Everything you always wanted to know about 8ball…
The 8ball IDE in all its glory. At first look, it doesn't look like a lot has changed from Flash MX 2004 but, as Mike showed us, there are some *amazing* new features and improvements hiding all over the place. See if you can spot some differences...
The new Filters tab in the Property Inspector.
More filter settings. These are for the Drop Shadow filter that Mike showed us.
A movieclip of a cartoon dog with a drop-shadow filter applied in Flash.
Mike made a copy of this, rotated it and placed it so that it would resemble a realistic shadow... Now if only we could have just the shadow remain...
"Hide Object" to the rescue! Hiding the movie clip leaves just the shadow. I guess it can't get better than this...
... but it does: The shadow is just a copy of the original, animated, movieclip and, when the movie is run, animates along with the dog. This is an amazing effect (and so darn easy to achieve!)
The other filters: Drop Shadow, Blur, Glow, Bevel, Gradient Glow, Gradient Bevel and Adjust Color... looks like there will be lots for us to play with!
Apparently, you can even save your own custom filter presets.
Nice stroke... would you like a gradient with that? 
Finally: Control over caps and joins. Yes!
A square join in Flash: Who would have thought we'd see the day! The single most asked for feature?
Some of the other new items on the Property Inspector.
Along with Filters, Mike showed us Blend Modes. These work like the blend modes in Photoshop and Fireworks but in real-time at runtime. The possibilities are quite limitless.
A new drawing mode to bring Flash in-line with other vector illustration tools. As you know, Flash has always had its own way of drawing, where shapes take bites out of each other when they overlap. From what we saw, 8ball will also allow a drawing mode that stops shapes from canabalizing each other.
The current drawing mode: Great for animation, not the best for illustration.
The new option: Each shape is self-contained and doesn't affect the ones around it.
The timeline looks a little different.
Look at that: Multiple libraries in a single Library panel.
The ability to pin libaries is going to come in very handy...
... Especially when working with multiple FLAs and multiple libraries. Mike showed us how you can pin one of the library panels and easily copy assets from one open FLA to another. Also, the library now remembers its position (yes!)
I have to say, from what I've seen, I am more excited about 8ball than I have been about any other release of Flash (and I've been through a few!) 8ball looks like it's going to kick some major you-know-what.
The Everything you always wanted to know about 8ball… article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Subscribe to my blog
fzavramnir
Anal, you say?
Михаил
Никита
Kwanza
Carlos Rovira
Hi Aral,
Thanks for this huge post… : )
All we know that 8Ball is focused on design and less on coding (cause we have Flex)…but…
what about v2 components…8Ball comes with v3 comps or something like that?
They fix v2 code? We can expect more components (i.e, like containers as we have in Flex?)
Thanks again Aral : )
C.
April 14th, 2005 at 5:35 pmAral Balkan
Hi Carlos,
We’ll just have to wait and see
Macromedia has been more open with 8ball than with any other Flash version — a move I wholeheartedly applaud. Hey, based on what I saw at FITC, they have every right to want to show off this baby!
April 15th, 2005 at 12:02 amfandango from mac
Hi,
and time when Flash 8 will come? thank you ..
Fandango
April 15th, 2005 at 7:39 amSönke Rohde
Another important question is if the compile time is decreased. Any information on that?
April 15th, 2005 at 8:25 amDaniel
Hi Aral,
cool to see you’re back, and with freakin’ fresh news about Flash! Thanks a lot for your post, hope we’ll be able to put our hands on 8ball soon.
April 15th, 2005 at 9:06 amRegards
Kim Hansen
I still use Flash for coding and mainly only for coding, so I don’t really care much about new effects, however cool they might be.
Has the AS2.0 evolved? Has the AS editor improved? What about the project tree?
It is strange that you, Aral, aiming mainly at RIA’s, become so excited about a shadow effect rather than a better coding environment. I guess, for RIA’s its only FLEX now or what?
April 15th, 2005 at 10:23 amAral Balkan
Hi everyone,
Lots of questions! I guess we’ll have to wait for Macromedia to release more information before we know
Kim: Regarding the AS2.0 editor, I currently do all my coding in Sepy (switched recently from Primalscript.) With built in Flush, I don’t see a productivity decrease in having two tools. For Flex, of course, there’s Flex builder.
