3d distortion of shapes and also creating more custom shapes.
most rocking would be having the power to manipulate images/graphics in general on pixel level via code

In Flash, it was pretty hard to make good games, due to the collisions detection provided by the hitTest script. I know that it can be improved to the extent that it checks if the 0,0 coordinates of an object are touching any filled part of the other object. However, I'd like it A LOT more if you could check if a filled part of one object is touching a filled part of another object, and I think most other people would like to have that option. But don't take out the other hitTest options, because those can also be useful.

Maybe there could be an easier way to use the Drawing API? I'd like to be able to draw the object in some kind of window, and make Flash convert that into Drawing API script. It'd be nice if you were able to paste stuff into that window, or make Flash Player be able to convert what's visible in that frame into Drawing API script. But that would sort of defeat the purpose of the Drawing API.

I have Flash MX, so I'm not sure if this has been fixed already, but the Panel Sets don't appear to save the position of the Actions window. Another thing I'm not sure of, though I think I've heard of, is that you can no longer right-click on something and choose 'Actions' to add script to it. You have to use F9 instead. Is this true? If so, I'd like to see the right-click Actions come back.

Someone I chat to who has Flash MX 2004 says that one of the changes in Actionscript is that NaN = undefined. I don't want to hear that. However, I guess it's quite logical. I also heard the 'Normal' Actions panel is gone. I never use it any more, but A LOT of people are sad to see it go.

It's a good thing I started using Flash from Flash 5 - I probably wouldn't have survived with Flash MX's tutorials. Could you bring back the types of tutorials Flash 5 had?

I've read some bad stuff about the new way to Undo in Flash MX 2004. Could you put it back to the way it was like in Flash MX, or at least give some kind of option to change the setting it's on?

One thing I couldn't believe (and I might have just read it wrong - the post wasn't very clear) was that you can no longer Convert to Symbol? Man, I don't want hear that.

I can't imagine any way you could make it open faster or run faster in general, but maybe you could add a Preferences option that allows you to choose whether or not certain features are loaded when the application is opened? I'd absolutely love that. I'm sure some tools I've never even touched have VERY long scripts, that are just hogging up the load time.

And Flash Player is just horrible on Mac. On this computer, I have to set the quality to low for animations and games to be even a little bit smooth. When I got a near top-of-the-range G5 iMac, I was amazed at how much more fluid everything was... and at high quality, too!

And please, PLEASE make sure it'll still be usable on 1024x768 resolution. I'm sure you've already catered for that already, so it probably doesn't matter.

One thing that would be VERY good is better preservation of non-vector images. Instead of smoothing it out, maybe there could be an option upon import to just make a grid of coloured-in vector squares, with colors corresponding to their respective pixels in the image that was imported. It's make it a lot easier to delete all the unwanted color around the part of the image you want to add in.

Is there any way to make specific things have their own qualities? That'd be VERY useful. Non-vector images always look best in low-quality, which could be an alternative solution to my above idea. Just importing them into the editor in low-quality.

And I'd LOVE modifiable framerates throughout the movie. To a certain extent, we can already do it... with setInterval. But I'd like to be able to add an action to a frame or a movie clip like this:

_fps=24;

Or is that not possible? It'd certainly be useful.

It would be useful to have some templates of platforming games, shoot-em-ups, etc. Open source is the best resource for beginners to learn from.

I'd appreciate some more user-friendly scripts for making games. There's currently no simple way of making something happen if you're touching the left side of an object. It would be nice to be able to make health go down if you touched the left and right sides of the enemy, but make the enemy die when you jumped on top of it. It also means you could make a wall stop you walking right if you touched it on its left side, and vice-versa. Right now, I have to make loads of leftwalls, and loads of rightwalls.

Is there any way to make a group of objects all do the same thing? Something like this:

newGroup(_root.moveGroup) = _root.thing, _root.blah, _root.myThing, _root.myOtherThing;
group(_root.moveGroup) {
_x+=5;
_alpha=50;
}

The first line would put _root.thing, _root.blah, _root.myThing and _root.myOtherThing into the group, _root.moveGroup.

