Flash

Adobe has released details about the latest version its Flash authoring tool, which arrives amid great uncertainty concerning the multimedia platform’s future.

Flash Professional CS5 boasts a number of improvements over previous versions, including better animation physics, improved typography controls, new code hints and snippets for building webapps in ActionScript, some new data formats, and better ability to add cue points to videos. It also has a few tricks for developers eager to publish apps to places where Flash isn’t allowed.

Flash is part of Creative Suite 5, Adobe’s new package of apps for building websites, assembling videos and editing photos. The new suite of apps, which Adobe says will ship mid-May, was announced Monday. We have a first look at Dreamweaver CS5 on Webmonkey, and we have a first look at the new Photoshop on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab.

Adobe Flash has taken a beating lately, especially from the hurricane that Apple’s public relations team generated around the launch of the iPad. Apple’s mobile devices don’t support Flash Player, so Apple is encouraging web developers to make their sites “iPad-ready” by removing Flash elements.

Also, last week, the new iPhone OS was announced, and it includes a new rule banning applications built with cross-compilers. Flash CS5 will ship with such a cross-compiler, Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, which lets developers build apps in Adobe’s suite of tools that can be exported with the click of a button and wrapped up as Apple-native code. Well, those apps won’t run on iPhones and iPads once the devices get their software updates this summer and fall, respectively. (There’s also a note on Adobe’s website Monday noting the use of Packager for iPhone is “Subject to Apple’s current requirements and approval.”)


Even with this cloud of negativity hovering overhead, Flash has plenty of steam left. The biggest factor in Flash’s success — video playback — is still a killer app on the web. The latest version of Flash Player (version 10.1, which came out earlier this year) addressed many of the performance and consistency issues that have been dogging Flash for the last year. And Flash will continue to be a key to video experiences in browsers, at least until the mess that open video is stuck in right now gets cleared up.

Even so, Adobe is smart enough to see that HTML5 is going to be a big part of the web’s future, which is why the company has built tools into Creative Suite 5 for rendering Flash elements as HTML5-ready Canvas animations, as seen in this video. As developer and blogger Simon Willison notes, this feature could be very useful for displaying newspaper infographics and other “Flashy” data visualizations on iPads and iPhones.

The HTML5 debate aside, here’s a rundown of what else is new in Flash Professional CS5.

Video cue points
If you’re building content around a Flash-embedded video file, you’ll be keen on one of the new enhancements in CS5: the ability to use cue points in the videos’ timelines to trigger ActionScript events.