Flash Professional CC | Eshwar | Release Notes

Welcome to the Flash Professional CC (codenamed Eshwar) Release Notes.

These release notes describe the changes in the May 2015 prerelease of Flash Professional CC, codenamed Eshwar. Eshwar Prerelease Drop-9 offers the following features and enhancements:

• New SymbolType key in CPSDK
• Bug fixes

Adobe Confidential

All information in this document is considered confidential and is covered under the nondisclosure agreement you signed before entering the prerelease program. Do not distribute or discuss the content of this document with anyone outside the prerelease program.

Prerelease Build Details

This Prerelease Software is a prerelease version, does not represent a final product from Adobe, and may contain bugs, errors, and other problems that could cause system or other failures and data loss. Adobe may never commercially release the Prerelease Software. If you received the Prerelease software under a separate written agreement, such as theAdobe Systems Incorporated Serial Agreement for Unreleased Products, your use of the software is also governed by such agreement. You will return or destroy all copies of Prerelease software upon request by Adobe or upon Adobe’s commercial release of such software. Because there may be bugs, please do not run this prerelease build in a production environment, and save your work frequently.

Feature Requests, Bugs, and Feedback

Your feedback will help improve Flash Professional. Please share your feature requests and bug reports on the Flash Professional prerelease website (https://prerelease.adobe.com/).

Introduction

Adobe® Flash® Professional is the industry-leading authoring environment for producing expressive interactive content. The next release of Flash Professional is codenamed ‘‘Eshwar’’.

Flash Pro has been the tool of choice for designers for a very long time and we are embarking on an exciting journey to make it even more compelling as a solution for animation on the web and beyond. Continuing on our recent efforts to add support for additional output formats, the new release provides optimized HTML5 output, WebGL support, and an SDK for building support for your custom platforms. Your feedback in this endeavor is important and invaluable.

Installing Flash Professional

Installation considerations

If you have a creative cloud account for Flash Professional CC, you can use the same account for the Eshwar prerelease also. To install the build, follow the instructions in the “Install the prerelease build” section. To create a new Adobe ID, go to https://creative.adobe.com/join/starter.

Installing the prerelease build

The M09 build of Flash Professional CC (Eshwar) prerelease for Flash Professional CC is a full-installer and it can co-exist with another released version of Flash CC. However, if you have installed one of the previous prerelease builds, you must uninstall it before installing the M09 build. Download the M09 build for your operating system and run the installer to work with Flash Professional CC (Eshwar).

System Requirements

What's new in Flash Professional CC 

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 9

New SymbolType key in CPSDK

ILibraryItem::GetProperties() returns an additional key SymbolType for symbols. The value of this key can be Button, MovieClip, or Graphic.

Bug fixes

General:

• IK Layering Problem - WebGL publishes IK in an order inverse to what you see on stage.
• Crash while trying to delete a motion tween by selecting its anchor point.
• Flash Pro crashes while trying to launch the application after installing the pre-release build M08.
• The process of dragging the playhead to the edge of the timeline panel to scroll forwards/backwards is unreasonably slow.

CPSDK fixes:

• Graphic instance with a tween and looping option set to "single frame" is not exported correctly.
• If the dynamic text field is empty, then you cannot get text properties as IClassicText::GetParagraphs() returns an empty list. For empty dynamic text, IClassicText::GetParagraphs() now returns a paragraph, which contains all the information such as font name, font color, and so on.
• Shapes, which were part of the shape tween, are not reused.

Sample Plugin and Sample Runtime fixes:

• The images and sounds folders are not automatically created in the output folder if the output contains images or sounds.
• The latest version of Google Chrome displays the published output in black color.
• Corrupted VS2012 project file. 

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 8

Reset timeline zoom to the default level

You can now reset the timeline zoom to the default level with one click as shown in the image.

