Lee Brimelow made a video showing off some of Flash CS5 new features. For me the feature I’m looking forward to the most is the Iphone support but I must say there are quite a few improvements.
Some of the features to look forward to is the new video functionality with live preview and displaying the first frame. You can also change the skin of the player while in live mode. Also cue points are more advanced now with some extra features.
There’s also an updated colour panel. The new text features are really cool especially for embedding fonts.
The new XFL file format is essentially a zip file with xml data. The FLA format will not fall away completely but the nice thing about the XFL format is that instead of saving your project as FLA it creates a folder with all assets included which is great for version control.
Another nice addition is the SWF size history. Every time you publish the swf Flash will create a history of the size published.
Now the Snippets panel is one of my favourites. There are a lot of pre-defined code snippets which makes it great for learning AS3 and most definitely a great time saver. The actions panel is also greatly improved with code hinting not only for standard flash functions but also external library support.
Integration with Flash Builder is much more streamlined. You can code everything inside Flash Builder, test your code and debug with no hassle at all.
The deco tool is pretty cool now as you get pre defined brushes which is great for quick drawings. The nice thing about this is that the tool was developed with JavaScript and would therefore open up the opportunity to create your own drawing tools.
The embedding options were also improved and the best thing about it is that it uses SWF Object to embed the SWF.
The text tool framework was greatly improved. The nice thing about it is that you can wrap text much easier around objects with link containers. There’s also the option for multi column text and lot’s of extra styling options. A real great addition.
