Jonesin’ for Some 8-Ball

November 18th, 2004

As many people know, the next version of Flash — codenamed “8-Ball” — is currently in beta and has been previewed at Macromedia conferences in the last several weeks. I have beta-tested versions of Flash in the past, but unfortunately, I neglected to register for this one. I am the worst kind of beta tester. I download the new builds and never end up providing much feedback to the development team. I’ll be the first to admit, I beta-test mainly to plan future content releases as opposed to actually helping fix bugs. I suppose it would be better to help out with the bugs and all, but as a major content provider, I figure just helping to push the technology is my contribution to Macromedia’s success.

Anyway… after seeing what’s in store with 8-Ball, I’m regretting more and more that I never signed up for the beta. It looks like the most exciting update to Flash since Flash 4 and the introduction of ActionScript. Here is what I’m really excited about so far:

  • Live Photoshop-like effects such as drop shadows, glows, and strokes
  • MUCH faster rendering and better processor management on both Macs and PCs
  • A better anti-aliasing engine for text (codenamed Saffron)… sIFR will benefit greatly from this
  • Fully alpha-maskable video, with much better compression as well
  • Much much more…

There are two videos I’ve seen which demo various parts of 8-Ball. Have a look:

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9 Responses:

  1. Josh Dura says:

    Thanks for the link Mike!

    #1 - November 19th, 2004 at 1:39 pm
  2. Dustin Diaz says:

    Wow, this really looks like this is going to blow Flash mx 2004 out of the water.

    #2 - November 19th, 2004 at 7:57 pm
  3. Jeff says:

    Yeah, I saw Moock’s a while back, this does look awesome. I was also thinking of how wonderfully sifr could benefit from this. I can’t get the first video to load though.

    #3 - November 20th, 2004 at 8:43 am
  4. Colin Toomey says:

    yeah looks very impressive. I wonder when “8-ball” is planning on being released? I can’t wait as it has a lot of good features i have always wanted.

    #4 - November 20th, 2004 at 1:14 pm
  5. mGee says:

    I hope that they at least make the mac panel system work like the windows panel system and allow for panels below the document window.

    #5 - April 10th, 2005 at 1:18 pm
  6. Luca Deltodesco says:

    How much powerful is flash 8 gunna be in terms of scripting and programming, im making a 3d engine atm im adding collision into it (finsihed collision for sphere to sphere) but with only about 70 vertices and 80 fills (with cameras, frustum clipping and culling, collision and flat shading lighting, i get about 6fps on my high end computer)

    #6 - June 4th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
  7. Bevan says:

    It is released ;0)

    #7 - June 10th, 2005 at 1:36 am
  8. Mike Gregoire says:

    Hey Bevan, explain. Surely you can’t mean the announcement of “Flash Platform”. That ISN’T the new fash version.

    #8 - June 10th, 2005 at 3:37 am
  9. Circa CFD says:

    8-ball.

    Flash MX 2005 ? “Much faster rendering”…

    #9 - November 21st, 2004 at 1:31 pm

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