July 15, 2005
Now that you CAN, consider if you SHOULD.
Well, it's no secret that everyone's buzzing about Flash 8 and the new features. Lots of new image filters in the mix. I am curious to see how these are put to use in real applications.
There are tons of uses for blur in Flash games, motion blur and z-depth blur being at the top of my list. But there are also cool things you could use it for in web design and page/content transitions.
Trouble is, there are also plenty of BAD uses for all of these new filters. I hope we don't degrade again to an age of navigation by obscurity, competing for the most heavily filtered but least usable layouts. I do confess that the blending mode chooser was always the LEAST used feature of my Photoshop tool palette.
Don't get me wrong. I am totally excited about Flash8, primarily about the speed improvements brought about by cacheAsBitmap. Games are a big market for Flash, and without the speed, you are severely limited in the type of game you can design. The clearer type antialiasing looks great, too.
Just remember that you must choose whether to use these newly found superpowers for good or for evil. :)
Posted by andy at July 15, 2005 11:29 AMI am very much looking forward to experimenting with the cache-as-bitmap functionality. That combined with some mathematical optimizations (reducing the frequency of trigonometric functions, which can be done now for Flash Player 7) should really speed up some of my game projects. Now if only Macromedia would implement double-buffering and hardware-assisted trigonometry!
Posted by: Brian Sexton at July 21, 2005 01:30 PM