Frame rate control in Timeline panel disabled

Frame rate control in the timeline panel has been disabled to avoid accidental changes. In the current release onwards, the frame rate cannot be changed using the timeline FPS control. However, users can continue to modify the frame rate through New Document (File > New), Document Settings (Modify > Document) dialog boxes, and document Property Inspector.

Improved Hide Edges feature

When you select a shape on the stage and click View > Hide Edges hides the selection pattern on the shape. However, when you select a color from a color/swatch panel disables the "Hide Edges" option, which designers were not happy with. The behaviour has been changed in the current release to keep the "Hide Edges” option enabled till the object on the stage is deselected.

Integration of latest CreateJS libraries  

This pre-release drop of Flash Professional comes with the latest CreateJS libraries integrated.

Since the latest libraries are not yet hosted via CDN, clear the Hosted LIbraries checkbox under the Advanced section of the Publish Settings dialog box (Edit > Publish Settings > Advanced) to see the output.  

Changes in CPSDK and sample plugin

This release includes the following enhancements to CPSDK and the sample plugin:

• IK content is now converted to frame-by-frame animation when you paste it into a custom platform document. Bone tool is disabled in custom platform documents.
• The sample plugin has been modifies to reuse the bitmaps used for shape fills.
• Mongoose web server has been integrated to the sample plugin.

Bug fixes

• Linkage names of library items are now preserved in HTML5 Canvas and WebGL documents.

CPSDK bug Fixes:

• Crash when the timeline contains masked hidden layers.
• The UpdateMask command was referring to objects that were not added to the ITimelineBuilder.

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 7

Bone Tool for WebGL

Starting this release, the Bone Tool for inverse kinematics animation has been enabled for the WebGL document type. 

Bone tool enhancement

This prerelease drop includes changes to restrict scaling of bones with zooming of stage, which help in working on finer details without obstructing the graphics in zoomed stage.

Importing audio with H.264 video import

Audio playback is now enabled for H.264 videos. You can now select the ‘Include audio’ option while importing H.264 videos. Once imported to the stage (with ‘place instance on stage’ option selected), scrubbing the timeline should play the audio for the relevant frames. Playing the timeline (Enter) should playback the animation at the fps of the imported video so that the audio is in sync with the video frames on stage.

Note:

• This feature is still work-in-progress.
• The .fla files containing H.264 video that have been saved using a pre-release build need to be re-created.

Invert selection

This new option in the Edit menu and the Stage context menu inverts the selection of currently selected objects or shapes on the stage. 

Integration of latest Flash Player and AIR SDK

This prerelease drop comes to you with the Flash Player version 17.0 and AIR SDK 17.0 integrated. 

Bug fixes

This pre-release drop contains fixes for the following bugs, which were reported by prerelease users:

WebGL:

• Rendering glitches when playing animation.
• gotoAndStop() does not work immediately after adding child to the stage.

Bone tool:

• Bone tool: Dragging the bone does not work when object is not selected.

Others:

• Flash crashes when pasting from Photoshop into the Library while the Timeline layer is locked.
  

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 6

Bone Tool for inverse kinematics animation

This prerelease drop reintroduces the bone tool that was deprecated in the CC release. The bone tool gives you the inverse kinematics (IK) capabilities in Flash.

IK is a way of animating objects using bones chained into linear or branched armatures in parent-child relationships. When one bone moves, connected bones move in relation to it. Inverse kinematics lets you easily create natural motion. To animate using inverse kinematics, you simply specify the start and end positions of bones on the Timeline. Flash automatically interpolates the positions of the bones in the armature between the starting and ending frames.

You can use IK in the following ways:

• By using a shape as a container for multiple bones. For example, you can add bones to a drawing of a snake so that it slithers realistically. You can draw these shapes in Object Drawing mode. 
• By chaining symbol instances. For example, you can link movie clips showing a torso, arm, lower arm, and hand so that they move realistically in relation to each other. Each instance has only one bone.

