Flash CS4 Professional

Adobe Flash CS4 has been radically redesigned and restructured. With CS4, Flash has finally turned the corner from a code-based authoring tool with an interactive animation element, to a designer-friendly space for illustrators to intuitively draw animation. Yes, draw animation--by shaping the path of an illustration the same way an artist would draw a vector path in Adobe Illustrator. With its revamped animation logic, and substantial new animation tools, Flash has now evolved into a much more accessible environment for designers who are comfortable with Adobe design workhorse applications like Illustrator, Photoshop , and InDesign.

The new Flash identity is immediately apparent in its new default layout. The stage--Flash's design surface--has been moved from the bottom to the top of the window, with the formerly dominant Timeline now dispatched to the bottom of the screen. The change is both functional and symbolic. Underlying the new look is a new logic and model for generating animation.

Intuitive animation tools

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Adobe Flash CS4 has been radically redesigned and restructured. With CS4, Flash has finally turned the corner from a code-based authoring tool with an interactive animation element, to a designer-friendly space for illustrators to intuitively draw animation. Yes, draw animation--by shaping the path of an illustration the same way an artist would draw a vector path in Adobe Illustrator. With its revamped animation logic, and substantial new animation tools, Flash has now evolved into a much more accessible environment for designers who are comfortable with Adobe design workhorse applications like Illustrator, Photoshop , and InDesign.

The new Flash identity is immediately apparent in its new default layout. The stage--Flash's design surface--has been moved from the bottom to the top of the window, with the formerly dominant Timeline now dispatched to the bottom of the screen. The change is both functional and symbolic. Underlying the new look is a new logic and model for generating animation.

Intuitive animation tools

Central to the transformation of Flash is the emergence of object-based animation. This means that animation properties are now assigned to, and edited as graphic objects, rather than residing in the movie frame that hosts the object. The change is profound--since the emergence of Flash from the Shockwave evolutionary tree, generating and editing animation has been rooted in defining frames (and in particular, pivotal frames called keyframes) in the Timeline, and enhancing them with ActionScripts. Now, a designer can create a complex animation without even knowing what a frame or a keyframe is. Flash CS4 does not do away with the Timeline, frames, keyframes, and scripting. But these elements are now submerged beneath new intuitive and accessible tools.

An analogy to Dreamweaver is helpful here: You can create complex HTML Web pages, and use pre-built Spry tools to create interactive elements without writing or even needing to know HTML, JavaScript, or CSS coding.

The heart and soul of Flash--and this is more so in CS4--is moving animation (motion tweens). To create this kind of animation in Flash CS4, you no longer start by defining starting and ending frames, and inserting keyframes where the animation changes direction. Instead, you simply draw on the stage, as if you were designing an illustration on the Illustrator artboard. When you Control-click on any object, the contextual menu allows you to generate a motion, or a shape tween (animation). And Flash automatically converts your object to a ready-to-animate symbol. You then drag the object on the stage to generate an animation path. The resulting animation path can be edited on the stage like any vector path.

To return to the Dreamweaver analogy--the frames, keyframes, and ActionScript coding generated as you create an animation on the stage in Flash CS4 are all still editable the old-fashioned way, so users who are comfortable with these modes of defining and editing animation can still use them, with no loss of functionality, from previous versions of Flash.

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