Flash Professional CC | Falak | Release Notes

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

These release notes describe the changes in the October 2015 prerelease of Flash Professional CC, codenamed Falak. Falak Prerelease Drop-5 offers the following features and enhancements:

• Projector support in Publish Settings
• Canvas improvements
• New shortcuts in PI to Expand to Fill, Create Object and Break Apart options
• Drawing/smoothing improvements in "zoomed in" state 
• AIR and Flash Player 19 integration
• 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 ‘‘Falak’’.

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 improve export and animation capabilities, the new release provides some major features, such as CC Libraries and Adobe Stock integration, new paint brushes, stage rotation, SVG import, enhanced drawing object bounding, and bug fixes.

Installing Flash Professional

Installation considerations

If you have a creative cloud account for Flash Professional CC, you can use the same account for the Falak 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 M05 build of Flash Professional CC 2015 (Falak) prerelease 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 M05 build. Download the M05 build for your operating system and run the installer to work with Flash Professional CC (Falak).

System Requirements

What's new in Flash Professional CC 2015 Prerelease

What's New in Falak Prerelease Drop - 5

Projector support in Publish Settings

Flash Professional now supports publishing ActionScript documents as projector files. Projectors are Flash files that contain both the published SWF and Flash Player. Projectors can play like an ordinary application, without the need for a web browser, the Flash Player plugin, or Adobe AIR.

To publish an ActionScript document in projector format:

1. Click File > Publish Settings.
2. On the Publish Settings dialog box, select Mac Projector or Win Projector.
3. In the Output file box on the right pane, type a name for your output file. 
4. Click Publish. 

Canvas improvements

The following HTML5 Canvas improvements are part of this pre-release drop:

• Canvas stroke style support: In earlier releases, only solid stroke style was available for HTML5 Canvas documents. Now, different stroke styles are available for you to choose from. 
• Drop Shadow filter with Angle and Distance properties with quality set at Medium: When you create a symbol and select the Drop Shadow filter by clicking Filters in Property panel and expanding the + dropdown, you can set Distance and Angle properties for the symbol. The quality is set to Medium. 

New shortcuts in PI to Expand to Fill, Create Object and Break Apart options

The following shortcut buttons have been added in the Properties panel for easier access:

• Expand to fill: Converts the selected strokes to fills and merge them together
• Create Object: Converts the selected shape in merged mode to Drawing object (same as Union operation)
• Break Apart: Breaks the selected Drawing Object into a raw shape

Drawing/smoothing improvements in "zoomed in" state 

The Brush tool’s drawing experience has been improved in High Zoomed state as well. Earlier, improvements were working only in Normal (100%) mode.

Note: Brush tool’s drawing experience improvements have been applied only to smoothening setting of 40 to 60 Percent.

AIR and Flash Player 19 integration

This pre-release drop comes AIR 19.0 and Flash Player 19.0 integrated. 

Bug fixes

• Sound: Streaming sounds sometimes play from the beginning regardless of the timeline header position
• Export Movie -> Animated GIF background cannot be transparent
  
• Text gets overwritten in Save As dialog in a particular scenario
• Center Stage button should be enabled always irrespective of the stage magnification in order to reset the stage rotation
• On HTML Canvas doc, a linkage-symbol by JSFL is not published. Here is the code for adding linkage names via JSFL:

        var item = fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items[0];

        item.linkageExportForAS = true;

        item.linkageClassName = "linkagedItem";

• The Color Panel's minimum width is too large
• Crash on startup just after installing
• Panel CC Libraries always open at Flash Pro launch
• Need to edit the description associated with a WebGL document
• Cannot double-click on image assets to open Properties dialog on the Library panel
• Removing color from the Color panel when Linear gradient removes wrong color pin
• Failed to export Canvas document when an asset name contains special characters

What's New in Falak Prerelease Drop - 4

Tagged Swatches

You can now create tagged swatches by selecting a color from your swatches. Once you create a tagged swatch and apply it to shapes and paths in your Flash content, changing the color in the tagged swatch will automatically update all the content that is using it. 

