At last, a chance to properly review Flash 8 ... Macromedia Flash Professional 8, released as part of Studio 8, appears to have jumped up a class or two in the animation stakes and if you're looking for an unbiased review, well, you won't find it here ... I am unabashedly biased because, in my opinion, Flash 8 is fabbo ... so lets take a look.

The new look and feel of the product seems much cleaner to me, although at first it appeared to be the same as MX2004, subtle differences became apparent almost immediately. The old "undo" is back, the library can be pinned to stay on screen and, as has come to be expected from Macromedia, a hole host of other shortcuts and GUI features. One in particular is the new "Combine Objects" menu which allows objects to be combined (funnily enough) much like Illustrator does.

How about some filters in Flash to spice things up ... yes, you read that correctly ... filters ... drop shadow, glow, bevel, blur, gradient glow, gradient bevel and color adjustments can now be applied to movie clips and buttons. Alot of those nifty Photoshop Filters you've been itching to use in Flash are now there ... AND, filters can also be applied using ActionScript ... impressive huh.

Another Photoshop-esq feature that has been plonked into Flash is blend modes ... take two movie clips or buttons and blend them together with layer, darken, multiply, lighten, screen, overlay, hardlight, add, subtract, difference, invert, alpha, and erase. Hmmm, methinks we see signs of the "merger" surfacing already.

Stepping up to meet the search engine's head-on, Flash 8 incorporates a search-engine friendly description and title in the document menu. Search engines that look inside binary .swf data will be able to read and rank your Flash movie like they do with general .html files. This may go some way to prompting web developers to promote full Flash websites more, as the drawback was always that the search engines ignored them.

Major enhancements to the scripting language in Flash Professional 8 include the possibility to draw pixels straight to the screen using commands such as setPixel and getPixel. If you add to that, the already mentioned, "Realtime Filters" that can be applied to any object, then scripting in Flash is becoming powerful and exciting. In fact, it seems this version of Flash is aimed directly at animators and programmers, which is another thing we have come to expect from Macromedia ... when their users speak up and tell them what they want, they usually get it.

As usual, there is far too much content to to go through in one review, but I can't sign off without a few kind words on the video enhancements offered in Flash Professional 8. Flash MX2004 had some very basic import and export video features ... Flash 8 has a new Import Video Wizard which features advanced settings that are becoming almost mandatory in the video creation industry ... size, cropping, quality and trimming ... but further than that, without any programming knowledge, you can use the wizard to import your video and setup video player controls (fully functioning mind you, with slider controls and the works) just by following the steps ... yes!! Of course, most coders can do this themselves, but think of the time-saving opportunities!

There is a list of the major new features on the Macromedia site and you can read them if you click here. Expressiveness is one term that is bandied about quite a lot when reference is made to Flash Professional 8 ... why? Well, because it seems to me a lot of the new features give a lot of latitude to programmers and animators alike to express themselves with the use of Filters, Blend Modes, the enhanced Text Tool, enhanced Stroke properties, the old "Normal Mode" now called Script Assistance (yoh), not to mention the enhanced Mobile authoring.

The reaction to this release of Flash has been resounding applause for Macromedia and I'm completely in agreement and, as I said, completely biased ... Flash Professional 8 proudly gets a double thumbs up from me ... and I feel very happy to award the product the Editor's Choice award for November 2005. Nice one Macromedia.