FLASH PLAYER REQUESTS ONLY - NOT THE FLASH AUTHORING TOOL.

If you would like to request a different type of feature for the Flash authoring tool please find the appropriate post on this blog.

FLASH AUTHORING TOOL REQUESTS ONLY - NOT THE FLASH PLAYER.

If you would like to request a different type of feature for the Flash authoring tool, or the Flash Player, please find the appropriate post on this blog.

Thanks,
Flash Team

FLASH AUTHORING TOOL REQUESTS ONLY - NOT THE FLASH PLAYER.

If you would like to request a different type of feature for the Flash authoring tool, or the Flash Player, please find the appropriate post on this blog.

Thanks,
Flash Team

Here are the top requests that we've heard so far. We won't likely be able to do all of these so we need you to help us prioritize which are most important. Please comment on your top three favorites and feel free to suggest enhancements that are not listed here. Please also comment on how you would like to see these implemented, why they're important to you, etc.

- Code collapse/code folding
- Comment/un-comment buttons/shortcut keys
- Function browser (auto-populate a list of the functions declared within your current document and jump to the code when selected)
- Snippets
- Custom class introspection (code completion for custom classes)
- Class browser

Special Notes:

** PLEASE LIMIT YOUR COMMENTS TO CODE EDITOR FEATURES IN THE FLASH AUTHORING TOOL **

** WE ARE ALSO PLANNING ON MAKING IT EASY FOR USERS TO MAKE FLEX BUILDER THEY'RE PREFERRED ACTIONSCRIPT EDITOR SO PLEASE FOCUS ON THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURES TO HAVE INSIDE OF FLASH AND NOT ON ADVANCED THINGS THAT FLEX BUILDER IS BETTER-SUITED FOR **

Thank you in advance!

Flash Team

Here is one of many chances that you'll have to submit your feature wishes. Please limit your comments to feature requests. It also helps if you include a use case for your feature request - ie, how would you use the feature, what would be the impact to your business, etc. These are all criteria that we examine when we decide whether to build a feature or not.

* Note - you can also submit feature requests via the Macromedia Wish Form.

OK - let's here those great ideas!

-- Mike Downey | Flash Product Manager

UPDATE (2/8/2006): We have heard your requests for bi-directional text (aka right-to-left, aka Arabic text support) for the Flash Player. The Flash Player team knows this is important and knows it is a high priority.

PLEASE STOP POSTING THE SAME COMMENT OVER AND OVER AGAIN. We hear you. :)

Some examples are:
- Interactive slideshows like this:
http://music.channel.aol.com/live_8_concert/home
- Ad banners
- Interactive video presentations
- Interactive and unique navigation like this:
http://www.fantasticfourmovie.com/flash_index.html
- Simple games

Please use the comments section to post your suggestions for what you'd like to see.

- Flashteam

Post your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

First, I highly recommend that you check out the video of our MAX US 2004 keynote. In it you will see my demonstrations of some of the new Maelstrom features.
http://macromedia.com/macromedia/events/max/video/2004/
(click on "Day 1" and then the second thumbnail from the right)

Also, if you'd like to see the sneaks of 8ball, Josh Dura video taped the demonstration and posted to his weblog.
http://www.joshdura.com/sneakpeek/SneakPeeks_320x240.mov

Now, to summarize the features shown:
Maelstrom
Three key themes:
Performance
- Greatly improved ActionScript performance
- A new feature that we're working on called "Bitmap Caching" which essentially freezes a MovieClip at run-time as a bitmap, with all vector data still maintained, and allows the player to greatly cut down on processor stress by just shifting pixels around the screen instead of recalculating every vector at every frame. When vector data changes, the cached MovieClip is recalculated.
- Further optimizations in the Mac Player. You'll notice in the keynote video that the demos were all done on the Mac - on purpose.
Expressiveness
- A new "Filters" API that allows Flash users to apply effects like drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, etc at run-time, without adding file size. They also have full control over these effects at run-time, which means you can fully animate the effects.
- New precise control over pixels. Not much shown here, just hinted at. :-)
- A new text rendering engine - arguably among the best in the industry.
Video
- A new video codec, among the best in the industry. Superior quality without adding file size.
- Support for the alpha channel in video. This is super-cool. Users will be able to overlay video with transparency (even semi-transparent objects like water, fire, or smoke) on any other Flash asset, including interactive elements.

8ball
We're being a lot more secretive about what we're working on in 8ball so we've only showed a few interesting things thus far. We're still holding back on some big things. We don't want to give you sensory overload. ;-)
- Blending modes
- Full UI for filters (see above)
- Improvements to Undo/Redo (watch Josh's video very closely)
- Enhanced stroke properties (caps and joins like Freehand/Illustrator)
- Object-based drawing option (makes Flash treat shapes more like Fireworks/Freehand/Illustrator/Photoshop, etc. Toggle's on and off in the tools panel)
- Enhanced gradient properties including control over the direction of a radial gradient

Like I said, there's a bunch of other things that we're working on. This list is just a sampling that we wanted to show off in the sneaks. Also keep in mind that these are just ideas that we're playing around with and aren't guaranteed to make it into the final product.