The second line would be telling everything in the group, _root.moveGroup, to:

...move 5 pixels to the right, and have 50% alpha.

Has that already been done? Because I've needed to use it for my game, but I ended up having to use several for loops telling all the rightwalls, leftwalls, trees, treetrunks, etc., to move to the left when you scroll forward. If you put in this feature, it'd also be nice to have a script like this:

this.joinGroup(_root.moveGroup);

Which would make the object join _root.moveGroup.

I would find something like this very useful. PLEASE consider everything I've said, because I'm not getting Flash MX 2004, due to all the negative feedback, and I'm waiting for a good upgrade to it before I get a new version.

Debugger, Debugger, Debugger...

I want a reliable, *fast* debugger :). Along with a command panel so I can get the value of any variable or call any method.

It needs to be integrated into the UI better. Right now it just floats around and gets in the way. I can dock it, but it's super awkward. The panels and the scripts window need to be separate entities. And ideally each panel, stack, locals, scripts, commands, could be undocked from each other and docked, hidden, floated anywhere else.

Open up the .swd format and provide a jsfl layer to debugging. I want to set break points with JSFL or possibly even ActionScript.

I started using Flash at v.5, and it has greatly improved in usability (those old huge dialog boxes!). I'm more of a designer than a developer, although anyone who's good at Flash is a little of both. So my wishes are more towards design usability.

1. Library palette (er, panel) that doesn't have to be part of that odd Macromedia panel world, but can float seperate and at it's own size.

2. Component skinning. The simplified Component Styling methods are crystal clear to the guys who made it, and I finally get Themes, but no transparent backgrounds? Setting a BoundingBox to _alpha = 0 makes the whole component invisible. And there's no transparent "color" to setStyle with, since color is not _alpha. Components shouldn't be treated like .css objects. v6 (MX) was much easier to customize.

3. Sampling gradients - you have to use the eye-dropper, which immediately locks the gradient. Why not just have the gradient available on click, as in Illustrator?

4. A keyboard shortcut for tracking back out of multi-nested clips, like the back function of web browsers. Why keep clicking that arrow for back, back, back? The bread-crumbs are great, but the clicking is cumbersom.

just make it faster eh? nothing else, just make the flash player about 30 times faster. i know you guys can do it. blow everyone away and make the flash player 30 times faster.:)

yeah,blink is SO right.
more designer features sound great (and lengthy overdue) but just imagine what all we could do with a vastly speedier flash player =D

Wow! Tons of great comments here. Thanks everyone.

Regarding a speedier Flash Player: done (well, being done, actually...). And when I say, "speedier" I mean "A LOT FREAKIN FASTER!" And speed will just be one of the great improvements in the next player.

The next version of the player just might be the best piece of software our company has ever written. Sorry I can't provide any specifics, but you'll see it for yourself some time next year.

Regarding all of the other requests, the team went through this list last week (and will continue to do so) and we're continuing to add "enhancements" to the development schedule. The major feature list has already been baked (mostly) and several of the things on this list will be addressed, but there's still a little bit of room for smaller feature enhancements (like improvements to the library, for example).

Please keep posting your thoughts as we continue to monitor this list (and many others).

Regards,
MD

Another (simple) feature request:
A warning message when a external Classfile could not be found.

Any plans of visting India? We would love to have you guys here :)

Cool, thanx for everything! :)

As johndoe mentioned, i'd also love a hitTest'like function that can check if a filled part of one object is touching a filled part of another object.

A much faster renderer is my most wanted improvement.

Another thing is the 1 pixel cut off that seems to occur on bitmaps. A current work around is to place the bitmap in the negative area of a graphic symbol and then use it via it's graphic symbol. It's quite annoying having to do that when you've got a lot of bitmaps.

Good to hear the next flash player will be a lot faster. One 'feature request' I have however is for a working version of flash/player on the mac, right now the product is extremely buggy and plain slow. Flash player/flash authoring on the mac has been neglected by macromedia for so long, its really getting to a terrible state. What would be nice, is a massively massively faster flash player on the mac, and a lot of the bugs still in 7.2 gone once and for all. Speed speed and more speed first up tho :)

Cheers. oh and an improved hitTest that can check filled vs filled of two objects would be handy too.