This prerelease drop also introduces on-stage controls for the bone tool. The onstage controls allows you to switch between Locked, Open, and Constrained states for Rotation and Translation properties of individual bones in the IK armature. You can now directly adjust these constraints on stage with accuracy using clear visual feedback.     Notes:

• Some of the bone tool features may not work as documented because the work on the feature is in progress. 
• See this Flash Professional CS6 article to learn more about the bone tool.

Auto-recovery optimizations

The following auto-recovery changes have been implemented in this pre-release drop to avoid continuous loop of auto-recovery for short auto-recovery duration:

• At each auto-recovery interval,  snapshot for all files modified after last auto-recovery are created.
• Next auto recovery timer is started only after this process is completed.

Remember audio sync options in PI

Audio in Flash Professional has been enhanced in this prerelease drop to remember the sync options in property inspector. If a sound is selected from the “Sound” section of the Properties Inspector, then on trying to set another sound on a new keyframe from the Properties Inspector, Flash remembers the sync options “Stream” or “Event” of the previous sound.

Increase in timeline footer height

Height of the timeline footer containing the different controls has been increased with some padding around the controls. This will reduce the chances of unintentional modification of the hot-text controls like FPS. 

CPSDK enhancements

In Custom Platform Support SDK, all the button instances were treated as movie clips. Starting this prerelease drop, the new APIs will support buttons in DOM and the IFrameCommandGenerator service.

Bug fixes

This prerelease drop contains fixes for the following bugs, which were reported by prerelease users:

• Crash while dragging color slider under a new document's properties during auto-recovery.

CPSDK bug fixes:

• Crash while publishing an FLA that contains graphic instances.

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 5

Import H.264 videos

In addition to FLV videos, this Prerelease drop introduces an option to embed H.264 videos in the timeline. When an H.264 video is embedded, the frames of the video will be rendered on the stage when you scrub the timeline. This enables you to use videos as a guide to synchronize your animation on stage. Since the Flash Player and other run-times do not support rendering embedded H.264 videos, they will not be published. This is a design-time-only feature. 

To import video:

Click File > Import > Import Video and select the Embed FLV or H.264 and play in timeline option as shown in the following image:

 

The imported video file renders on stage as shown in the following image:

Currently, in the import wizard, the option to place a video on the stage is enabled only when you are on a guide layer. If you are on a non-guide layer, the video will be imported to the library, but not the timeline. You can however, drag-and-drop a video from the library to a frame, irrespective of whether it is on a guide layer or not. This workflow is scheduled to change in upcoming prerelease drops to make the workflow more streamlined.

Notes:

• You can also use File > Import > Import to Stage and File > Import > Import to Library workflows to import video.
• When you save the FLA, the imported video will be embedded within the FLA as well.
• On trying to publish a FLA with H264 video content on a non-guide layer, a warning dialog appears indicating an unsupported target platform.
• As this is an design-time-only feature, audio in the video clip will be disabled.
• The UI for this feature is still work-in-progress and is subject to change.

Auto-recovery optimization

The following auto-recovery enhancements are part of this prerelease drop:

• Flash Professional does not create unnecessary auto-recovery files. An auto-recovery file is created only if the document is modified after the last auto-recovery files were created.
• Progress bar will be displayed only when the FlashPro App is in focus.
• Auto-recovery file is removed only after completing a successful save operation.

CreateJS library integration 

The latest CreateJS libaries have been integrated with Flash in this prerelease drop.

Code snippet support for WebGL

In this prerelease drop, code snippets for WebGL doctype have been added for some commonly used actions. 

Note: This enhancement is available only in the English language version of this prerelease drop.

CPSDK enhancements

A new CPSDK API has been added to get the bounds of IClassicText objects while using the IFrameCommandGenerator service.

Download the CustomPlatformSupport_Eshwar_M05.zip file from the downloads section to work with the latest custom platform support SDK and sample plugin.

