Re: FLASH: Flash 4

[K]

I don't know if I am misunderstanding, but it seems that there are people

here saying they don't want a flash upgrade?  I must say that seems awfully

unusual.  IMO, the sooner there's an upgrade, the better, because yes, it

will take time for people to adopt the new version of the plug-in, and the

sooner it is available, the sooner a critical number of users will have it

installed.  That said, obviously it should not be released until it is

ready, as a buggy upgrade would be worse than no upgrade at all because we

would then have to support the bugs (my big gripe with the browser makers).



I can think of a lot of things that I would like to see in an upgrade:


1. Shockwave audio support.

SWA files are currently my favorite sound compression format for the web

(though beatnik is pretty nifty too).  Since macromedia already owns the

technology i would tend to think that it should not be too difficult to

support swa sounds in flash, which would be a vast improvement to flash's

sound capabilities, and certainly solve a lot of my problems =).


2. Text-handling

while flash's text handling capabilities are adequate for small amounts of

text right now, it is still impractical to make screens with large amounts

of text (something the length of this email for instance). Flash could

potentially offer all the benefits of embedded fonts and more without the

cross-browser compatibility or security issues.  But first, at the very

least, we need the ability to import text files.  The line space and letter

space options should also be more accessible.  And though I suspect text

wrapping features would be a bit much to ask for, one can always dream =).


3. Forms

This one is pretty self-explanatory, forms support in flash would be great,

and just imagine the nice little checkboxes we could design ;-).


4. Bezier curves

Although flash's forgiving line drawing tools are very nice, I have often

found myself wishing for bezier tools when trying to replicate a particular

curve.


5. image handling

Is it really necessessary for jpegs to be rendered from a 256-color

palette? I have had problems which I have so far been unable to solve

trying to display images in a swf file which I had imported as jpegs.  When

exporting to a swf file flash seems to convert them to a 256-color palette.

Although I realize that people viewing the page in 256 colors would see the

images that way, it bothers me that I cannot take advantage of the better

quality I would normally get viewing them in 16 or 24 bit color.  It seems

to negate one of the large advantages of the jpg format.  (if this is

something I am doing wrong I would apreciate it if someone would please

tell me)


6. ?Anchors?

I have no idea about the feasibility of this, but would it be possible to

call a swf file with an anchor like you can with an html file? So for

instance you could have a link to example.swf#anchor and it would open the

movie and take you to the frame for anchor? This may be a totally

half-baked idea as I've just thought it up and haven't really thought it

through, but I thought I'd throw it out there.


Those are my thoughts for the day =)


Karen


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