Kord, it was actually me who suggested the fill touching fill hitTest thingy (the names of people who posted the messages are below the post instead of above, for some reason).

Yeah, Mac needs a MUCH better Flash Player. And how about creating scrollbars that work exactly the same way as the ones you get on your system? I tried to replicate the Mac OS X scroll bar on my website (with the help of Namzorg), but I still didn't quite manage it. We need components with the themes the system itself uses.

Would you guys be able to make a scroll bar that works on movie clips? Insetad of scrolling the text, it would move the movie clip around... or does the Scroll Pane already do that?

It'd be nice if there was a better way to control what happens when you use Right-click. Currently, you can use Stage.showMenu = false; to hide certain options, and you can also add stuff to the menu using scripts, but how about being able to use the Right-click button as a secondary mode of fire for a weapon? Like using left-click would be a Burst shot, and Right-click would be Automatic fire, without making a menu appear or something.

Could you make a script that prevents Flash from drawing parts of objects which aren't on the stage? For instance, I could have a platformer game, and instead of tiling everything, or attaching/duplicating movie clips or something, I could just type in a script like :

this.Area.onStage._visible = true;
this.Area.offStage._visible = false;
// or something similar to that

Which would stop Flash player drawing any area of the object that isn't on the stage - it would REALLY help optimization, and everything would be so much easier to do.

And how about being able to give specific movie clips a _quality property? Would that be possible? I could have loads of sprites in the foreground at low quality, so that Flash wouldn't smooth them out, and they'd retain their original look. Alongside those, I could have a background drawn in Flash, being shown at high quality. That would be amazing.

Maybe a way to modify the point around which an object rotates, grows bigger, sets its coordinates, etc., using script? It'd really help to be able to rotate a map around your character.

How about when you type in:

if (Key.isDown(Key.

Flash will convert the next key you press into ASCII? You could do something like this:

if (Key.isDown(Key.
// User presses A key
if (Key.isDown(65

// OR:

if (Key.isDown(Key.
// User presses RIGHT cursor key
if (Key.isDown(Key.RIGHT

But, since some people might find that annoying, that would have to be possible to toggle off. But I'd really like that.

I'd still like MUCH better tutorials, especially for using Actionscript itself. And everything I mentioned in my other post.

JSFL events!

It would really be handy if there was a "refresh window swf's" command. It's a pain having to close flash and then open it back up. There is one for tools, it would be cool to do the same for panels.

I think this has been mentioned before... but visibleWidth and visibleHeight properties would be nice. Useful for situations where you don't want masked content to register or affect the width and height of a movieclip / component.

It's hard to know what has been said already (and on what forum/site) so forgive me if I am repeating. (and I don't have MX 2004 so I may be stating things that are already there)

What about a way to set a registration point through code? (i.e. giving it new coordinates from the current clips 0,0)

example: myMovie.setReg (x,y);

or

exmaple: myMovie._registration (x,y);

This would help tremendously in the loading of dynamic images and their post-load manipulation.
(i.e. rotation, location)

What are the possibilities of adding an HTML object? I imagine it being similar to a webbrowser control in VB. (and all the properties and methods that would invite) This would give us the ability to place HTML documents/code in our flash document instead of just the other way around.

I could see this being a huge upgrade point to many website areas already programmed in some other language and bears to convert over. (shopping carts..etc)

What about auto-complete options in the action panel? One of the products I've like the best over the years is ColdFusion Studio.
(I mostly use version 5) The code environment there was very helpful.

What about the ability to a gobal replace in any actionscript? Currently (as of mx) You have to use the movie explorer to find all references and then replace them codeset by codeset.

What about the ability to access waveout data?
(for spectrum data or similar)

Currenty I use thirdparty file converters to add spectrum data into swf files, but it would be great to be able to access this data from the audio stream itself.

What about midi support?

I know this may be viewed by some as a step backwards in the audio department, but it really isn't. With over 90% of all web browsing systems having sound cards with upper-level sound banks, it makes sense to give us a way to write music that takes advantage of this and offers extremely low bandwidth.