Bug fixes

This prerelease drop contains fixes for the following bugs, which were reported by prerelease users:

• The new swatches panel was very large with fixed swatch size. The panel has now been made reasonably tall to display all the default swatches.
• The color palette on the toolbar should be made collapsible. 
  
• Rendering issues in WebGL documents after upgrading to Chrome browser versions 40 and above.
• Typo in a HTML5 template.
• The Images and Export Bitmap as Spritesheet check boxes in publish settings have to be linked. 
  

CPSDK bug fixes:

• The IFLADocument > GetTimelines function returns scenes that were deleted. 
• An issue that causes an assert while using the IFrameCommandGenerator service.

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 4

Organize imported GIFs in library

This enhancement allows you to import Animated GIF files in a more organized way so that you can keep your library in proper order. In previous releases, the imported GIF assets were placed in the library root folder without proper naming. In this release, a folder with the GIF file name is created and all the associated bitmaps are organized under it. As shown in the following image, the bitmaps are now named appropriately based on their sequence. 

Save optimizations

This release comes with the following Save optimizations:

• Save algorithm optimization resulting in faster saving of FLA
• Showing progress bar while auto recovery is in progress

HTML5 canvas output optimizations

The Optimize Graphic check box has now been removed from the Publish Settings dialog box as Flash Professional performs this optimization implicitly while publishing HTML5 Canvas documents.

Masking support in CPSDK

This release supports masking in the IFrameCommandGenerator service. The new interface ITimelineuilder2 that is from the existing ITimelineBuilder interface contains the functions that the plugin has to implement to make this feature work. 

Download the CustomPlatformSupport_Eshwar_M04.zip file from the downloads section to work with the latest custom platform support SDK and sample plugin.

Bug fixes

Based on prerelease feedback, the following issues were fixed in this release:

Export as bitmap as sprite sheet

• In the previous build, bitmap fills did not work when you export bitmaps as a sprite sheet. This issue is now fixed.
• The error in Chrome console while using an imported bitmap image in conjunction with interactive JavaScript is now fixed. Flash now uses a local server during Test Movie from HTML5 Canvas documents to avoid any cross domain access errors during test movie.

Audio

• Timeline Audio Waveform Drawing corrections: In the previous prerelease drop, waveform on the timeline changes when you split the audio on the timeline, which gave users an impression that the split was not correct. This has been fixed.
• The Wacom tablet issue related to the handle/point not being released while editing in Edit Envelope panel even after lifting the pen off the tablet is now fixed.
  

Panel locking

• Based on prerelease feedback, the locked panels have been made resizable.

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 3

Export bitmap as sprite sheet

Export sprite sheet as bitmap allows you to pack all the bitmaps in canvas document in to a sprite sheet. A new Export the Bitmap as Sprite Sheet check box has been added and enabled by default. You can specify the maximum size of the sprite sheet by giving the height and width values in the publish settings. This enhancement reduces the number of server requests, which in turn results in improved performance. 

Known issue: With this change, bitmap fills do not work. 

Panel locking

A new option, Lock All/Unlock All, has been added to the fly-out menu of the panels to lock the dock. Once a dock is locked, all the panels in the dock cannot be resized or moved. This feature helps you prevent accidental drag and resize of panels. 

Library search by linkage name

In this release, the library search panel has been enhanced to include searching for symbols by ActionScript linkage names in addition to searching by symbol names. 

Audio splitting design enhancement

Audio splitting has been enhanced in this release to eliminate the need to insert a blank keyframe on split audio.

Flash Player 16.0 and AIR SDK 16.0 integration

AIR 16.0 for iOS allows you to generate 64-bit binaries to comply with the Apple requirement starting February 1, 2015.

With the AIR 16.0 update for iOS, the Enable Faster Packaging option under the Deployment tab of AIR for iOS Setting dialog has been enabled by default.

Note: Since AIR 16.0 has not been released for Android yet, shared runtime is not available for the version. You can use the embedded AIR runtime for Android applications.