OAM publishing support for AS3, WebGL, and HTML5 Canvas documents 

You can now export Flash content in ActionScript, WebGL, or HTML5 Canvas to OAM (.oam) animated widget files. The OAM files generated from Flash can be placed in Dreamweaver, Muse and InDesign. To export your Flash content to OAM format, do the following:

1. Click File > Publish Settings.
2. On the left panel of the Publish Settings dialog box, select OAM Package.
3. In the Output File box, type a filename for your OAM package. 
4. Under Poster Image, select either:

• Generate from current frame (PNG) if you want to generate the OAM package from contents of the current frame.
• If you want generate OAM from another file, specify the path of the file in the Use this file box.

 

Publish text as outlines in HTML5 Canvas documents

This pre-release drop adds a new option to HTML canvas publish settings that lets you automatically convert text as outlines while publishing. This ensures that the font and appearance of your text are the same on any browser or device.

If you select this option, Flash converts all the text instances except the named ones to outlines in the Javascript/HTML output.

Color-coded Onion Skinning

In this pre-release drop, the onion skinning feature has been enhanced with color coding to help distinguish between the past, present, and future frames. In the new interface, onion skin frames before active frame appear in blue and frames after active frame appear in green. Onion skin frames away from active frame appear with progressively decreasing transparency.

Improved drawing experience with Brush tool

The Traditional Brush  tool has been enhanced to give you much more accurate and smoother drawing experience. The final stroke that will be generated is now very close to the live preview. With this, you do not see any unpredictable thinning or thickening of the brush strokes. Even the finer curves drawn using brush tool do not show any breakages or gaps. 

Note: This improvement is currently enabled only for 50% smoothening, which is enabled by default.

Improved drawing experience with Paint Brush tool

The Paint Brush tool now offers much faster drawing experience than before, with no splitting or interference with the previously drawn strokes. Curve fitting has also been made smoother.

For better drawing experience, Flash enforces that art brush strokes are always drawn in Object mode.

Changes in Art Brush settings

In this pre-release drop, Art Brushes offer brush preview with draggable guides for setting the start and end markers.

You can save the edited Art Brush settings as a new brush or update existing strokes in the document.

More Art Brushes in Brush Library

In this pre-release drop, a number of new art brushes have been added to the Brush library. 

New buttons for commonly used operations in the properties panel

The following buttons have been added in the Properties panel for easier access:

• Expand to fill: Converts the selected strokes to fills and merge them together
• Create Object: Converts the selected shape in merged mode to Drawing object (same as Union operation)
• Break Apart: Breaks the selected Drawing Object into a raw shape

Note: This feature is still in progress. The icons will change in the final release. 

What's New in Falak Prerelease Drop - 3

Brush library panel

Flash Pro CC now comes integrated with a global library for Art Brushes that includes a vast collection of brushes. To launch the Brush Panel, click Windows > Brush Library. Before using any brush, add it to your current document by double-clicking on the brush in the Brush Library panel. Clicking on a brush in CC Library adds it to both the global Brush Library panel and the current document.

Stroke PI changes  

Strokes in the PI has the following changes in this pre-release drop:

• Clicking on the Brush icon launches Brush Library.
• A preview of the selected brush style appears on top.
• Editing Stroke Style (Pencil icon ) brings up the Art Brush options dialog box for the selected Art Brush.

Edit Brush and Art Brush options  

The new Edit Brush icon launches the Brush editing dialog box for the selected brush. If a normal stroke or one of the old stroke styles is selected, the old dialog box appears. If an Art Brush is selected, the new Art Brush Options dialog box appears.

SWF and HTML5 Canvas publishing support for paint brushes  

Starting this pre-release drop, Flash Pro CC adds SWF and HTML5 Canvas publishing support for Paint Brushes.

Object Drawing mode representation

While selecting and drawing objects, the new object drawing mode shows a thin outline along the shape regions according to the layer color. The small circles are indicate the anchor points and are not interactive or editable using the selection tool.

