Flash 8.0 preview: Unveil the thin veil of 8 ball

In the last quarter of 2005, Macromedia Company will launch the latest version of flash2005, and give the latest version of a very humorous project code-named "8 Ball."

Does "8 Ball" still have a lot of technical problems like the previous flashmx 20,041? or "8 Ball" can become the real flash world leader? or "8 Ball" developed by the project to better meet the needs of the commercial market? It's really premature for us to jump to conclusions, but some of the ball are in front of them and get the following impressions through their contact with "8".

"8 Ball" is a powerful feature of the text rendering engine , saffron can be text rendering on the screen, which will be a great flash breakthrough. Especially when it comes to small words, it works very well. This is a very useful function for the designer, so the history of Flash can not be made to the font effect rendering will be completely rewritten. Macromedia Company publicly said that "8 Ball" will provide the alpha channel in the Flash movie, and some filters will make many people benefit from it.

The Macromedia Company also exposes two features that sound interesting, one of which is how bitmaps are handled. The concept of bitmap caching has been introduced, and vector graphics are optimized for processor rendering, both of which lead to more powerful performance improvements. Previously, such as control bitmaps and create dynamic effects, can only be implemented in Java and director, and in the "8 Ball" plan, the way to control the bitmap can really change the way the Flash movie display. They are not only vector graphics, but also not only flash video, but can really implement dynamic bitmap .

The other is support for the e4x (ECMAScript for XML). This may be said to be the "8 ball" developers to pursue. Support for E4X can revolutionize the way we use ActionScript to interface with data sources. Flash Remoting also does not solve the problem of using Flash as a data interface. Although the flash remoting interacts with the Web service, it cannot interact with the. NET DataSet. With e4x, ActionScript can become a powerful programming language, a real development platform. To implement E4x,macromedia will provide us with a true regular expression object. It provides an original ActionScript object to process XML, completely altering the way in which ActionScript traverses the XML tree.

However, there are still many people "8 ball" holding the wait-and-see attitude, and even some people are not optimistic about "8 ball". Some people are convinced that there is a permanent approach, one that can be the only standard for everyone using alpha video, not just the alpha channel in Flash movies. And for the flash in the implementation of similar fireworks bitmap and layer effect, also not much interest. Some people even regard "8 ball" as a gamble, however, "8 ball" the likelihood of success is very big.