We're still a long way from finishing the product. We just have a new philosophy to be more open about our product plans much earlier in the development cycle. We think it will help us build a better product.

The team can't wait to release 8ball to the world because the early feedback has been phenominal.

Regards,
Mike Downey
Technical Product Manager, Flash
mdowney@macromedia.com

I thought I'd make a quick post to catch everyone up on our progress.

We completed our last wave of initial customer visits two weeks ago as we met with customers throughout Europe. We've finally refined the spec for the product and are moving forward with major feature development. Of course, building the product is an iterative process that began months ago, and the features will continue to subtly change and evolve, but we're pretty happy with the core features for now.

We've been extremely encouraged by our meetings with customers. As we've mentioned in previous posts, we were able to meet with a very wide variety of customers - from enterprise to independent contractors - from all over the world and the feedback that we've gotten has been fairly consistent.

We're still listening to ideas from the community as well, so if you have ideas either post them in the comments or email them to wish-flash@macromedia.com

Here is the email:

I wanted to write up a description of a particular issue which I think demonstrates why something that seems simple to fix / change is not always so simple. Part of the reason I am writing this is to give some context to how we decide what we can fix at this stage in the beta, but also because this was the first time I have been directly involved in the decision making process.

First, some background. At this point in Ellipsis, we are really focusing on fixing any issues caused by changes made in Ellipsis. However, the team is very committed to making this a very relevant release for users, so if there is a bug or pain point that:

1. affects a lot of users
2. does not risk / touch a lot of the code base

then we will look at it (there should be some pleasant surprises with the next beta release).

So, yesterday the issue of the Find Window being modal came up. In case you didn't read the thread, the issue is that when you open the Find Panel for the ActionScript editor, it is modal, meaning that you cannot change / edit the text in the editor while the Find Window is open. This is inconsistent with other Text Editors, and to put it frankly, is rather annoying.

So, I saw the posts about it yesterday. I thought it would be something very simple to fix (just flip a Flag on the Window so it is non-modal). Based on this, and the input from the list, we decided to look into:

1. how easy (code wise) it would be to fix the problem
2. how risky the fix would be (would it affect code that affects other parts of the app)
3. would it cause any new usability issues.

So, the issue was sent to the management team (includes product management, heads of engineering, QA and IMD(documentation)), with a suggestion that we look into this. Everyone agreed, and the head of engineering asked an engineer to look into the issue. It looked like it would be an easy fix, and an easy win for users (which is a win for us).

So, the first item that came up was actually usability related. There were concerns that it would be confusing to users if the Find Panel was open but the ActionScript editor had been closed. What should the panel do if the user clicks find then? What if they keep the panel open, but open a new frame of ActionScript? We looked at how other programs handled this (Visual Studio, EditPlus and Notepad), and determined that this would not affect many users, and that the other programs have similar issues.

So, the engineer then looked into how easy and risky it would be from a code standpoint to make the change. It turned out, that in order to make it non-modal, we couldn't just flip a Flag, but rather had to call a new method. Ok, a little more risky, but not that big of a deal.

After further investigation, we discovered that we would actually have to change the window type, which in essence would mean we would have to reprogram the Window. Again, not yet that risky, but now we are getting into more significant changes.

Finally, and the straw that broke the camels back, we found out that we would have to completely rewrite how the Find panel actually finds data. This is because currently, when you open the Find Panel, it takes a snapshot of the text in ActionScript editor (since the user won't be able to change it). I am not sure why it is done like this, but do know that it is faster than dynamically loading the text each time and keeping the cursor position each time.

Changing how the Find Panel searches text is big code change and risky. Furthermore, making the change could now lead to significant performance decreases when searching large amounts of text. These factors combined to make the change too risky for Ellipsis, and we deferred it to the next version of Flash (at which time we are basically re-writing all panel and window code).

Anyways, I just wanted to share this with the list to give some context to why something that may seem simple, doesn't get fixed for Ellipsis. This was an issue that I thought would be very simple for us to fix, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated and risky than I expected.

Again, this isn't to justify why the Find Panel is modal, but rather to give some context to how we determine what additional things we can fix at this stage.

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com
---------------------end email---------------------

Hope that helps put some context around how we make decisions on individual issues and requests, and show how something that seems simple can ending of being pretty complex (for any number of reasons).

Btw, the issue described above is something that we are now looking at for 8Ball.