I see the benefits in areas like web-games, or even webisodes, plus others. Currently I am using a javascript tie-in work-around in order to manipulate midi files. It works, but is cumbersome.

I forgot to mention that I have seen a third-party swf player that supports hardware acceleration for playback. I think this would be great if Macromedia built that in.

a) please add OpenGL functionality to Flash
b) please put speed into the built in components. RIA business applications are way to slow right now !

Thanks, Bernd

Improvements to the sound class to allow actual volume levels and frequency levels to be read in real-time.

Different blending modes for movieclips and graphics would be excellent (although it might be to late to implement this). What I mean is that instead of the normal alpha blending, you could also use additive blending (which would make particle effects and such look MUCH better), and other types of blending--some of which I have made into a list below...

-Normal percent based blending (Flash's current and only blending mode)
-Addive blending
-Subtractive blending
-Multiplicative blending
-Maximum blending
-Minimum blending

These blending modes would make Flash movies and games seem much more vibrant and would enable all kinds of new effects if added. Although they are very basic and simple additions, the improvement in visuals that could be attained would be on the same level as the addition of the Drawing API, in my opinion.

I´d also want to make my sugestions...

Component are great, but components smaller in size would be a great improvement to 8ball.

XML Parser (like the one in ColdFusion) would be great too

I think Flash is awesome and can't wait for 8ball to come out. I've always wondered if posts on these forums were actually seen by people who matter... Looks like they might be! Anyway, I have several simple and realistic feature requests that I would like to see in the new version of Flash:

DESIGN / UI FEATURES
> Put 'Flip Horizontal' and 'Flip Vertical' buttons on the Transform Panel
> Make 'Polystar' a seperate tool button (i.e. NOT in rectangle flyout). Take away the "Options..." button for Polystar creation and instead provide the controls directly in the Properties Panel
> Add a 'Symbol Sprayer' tool (with grid features)
> Allow shapes (e.g. rectangle, circle) to be created from centre or from edge
> More control over types of object snapping (e.g. snap to lines, snap to corners, snap to open ends, snap to midpoints of lines, snap to midpoints of shapes, ...)
> Easy panning (i.e. Alt + drag right mouse, drag middle mouse button, or something ...)
> DON'T move the "stage" when the docked timeline is resized vertically downwards - just leave it where it is and update the scrollbars
> Remember whether user likes to view 'Short' style frames/layers on the timeline by default
> Remember the position of the Library Palette (please!)
> More types of gradient (e.g. from corner, diamond, etc...)
> Allow more control over tweening (a bezier graph control would be pure AWESOME, but even if the tweening limits could be extended from +/-100 to 300 or higher for more exaggerated tweening it would be an improvment
> "Alpha Masks" - is this the right word? i.e. a mask with alpha values which partially show the content underneath rather than just fully showing it or not
> Frame label tooltips
> Make resized PNGS look smooth when exported in a movie - currently the pixels heavily distort...

DEVELOPMENT / SCRIPTING FEATURES
> Well obviously a more feature packed Actionscript editor would be nice (e.g. auto completion, refactoring, live templates, real time error checking, etc.) A lot of work for macromedia though...
> Give code warnings in syntax checks (as opposed to just errors), i.e. find undeclared variable use, illegal assignments, etc...
> Remove the colour coding of some 'keywords' that are used in components or other obscure objects (e.g. type 'arrow' in the editor - it is formatted as a keyword! why?)
> Allow hitTest() for two MovieClip fills, not just bounding boxes
> Set frameRate in script
> XPath addressing in XML objects please please!
> MovieClip._tint !!!

Apart from those, like everybody says, it would be nice if the Flash Player was faster! Flash 3D engines run far too slow - there is no call for that)

That's all I can think of right now, but I know there are probably a few more! I'll post again if I can think of them!

Thanks!

I just saw the 8-ball new featues vid clip floating around.

Yowza!

Tell me it's doing all those things at the same CPU usage as FP 6 or 7, and I'll be duly impressed.