What excites me about the upcoming Flash is that a lot of these improvements are in the player (Maelstrom) and will be available for use on the whole Flash platform (and that includes Flex applications.) From Macromedia’s demos, we can see an amazing speed increase in playback performance — again this will affect the whole Flash ecosystem.
April 15th, 2005 at 1:05 pmKim Hansen
I definitely believe the new effects can push the the graphical limits forward and give some amazing future online multimedia experiences.
I was just frustrated that all your excitement was for some extra effects, rather than better application creation. Especially since I (well, probably all of us) am sooooo curious as to what 8Ball will bring.
Anyways, thanks for your descriptions of the new effects and for showing the pictures.
April 15th, 2005 at 4:24 pmBDisOKE
Nice article!
April 17th, 2005 at 10:05 amLooks Macromedia is going to make a lot of people very happy with Eightball!
Rost
Very impressive, especially about drawing lines. Here’s my suggestion i will submit to Macromedia Flash WishForm too: i think Flash strongly needs a better lines rendering engine. Anyone knows lines in flash are really slow render. So developers convert lines to fills each time. It is very bad, because it is often important to go back to lines in further editing. Let’s submit it to Macromedia as much time as it takes to force implementing it!
(http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/)
April 17th, 2005 at 4:48 pmzeh
fandango from mac: No one knows when Flash 8/8ball will be released. In fact, no one has the slightiest clue even about the year it’ll be released. The only people who have such idea are people that can’t talk about it, that is, people from Macromedia and other people under NDA agreements.
The Flash Player 8 public test (they’ll probably have it) hasn’t even started, so the Flash 8 release must be pretty far away still. I’m betting for a release on the end of the year, but that’s just my opinion.
April 18th, 2005 at 2:51 ame2easy.com
Did they demonstrate a prototype of Central based on FP8?
Can the bitmap effects be applied dynamically by ActionScript methods?
April 19th, 2005 at 3:51 pmStripey
Hey, all you developers have had the lion’s share of Flash up until now, if I may say so.
From Flash 5 right up till MX2004, it’s quite clear Macromedia have been focusing on the code engine and have neglected the designers pallette to a considerable extent.
I’m really pleased to see they’re on the up and up with some -genuine- improvements to the designers artillery within Flash. I’d much rather be spending more time in Flash than stuffing around with filters in adobe’s photoshop and then having to import them back in. All I can say is I hope they’ve thought about weight constraints for online media and the relative uselessness of nice-looking (but sometimes heavy and always processor intensive) ‘effects’ like edge softening.
Rack up the 8ball!
May 19th, 2005 at 6:18 pmThe Lemur
“A square join in Flash: Who would have thought we’d see the day! The single most asked for feature?”
What is a square join?
July 20th, 2005 at 9:37 pmpete
Hey, concerning the release date of 8ball… At Flashforward in NY earlier this month, Kevin Lynch delivered the Macromedia keynote. I’m almost sure he said that 8ball would be released in late summer or early fall of this year. Can anyone confirm this?
July 22nd, 2005 at 4:37 ampete
I just read that Flash Player 8 beta came out a few days ago. If anyone is interested, it’s available at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/public_beta/
July 22nd, 2005 at 4:46 amchall3ng3r
get the standalone flashplayer with built-in SWF8 converter from my blog: http://chall3ng3r.blogspot.com/
// chall3ng3r //
August 6th, 2005 at 4:40 amLacuna
Wow, I’m seriously in love…. so many amazing new features to play with.. is there ANYTHING bad with this new release?
December 7th, 2005 at 6:56 pmwishsomez
sun shining well!!!
August 26th, 2008 at 11:39 amsun shining well!!!
sun shining well!!!
fedrewas
August 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pmhttp://rock-life.3dn.ru
anonymailer
hey totorial seems fine but better screenshot is necessary. Man get a screenvirtuose or something for this professional work
October 8th, 2008 at 2:11 amanonymailer
by the way pretty character, indeed.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:13 am