Bug fixes

Avoid file corruption during network save.

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 2

HTML5 canvas output optimizations

Eshwar prerelease drop-1 contained HTML5 canvas output file size optimizations of not exporting unused library assets such as bitmaps and sound present in the library. This release provides the following optimizations of the next level:

• Assets on guide layers will not be exported.
• Assets on the hidden layer will not be exported if ‘Include hidden layers’ is not selected in the Publish Settings dialog box.
• Assets on unused frames of graphic symbols will not be exported.

If your content has assets that fall into any of the above-mentioned categories, Flash Professional optimizes the size of your published output by leaving out all unused and hidden assets.

Brush size scaling according to the zoom level of the stage

With this release, Flash Professional scales the the brush size proportionately to the changing zoom level of the stage. This allows you to draw seamlessly adjusting to any zoom level and preview your work as you draw. If you want to revert to the earlier default behavior of brushes maintaining a constant pixel size even when you change the zoom level of the stage, you must disable the 'Stage zoom level' checkbox in the brush Property Inspector. 

Universal Doctype converter

The universal document type converter enables conversion of your existing FLA projects (of any type) to any other document type such as HTML5 Canvas or WebGL.

To use this feature, click Commands > Convert to Other Document Formats and then select the target document type and specify the path of the converted file.

Motion Editor enhancements

The Paste functionality has been enhanced as follows:

• Paste: Till the 2014.1 release, when you copy a curve in the Motion Editor and use the Paste option to paste it in a new range, it pastes within the current curve’s range and not with absolute values. This has been changed now and the Paste option pastes the curve with absolute values.
• Paste to fit current range: This option now replicates the old Paste operation and pastes the curve within the current curve’s range and not with absolute values. 

Bug fixes

Brush issues (3859694) with Monoprice graphic tablet have been fixed.

What's New in Eshwar Prerelease Drop - 1

Export unused assets in the library

The new 'Export unused assets in the library' checkbox in the publish settings for the HTML5 Canvas document type now enables you to control the exporting of the unused media assets such as sound and bitmaps present in the library. This setting is on by default, which means that the unused media are exported. If you want to prevent exporting all unused assets, you can clear this checkbox to ensure that only the media items (sound, bitmaps) that are used on stage are exported. This could result in large savings in the output size, particularly if you had a large number of such media items in the library that were unused.

Audio splitting

The stream audio embedded on the timeline can now be split at ease using the Split Audio context menu. Split Audio inserts a blank keyframe and continues the audio in the next keyframe, thereby enabling you to pause the audio when it is necessary and then resume the audio playback from the point it was stopped at a later frame on the timeline.

To split an audio clip on your timeline, do the following:

1. Select File > Import > Import to library. 
2. Select the audio clip and import it to library. 
3. Create a new layer on your timeline and add the clip to the layer. 
4. Under Properties > Sound, select the Sync type as Streaming.
5. Right-click on the frame at which you want to split the audio and click Split Audio. The next frame after the selected frame is converted in to a blank keyframe, thereby inserting a pause at that frame. 

Paste and overwrite frames

The new 'Paste and Overwrite Frames' context menu option enables you to paste the copied frames by replacing the exact number of frames without pushing the frames forward. This replaces the existing way of selecting the exact number of frames which you want to replace with the same number of copied frames. For example, if you want to copy ten frames from a timeline and replace the exact number of frames in another timeline, just copy the ten frames and use the Paste and Overwrite Frames frames to paste it at the starting frame-the next ten frames will be overwritten with the copied frames. 

Bug fixes

• iOS simulator issue related to Xcode 6.x while debugging or testing a movie with AIR for iOS.
  
• Negative RGB % Color Effect resets to 0 on save, reopen, duplicate, and copy-paste operations.
  
• Issue with color transform matrix for Custom Platform Support.
  
• FLA close optimization reduces the time taken to close a file.