For the upcoming 8Ball:

*Bring back the "Normal Mode" in the Actions Panel;

*More control over sound events/streams, like drawing the sound wave/channels (spectrum analyser) with components;

*Add interactivity to .FLV (e.g.:layered video with specific actions on each object)... all that streamed would be great!

*Documentation and Tutorials on every new feature, including some exemples on data-base connectivity with ASP.NET, Coldfusion, PHP and FlashComm.

Thanks in advance,
JohnnyD

Didn't read through all of the above, but this is what I really want to see:

Better Interpolation Features for timeline animation! Right now you get "Ease" with -100 to 100. How about some more advanced features? That's the key to smooth eye-catching animation. The Tween() class is great, but all those abilities should be built into the Flash keyframe timeline IMHO. That would just make my day. :-)

a more feature packed Actionscript editor would be awsome. I use SEPY its WAY more confortable then the Flash editor.

thanks for your work, i really hope that you are gonna blow sparkle away.

1. A better built-in method for traversing XML heirarchy. Accessing them by name would be especially nice, something like xmlObj.recipies.chicken[3].soup (I suppose this would be XPath addressing).

2. REGULAR EXPRESSIONS!!!

3. Please don't downgrade any part of Flash (eg. components) for any other of your yet-to-be-released products (eg. Flex). Current components are horrible, and discourage their use in RIA development. The only usable components I have seen are third party and custom components.

4. If a bitmap is imported into Flash, Flash should leave it as is. I shouldn't have to border my images with transparency simply to preserve their original look. Also, if the bitmap is at sub-pixel coordinates, it should be drawn to the nearest integer. There's no reason I can think to draw half the image correctly at a time, and it really doesn't seem to improve the visual quality of bitmap manipulation.

5. Clean up the Modify > Transforms menu. Scale appears twice, rotate appears twice (not counting the 90 deg CW and CCW), and are a bit counterintuitive at times.

6. Remember where all the panels were on last exit, and whether they were actually open or not. Especially the LIBRARY panel.

7. Speaking of the library panel, it's incredibly slow when moving things around (from one lib to another or to a folder) when performing operations on more than, say, 20 objects. There is no feedback, the IDE just freezes until it's finished.

8. Underlined text, anyone?

9. If I specify no outline (or no fill), I want it to remember that until I pick a color again, even if I use a different tool in the meantime.

10. Something OTHER than the standard windows color selection dialog (which includes no hexadecimal values).

11. DETACH the help system from the Flash IDE. If you need to use entire HTML pages for the reference, then it shouldn't be in an undersized window that is dependent on Flash being open (and yes, I know about livedocs).

12. "Delete" panel layout...? (hardly an issue I have, but I feel it should be there somewhere)

The new player looks awesome. I congratulate you on the video alpha implementation!

...and please don't add OpenGL.

canadian job listing indiana job search computer jobs in dubai florida key jobs medical transcriptionist jobs at home teaching jobs abroad missouri and job and listing nursing informatics jobs executive level jobs medical transcription jobs at home arkansas blue cross and blue shield jobs jobs in los angeles california attorney jobs houston employment iraq job security uk banking jobs in dubai law enforcement jobs in illinois special education jobs work at home jobs mn job search art jobs houston tx commercial banking jobs aviation jobs california florida job rebuilding houston part time jobs accounting job opening california city jobs louisiana job service employment michigan jobs employment services online job search fort meade job openings paramedic jobs aviation management jobs teaching jobs in australia job search new zealand employment job retail searching canadian aviation jobs iowa nursing jobs work at home job listing marketing jobs material engineering job state jobs in florida missouri education jobs kansas job listing it jobs europe find a job in uae job listing graphic artist jobs in arkansas employment job houston accounting job interview question job site new york city government jobs free work home computer job teaching jobs overseas

blending Modes!
You could really acceve very nice effects with that.

A better AS editor or a possiblity to intergrate a external AS editor.

Great job guys!

feature request:

automatic hyphenation for dynamic textfields

or/and

support for or/and ­ would be great!

sorry,

i meant the "shy" (soft hyphenation) character <wbr>

So did you guys fix bitmap distortion before implementing bitmap caching? Better performance and new features are great, but Flash has a *LOT* of bugs and I would prefer to see a significant amount of them fixed before you introduce new bugs.

