Day Two was, all in all, a pretty good day for me.
Started off with the Fireworks Business Website mockup session I blogged earlier about.
Best session of the day was, not surprisingly, Lee Brimelow’s session where he introduced the new features of Flash CS4. Let me just say this – if you haven’t looked at the new UI and features of CS4 then do so immediately. It is a *must* upgrade in my opinion, for guys like me who never really got into the timeline animation thing because it just seemed to take so long to create nice animations, with multiple keyframes, etc. The new Motion Editor, along with the 3D tools, are absolutely brilliant. There is a definite learning curve to the Motion Editor, but learning it will be well worth it. I’m actually excited to start working on and experimenting on doing motion/animation again in flash without using actionscript. I haven’t felt that way in years. The 3D tool and the easing settings are great, and there are a boatload of built-in effects of the common stuff that most people seem to use anyways. You can also create and share your own effects.
As Brimelow mentioned during the session, one negative to the CS4 release is that Adobe did nothing to improve the actionscript editor. I don’t really mind the editor as much as many folks do. It’s definitely limited, but I understand that Adobe wants people moving on to Flex Builder anyway.
The UI of CS4 is completely different too. Much cleaner and makes more sense. I always hated the timeline being on top, for example, versus underneath the stage. It just feels more organized working in it now. And little things, like simply dragging the end of the last frame to extend the number of frames on the timeline, instead of right-clicking on a later frame and ‘insert frames’, etc.
It’ll take some definite getting used to, and as I said the Motion Editor will take some time to learn, but it’s a definite quantum leap forward for designing motion in Flash.
I ended the day attending a session on Flash Lite. It was a horrible presentation and pretty much a waste of time. I won’t go into the details, but based on what I’ve seen and heard of Flash on mobile devices….it just isn’t there yet and not worth the trouble for those of us in the elearning space. I never really understood the allure of ‘learning on my phone’ anyways.
P.S. I’m bummed. I got a copy of the Thermo (now formally known as Adobe Flash Catalyst) prerelease yesterday but I can’t use it as they only gave out the Mac version (what’s up with that?!?). So, the first person to email me and pay the postage for it gets it. I have no use for it.