Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Just saw the Sneak Peek videos Peter Elst posted. This has to be said. "Holy shit." The tweens without keyframes is cool, but I don't use frames like that. Many designers will eat that up. Bezier curved paths, drop different displayObjects on the path, etc. Nice. Live video on the stage at author-time is cool. Handy. Now... bones coming to Flash with live preview on stage! How awesome is that? Draw your object, set down your bones with joints in the object, and bamo... kinematic system! C/C++ -> AS3 conversion (showing approximating some multi-threading... side topic not shown, but might FP10 get threads?!?)
THE DUDE PORTED AND PLAYED QUAKE in FP10.
Okay, I've seen the videos aral balkan has posted, and I am really psyched about a number of things. The hydra stuff is going to be very mind-blowing, depending on how its implemented and how we can interact with the stuff. Pixel shaders are super nice. Writing .hydra isn't the easiest thing in the world in my opinion. C-like sure, but if Thermo can do a lot of the heavy-lifting for designers, you'd think that AIF would have a more robust and easy to use editor. I'm sure thats on the drawing table somewhere.
Adding .rotationZ is going to be sweet. You won't be able to use models like you can in Papervision3D, but its going to open up a lot of creative possibilities for those who find PV3D a little daunting. There are a few 3D packages for AS3 (and 2 for that matter), that combining an engine and the rotation stuff Adobe packs in should == coool stuff. Now, it might be cool to add a z axis within the IDE too. Just sayin'. And if FP10 gets .rotationZ, I'd imagine that Flex and AIR will eat that up too. In fact, anything FP10 can do you should be able to use in AIR, Flex & Flash. Would be cool to see FlashLite get some of this stuff too. And then you can stop calling it "FlashLite" and call it something like "FlashMobile."
Speaking of Thermo, it looks f'in amazing. Lots of us have Flex experience under our belts, but we can't crank out code that fast that implements skins so quickly. Thermo is going to save us tons of time getting the look and feel of our applications completed, freeing up more time for heavier logic or creating different applications.
So, perhaps we can see a trend beginning here. Thermo is for designers (primarily) and Flex is for more "code monkey" type developers. They meet at the MXML highway. How long before the Flash IDE is turned into a different kind of beast, one that pumps out Flex/AIR apps too? It seems like things are running towards that Flex foundation, and thats pretty cool. Especially since Flex apps are really starting to look better and distinct. A year ago, you knew a Flex app just by its appearance. And perhaps that loading widget. But now & in the future, the spit & polish is being applied. Things are looking good. And getting things looking & behaving good is going to become easier. I'm not saying the IDE is going to go away, but I wonder if it will turn into a cross-breeding of the IDE and Thermo now. Would that mean that the Library, etc. would go away? No, but the end product could follow the same pipeline path ultimately.
FlexBuilder is getting a price drop I've seen. Very nice. Here's to Flash Player 10, Thermo, Flex Builder 3, AIF & Hydra, and that other stuff (VOIP) that I heard about today. Share you can keep, and the Adobe Media Player has a ways to go, but its kinda cool. In all, Adobe is turning up the heat here. Silverlight may have some things going for it, but it has a long, long, winding road ahead of it if it ever wants to come close the beautiful deity that is the Flash Platform.
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