Feature Request:

WMA Support (Well, at least provide a tool to convert is to MP3 when importing it~ I beg you!!)

More Gradient Style Fill

16-bit (double byte) characters dynamic text support - when I tried to access such characters with a Flash Communication Server proram with an English Windows all I get is scrambled characters (Try viewing Trad Chinese text using European encoding and wou will know what I mean)

Maybe I've missed it or something but the ability to save a .txt file directly from the flash player would be great.

I know that it's possible to send xml to a server and have a server scipt then create a text file, or send data to a browser window and have the user save the browser etc. etc.

For situations where I create a Flash app that relies on an external xml file, I want to create associated interface apps to write the xml files.

Here's my wish list (more to come when I remember the rest):

- Ability to use CSS to adjust the line-height (leading) of text. Currently, you have to use textformat if you want to adjust leading, but it would be awesome if Flash's CSS support allowed for line-height as well.
- Dynamic text justification? a la myTextField.justifyText = "left" (or "center", "right", or "all")
- The MovieClipLoader listener onLoadProgress would be _much_ more appealing if it actually worked when tested locally. Currently it only works properly when viewed remotely through a Web browser or if the MovieClipLoader object is loading a remote asset.
- Inline (embedded) JPGs or SWFs in a text field should _not_ randomly crash the viewer's browser (or projector) when viewed on a Macintosh.
- Flash performance in Firefox (on the Mac, at least) is abysmal in certain situations. While some people claim this is a Firefox issue, others claim it is a Flash plug-in issue. Regardless of its causes, with Firefox popularity rising in leaps and bounds it would seem advantageous for all parties to resolve these issues.

I'm really excited to see and hear about the performance improvements and updated video/bitmap abilities, and am even more thrilled to play with all the new stuff when Flash MX 2005 is released. I've been working with Flash since version 4, and every update keeps adding features that I just couldn't live without. Keep up the fantastic work MM!

oh yea, Particles and a virtual camera, maybe even 3d cameras like after effects

lipsync made easy!
animated characters made easy
with a skeleton to attach graphics to?
with behavior components?
with possibility to record movements!
artificial intelligence rules for the characters?
using Erlang programming?
*****************************************
grapical programming!
*****************************************
Real-Draw-Pro graphic manipulation!
*****************************************
capturing of the screen in other programs
to do manuals/tutorials with an added narrator voice
*****************************************
3D-like in Director but with X3D importing/exporting
******************************************
Functioning DXF-import
*****************************************
SVG export/import
*****************************************

Full (or at least improved) support for html tags and CSS would be very helpful.

The inclusion of the img tag is great but we need more control over the way the image is positioned on the page, I don't always want the image aligned left or right or to have text wrap around it.

Proper support for html tables (including background colours and borders) would be a godsend.

Great job on mx2004, really looking forward to the new version.

With Avid, Adobe and Apple selling video editing apps at a blistering pace. Hardware has finally become powerful enough and affordable enough to allow joe sixpack to edit video... the new video features I saw in the sneak peak (if implemented) will bring in a whole new breed of flashers to Macromedia.

Especially if the blend modes, layered video and alpha features make it into the final release. The reason you won't hear many requests for this right now and on this board is because...
...the folks who would eat that stuff up don't know about it yet. They still flash as a cartoon program with "some" video capabilities. However, ...

"if you build it, they will come"

Those features would basically make Flash MX 2005 a borderline compositing application. And when the indie film guys and compositors out there get a whiff of it then "Katie bar the door!!!".

Michael James III

I would kill for pixel editing capability in actionscript so that bitmaps (and prerecorded/live video streams!) can be edited in realtime, for example realtime bicubic image sharpeners (ala virtualdub) and bitmap analysis (rendering of mandelbrot fractels hehehe) would be possible. I'd love to be able to make a flash app that could attempt analyse biometric information of the users face from a webcam for example, or tell the user that that's a snappy red sweater they are wearing :-).
If it could return the altered bitmap stream to the server that would be even better. Perhaps this will already be possible in the upcoming image filters you have planned, but it seemed a bit ambiguous as to whether we will have this level of control uncovered in actionscript. It seems to me that this would not significantly increase the size of the player?