For this week's visits we're focusing a little more deeply on new and casual users. We've been doing a lot of this throughout the process, but we'd really like to get some specific feedback this week. We have a big goal of making Flash much easier to use for new users and people who have the tool but don't really use it that much.

One of the items on our must-do list is to bring back "Lessons" to the authoring tool. We still ship with sample files, and after the release of Ellipsis, we have really good documentation, but we don't have the in-product lessons like Flash 4 and Flash 5 did.

We know we want to bring these back - and make them better than ever before - but we aren't really sure about the best way to surface them. If you were a Flash 4/5 user, you might remember that upon first launch of the tool "Lesson 1" was automatically opened (it was an actual FLA file with "Enable simple buttons" and "Enable simple Actions" turned on). The lesson was also the sample file. I liked that.

However, now we live in the age of Macromedia RoboDemo. We *could* build a large library of RoboDemo animated demonstrations and make them accessible via a floating panel or some other piece of the UI.

We have a lot of other ideas, but we're curious to hear your feedback on this. What do you think would be the best way for us to provide "lessons" in the next release of Flash? Should they be animated screen-capture-style RoboDemos, actual FLA files like the old days, or something else? It's easy to say that we should do "all of the above" but, of course, we only have so much time and so many resources, so we really need to focus on one area.

Please let us know what you think. Your feedback is very necessary for this release.

アップデータは無償で Flash ユーザーに提供され、日本語版はおよそ2週間後にリリースされる予定です。

このアップデータでは主に下記の不具合が修正されました。

・パフォーマンスとリソースの扱い
・ドキュメント
・コンポーネント
・ユーザビリティ
・日本語などの2バイトフォント特有の不具合

これらの項目以外の分野でも、多数のバグが修正されました。

Ellipsis では全部で120の不具合（主に日本語版で日本語を使用した場合）が修正されています。

これによって Flash に存在するすべての問題が解消されるわけではありませんが、このアップデータを通して Flash の次期リリースをより完全なものにするために必要な課題に取り組むことができました。

パネルの管理などは内部のコードを書き直す必要があり、今回のアップデータでは対応できませんでしたが、次回の Flash のリリース時には検討いたします。

Ellipsis の日本語版はおよそ2週間後にリリースされる予定です。

I don't want to give away the names of the customers that we visited with, but I will give you an idea of the types of companies that we visited. We spent several hours each with a total of 12 customers in 7 days (and we're exhausted!).

- Animators
- Mobile content developers
- Television stations
- Large Corporations
- Freelance developers
- Design Agencies
- Flash Development Shops

Each customer that we visited with seemed to use Flash in a slightly different way for a slightly different reason, yet everyone seemed to share the same basic requirements. Above all else, every customer was most interested in the Flash team giving them new capabilities to allow them to build better experiences for their customers. This surfaced in requests for new graphical capabilities in the player, better design and animation tools, better debugging and testing - including mobile devices, more control over sound, better player performance, new ActionScript APIs, and a variety of other requests.

I think the team is well underway in meeting these requirements for the next release of Flash and the Flash Player. We're still continuing to define the specs for 8Ball, but our understanding of our customers' requirements is becoming clearer and clearer with each visit that we do.

We have two more weeks of travel in the coming months for requirements gathering. We'll be heading to Los Angeles in a few weeks, then we'll likely head off to Europe a few weeks later.

Development is underway, and judging by the response to our presentations in Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco, we seem to be headed down the right tracks.

We are, of course, also gathering requirements through a variety of other means including the wishlist, our various advisory boards, our field organization, our international offices, our developer community, our support forums, and of course, our various company blogs.

Feel free to post your suggestions for 8Ball in the comments of this post. We will, of course, be making several posts in the future asking all of you for some very specific feedback in some of the key areas that we're targetting with the next release.

Thanks, again, to all of the fantastic companies that we visited with over the last two weeks. We had a great time!

--
Mike Downey | mdowney@macromedia.com

We're all really looking forward to our trip and are very eager to learn more about the Japanese market. We also look forward to meeting with some of the brilliant Japanese Flash designers and developers like Yugop, who has always impressed me.

Mike C and I will try to make a few posts during our trip. The team's schedule is really full, but we always make time to share our experiences with all of you.

If you have any suggestions on sites to see or things to do during our trip, please don't hesistate to post them.

..
Mike Downey | mdowney@macromedia.com

This release includes over 120 bug fixes, a major documentation overhaul, and significant performance and stability improvements.

To learn more about Ellipsis, read Mike Chambers Developer Center article on macromedia.com, "Logged In."

A few other community posts about the Ellipsis release:
ASVGuy
ActionScript Hero
Flash-MX.com
Community MX
Flash Magazine

Enjoy. And please send feedback to ellipsis@macromedia.com

Mike Downey
Technical Product Manager, Flash
mdowney@macromedia.com