What's New in Adobe Flash CS3?

Adobe Flash is the premier program for designing rich, interactive content for the Web. It is also a leader in the creation of games, CD-ROMs, educational materials, and mobile phone content. Flash CS3 Professional contains many exciting new features and improvements to its existing capabilities, which you'll further explore in this lesson.

Starting up

You can start Flash CS3 Professional and explore each new feature as it is discussed. If you haven't done so already, install Flash CS3 Professional and the Flash Video Encoder.

See Lesson 1 in action!

Use the accompanying video to gain a better understanding of how to use some of the features discussed in this lesson. View the Lesson 1 video training file found within the Flash video tutorials.

Testing the waters

QuarkXPress 7.31 includes many web tools. To learn more, click here to read online X-Ray Magazine v5n2: It's Time for a Move: Quark Interactive Designer, or click here to read the PDF Version.

Flash CS3 Professional includes dynamic additions and updates that appeal to all types of Flash users, designers and developers alike. These include enhanced drawing capabilities, a new version of ActionScript, and a variety of improvements that make working with Flash easier and more enjoyable. Here's an overview of some of the updates you will find in Flash CS3:

Improved drawing tools

Flash CS3 Professional expands on its existing drawing tools with the redesigned Pen tool and new Smart Shapes tools. The Pen tool now works like the Pen tool found in Adobe Illustrator CS3. It provides improved handling and flexibility needed by professional illustrators, and also includes Add, Delete, and Convert Anchor Point tools, making it easier to create all types of drawings.

New to Flash CS3 Professional are the Smart Shapes tools, which offer a new level of flexibility for creating complex shapes. Without Smart Shapes tools, it can be cumbersome to create even simple shapes, like pie charts and bulls-eyes. These new tools make it easy to round corners, adjust angles, and define an inner radius for circles or ovals, allowing you to get exactly what you need with much less effort.

Unique shapes can be created more easily, thanks to the new Smart Shapes tools.

Copy and Paste Motion

There are many occasions when you need to have two or more objects on the Timeline animated in exactly the same way. In earlier versions of Flash, you had to repeat all of the hard work you put into one animation so a second animation would behave exactly the same as the first. Now, you can use the new Copy Motion feature to copy animation behavior from one object and apply it to another. With this feature, you can apply the same animation behavior to two or more completely different objects with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Reapply the same animation across multiple objects and layers with the new Copy and Paste Motion features.

Copy Motion as ActionScript 3.0

Bridging the long-standing gap between Flash designers and developers, Flash CS3 Professional adds the ability to capture timeline-based animation as ActionScript 3.0. While most designers prefer to create animation using the Timeline, many developers want the control and flexibility provided by programmed animation, using ActionScript. Any timeline-based animation can now be copied and pasted to the Actions panel for use with ActionScript 3.0's new Animator class. You can create intricate animation sequences in the Timeline, and then enhance them with ActionScript's dynamic elements and interactivity.

Animation created on the Timeline can be copied as ActionScript 3.0 for exchange with ActionScript programmers.

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