Oh, and could that be full RGBA control over the pixels of bitmaps, so that we can program live chroma-keying of bitmap content, ie, knock out that aforementioned red sweater?

All I want for christmas is to be able to write actionscript that can respond to right mouse button events.

Overloading methods. PLEASE. And protected vars would be nice too.

The ability to duplicate a movieclip in its current state rather than its original state would also be great. I built a puzzle class recently and couldnt have it use a loaded image because I would have had to load it again for every piece.

From a game dev perspective (downloadable casual games), it would be cool to

a) have access to flash drawing canvas from the application hosting the flash player activex control

b) be able to synchronize/composite application's painting with flash's painting in a seamless way on each rendered frame.

This way, applications could use flash for what it does best and use directx/opengl/native os graphics for what those do best.

If there's ever a plan to support directx/opengl drawing directly from ActionScript, that would be very cool also. Custom shaders support would be the dream come true (ultimate hw-accelerated performance combined with flash's ease of use).

Better performance on the mac, both player and authoring
The tabs feature in windows on flash mx2004 for open fla and swf files, but it is not on the mac ?

Sorry
but Flash development is going in the wrong direction! because gets more and more complicated - more professional. That is not good för Flash. Flash will lose the great Web-comunity of non-professionals. Flash will then loose the market!

My suggestions:
1. Go on developping Flash Pro for professionals needing all the goodies of an API more and more like C#.

2. Go also on developping something called Flash Middle resembling Flash MX for the amateurs loving Flash and needing some programming possibilities.

3. Go also on developping something called Flash Basic resembling something like Flash 3. AND GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE. AND YOU WILL HAVE A VERY LARGE MASS OF PEOPLE USING FLASH THAT PERHAPS WILL UPGRADE TO FLASH MIDDLE OR FLASH PRO. Most people wants Flash as a drawing application with some possibilities of interactive buttons, simple animations, sound possibilities, some video, text and images. That is all. And they do not like to program. Flash is not used in education - no students are learning Flash in schools. Why because most teacher cannot program. And most students cannot program. Flash Basic only needs to have the simpliest programming: some interactivity programming for buttons, some interactivity on the timeline. And a preloading component. That is all! And hopefully the people will turn to Flash again. Now the mobiles with Internet and Flash with video is the great tool to use to make applications for those mobiles. And this can become a massmarket. So give away a stripped version of Flash for free called Flash Basic. Or Flash Lite. Or Flash Junior. - to be used in schools on all levels - university students and teachers do not have the time to master Flash Pro. They do only want to have an easy presentation tool with text, images, sound and video - a little aninmations and easy programming.

DO THIS AND YOU WILL NOT LOOSE THE MARKET AS YOU WILL NOW MAKING FLASH JUST SOMETHING FOR THE PROS - MAKING THE EVERYDAY MAN TURNING HIS BACK TO FLASH!!!

I want it to make coffee. And donuts.

seriously though, I'd love it if you improved the optomisation of exported .gifs

i disagree with the guy saying flash si going in a wrong way. There is too much stupid people using flash and doing shitty website that the reputation of flash is clearly touched! I got a lot of friend that HATE flash because too often, when the suft, they go on website with bad flash design and/or animation.. it become too long... too difficult to understand the navigation... Now flash is doing the right thing.. make a real professional program because flash is FOR PROFESSIONAL. You can still make fun with it.. just buy a book , read it, and learn it.

I definately think a better actionscript editor is needed one which you can open workspaces and include all you project .as files.

Also the ability to support more HTML featues like BLINK and CSS tags like src so you can externally specify downloadable fonts - without having to go anywhere near swf and embed within that increasing the file size.

I agree with the String.trim() - so you can get ris of a particular character like whitespace.

