Studio 8 Launch Event

I went to our local Studio 8 launch today.

There was some really cool stuff to see.

I am quite excited about the bitmap caching, this will have a major performance gain for us in the more complex controls and in scrolling content like grids I imagine and particularly for our Charting components it will really enable us to expand on their current capabilities significantly.

Back in January we added user interactive tools to our XPCharting components for drawing trends lines and doing real time chart analysis but to be honest once you started adding more than a few trend lines on the screen the performance quickly dropped off.

It was cool and to a degree useful but it was really ahead of the players capabilities so we put further development of the more sophisticated features on hold awaiting the arrival of Flash8. In one demo which Mike ran, the Flash logo was built from bouncing blocks that were drawn on screen row by row. In Flash 7 it ground to a halt quickly, in Flash 8 it ran fast and never slowed at all, all the way through to the last line. As I watched I could just imagine our charts drawing series after series without any drop off in performance, I guess for that feature alone Flash 8 is worth it for us.

Some of the other graphics capabilities will be very useful as well, with things like bevels and drop shadows now being built-in this will enable us to replace the equivalent functionality we currently have in our components that is provided by AS2 code, this should provide further performance gains and hopefully enable us to reduce the footprint.

Video is not currently a significant factor for us and neither is mobile development because of the lack of support for AS2, so those features whilst really cool don’t do a lot for us.

As a flash component developer though the most significant thing to me was that in an hour long presentation from Mike Downey the word "component" never got mentioned, ok I correct myself it got mentioned once in respect of the video playback control which was called a "component". Also the MXDJournal special on Studio8 that was being given away at the event also never mentions components. How things change in only a couple of years!

If you take this in conjunction with what has been said about Zorn recently it is clear that the writing is on the wall for the Flash IDE as an application development eniviroment, like it or not the future is Eclipse (well at least for another couple of years before MM move on to the next "next big thing" LOL). I am going to do an article for the blog shortly on our experience with Eclipse, ASDT and FDT so I will go into more detail on this later.

After hearing how, after years of refusing to listen to designers about gif/png support on the grounds that it was too heavy too include, they found it could be added in only a few kbytes I was dissapointed that we didn’t also see RegEx added for us application programmers, its hard these days to name another significant programming language that doesn’t have RegEx built-in even ActionScript's cousins JScript and JavaScript have long had this capability, oh well maybe F9 then....

Overall the new player enhancements are great and without a doubt were needed, but from a developers perspective I find it hard to call it the biggest ever release but none the less I guess the improvements are welcomed.

Rob