Also the ability to compile several swfs at same time and specify order of execution would be handy

I don't know if this is possible, but I would like to see a sleep() method. Probably the parameters would be timeToSleep in milliseconds.

function doSleep()
{
trace('a');
sleep(1000);
trace('b');
}

So, calling doSleep(); will trace 'b' 1 sec after 'a' :)

Sorry if this was already discussed above - I read all of the posts in this thread like a month ago...

Top site for bridesmaids dresses, plus size bridesmaid dress, bridesmaid cheap dress,bridesmaid discount dress,bridesmaid dress junior,bridesmaid dress plus size.

I'd like to see some way of changing the reference point of the main timeline, since measuring from the top left corner of the frame is confusing.

Thanks.

As stated by many people already, I'd love to see flash get better for making deeper games. The biggest restrictions are slow rendering (especially with large scrolling backgrounds), slow actionscript and difficulty handling collision detection among moving objects. It'd be great if there was some way to have lower level control over bitmap blitting so that we could set up our own tiling graphics engines (or even built in support for something like this). Anyway, I won't get into specifics of how to accomplish it, but if these three areas could be improved flash would be a truly great platform for doing simple games.

Hey Flash Team,

How's about a 3D layer mode like in After Effects?

I have seen this in MOHO so it must be possible right?

Cheers,

Ben

How about an inverse mask method and/or layer type

Hello everyone. I have two suggestions, but I'm not sure if they've already been covered. I find it to be a great limitation that the brush size is affected by your zoom. I definately see it being useful the way it is, but if you select an area to zoom in on, set your brush and draw, you need to write down what brush you picked at what zoom you were at. Make it (or have an option to) more like a standard art program. Which brings me to my second wish. Please, please dont let the Adobe / MM merge affect your programs. I was very disappointed with Adobe when they aquired CoolEdit. All they did was release CoolEdit with a new name and New bugs. They later updated the errors they created, but charged for the update.
Please dont forget that without users, there is no product.

Well, thats just my two cents.
Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings and keep up the great work!

Context menu zoom level accessible programmatically for read/write, the alternate approach of changing the root movie clip xscale,yscale is an insufficient solution because doing so breaks panning when movie is running in a browser. Right context menu zoom options does not break pan. Would be reasonable to initiate the zoom command from a toolbar for example.

Please make more Draw-API-stuff

it must be possible to make a "bitmap"-fill, not only a gradient one.
Remove Artifacts.
When something is drawn at a high x_scale then lineTo and curveTo create Artefacts, maybe you should remove these bugs.

Hoping we get an overhaul of the IDE, which supports auto-completion, and code compilation, similar to what we get with the eclipse, asdt, mtasc combo.

A couple suggestions:

Allow the vertical alignment of dynamic text fields.
Allow *.pngs, *.gifs, *.psd files to be loaded dynamically.
More robust and/or separate code editor as mentioned above.
I found that when i load a video file into an FLA and delete it, the file size of the FLA is still the size of the FLA with video. Please fix this!

Can't think of anything else about the single product that has kept me employed for 5 years.

Keep up the good work Macromedia!

The ability to dock the timeline elsewhere in addition to the main window would be nice.

I work on a dual monitor setup where all my panels are on one monitor so that I can utilize the other screen to work on the document. But it sucks because I can't simply dock the actions panel and the timeline panel into one block. each are seperate blocks. rather annoying.

~Anil

please add a feature that makes it make and serve pizza for you

overloading methods. PLEASE. And protected vars would be nice too

Add hardware acceleration and all the good stuff from director like xtras 3d and acticex.
Macromedia would own the web and maybe jest maybe the world.
:)

Can i do following thing in flash:

1). Set stage framerate in actionscript.

2). Make on Projector file from different
swf files.

Q).Above options are available in flash?

Thanks.

It would be great if you can provide a method to explicitly call the garbage collector in flash. Many times, the incremental GC does the job on its own sweet will, when for sure you know that the bulk of the obj that were instantiated have now been deleted.

In my case the Memory peaks to aorund 400 MB and when it releases memory, it doesnt immediately reflect. I would be happy if we cud call gc like System.gc(); so that I can put that on onrelease event of a button to free a lot of memory.