While drawing in object mode, the strokes and shapes are no longer selected by default.

Stage scaling based on selected anchor

You can select an anchor point in Document Settings, specify the height and width, and scale the stage accordingly. When ‘Scale Content’ is disabled, the stage expands in the directions according to the selected anchor point, as detailed in the following images.

Link option to proportionately scale stage dimensions

Flash Pro CC Property Inspector and Document Settings dialog box contain a Link option to increase the stage dimensions proportionately. By default, the height and width properties of the stage are unlinked. If you click the Link button and enable linking, as you modify the values of either height or width properties, the value of the other property is changed proportionately.

If you select the Scale Content option, the stage dimensions are automatically linked and disabled. This is because content scaling makes sense if stage dimensions are modified proportionately.

Drag and drop assets from CC Libraries

Starting this pre-release drop, Flash Pro CC allows you to drag and drop assets from CC Libraries to the stage.

What's New in Falak Prerelease Drop - 2

CC Libraries panel 

Starting this pre-release drop, Flash Pro comes integrated with Creative Cloud (CC) Libraries. CC Libraries help you keep track of all your design assets. When you create graphic assets and save them to Libraries, it’s available to use in your Flash documents. Design assets are automatically synced, and can be shared with anyone with a Creative Cloud account. As your creative team works across Adobe desktop and mobile apps, your shared library assets are always up to date and ready to use anywhere.

This pre-release drop supports options to import from libraries and reuse graphics. Asset types supported in Flash are:

• Colors and Color Themes
• Graphics
• Vector Brushes

To use CC Libraries:

1. Click Window > CC Libraries to launch the CC Libraries panel. You can see all the assets that you have saved in your CC library. 
2. You can do the following:

• Drag-and-drop an asset from library to stage.
• Click on a color theme to apply the theme to an object on stage.
• Click on a vector brush in your library to use it on stage.

For more help on using CC Libraries, see https://creativecloud.adobe.com/en/learn/creative-cloud/web/creative-cloud-libraries and https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/libraries.html.

Use colors, brushes, and shapes created using mobile apps in your Flash document

You can use the graphics and design assets created using Adobe mobile apps such as Adobe Brush CC, Adobe Shape CC, and Adobe Color CC in your Flash document by using the new CC Library panel. You can save and share the colors, shapes, and brushes that you and other collaborators create through CC libraries so that you can use them in any other Adobe app that supports CC Libraries, such as Flash Pro. 

Adobe Brush CC allows you to create custom brushes from photos you capture on your iPhone, iPad, or Android devices and start using them right away in Adobe Flash Pro. To use the brushes that you have captured using the Brush app, you must store them in your CC library. For more information about creating brushes using Adobe Brush, see http://www.adobe.com/in/products/brush.html

Adobe Shape CC allows you to capture shapes with your iPhone, iPad or Android devices and turn them into vectors you can use in your designs. Save them to Creative Cloud Libraries for quick access in Adobe apps. And now you can also share Libraries with your creative team. For more information about creating shapes using Adobe Shape CC, see http://www.adobe.com/in/products/shape.html

Adobe Color CC lets you capture color combinations whenever inspiration strikes using your iPhone, iPad or Android devices. Your color themes are automatically saved to Creative Cloud Libraries for access in desktop and mobile apps, or to share with your team. To learn more, see http://www.adobe.com/in/products/color.html

Adobe Stock integration for high-quality images, illustrations, and graphics 

Adobe Stock is a service that provides designers and businesses with access to 40 million high-quality, curated, royalty-free images, illustrations, and vector graphics for all their creative projects. You can purchase Adobe Stock on an as-needed basis as a single image or you can purchase a multi-image subscription. A number of subscription packages are available.

1. To use Adobe Stock assets within Flash Pro:
2. Click Window > CC Libraries. 
3. On the bottom of the Library panel, click the Adobe Stock icon. The Adobe Stock page for your CC account opens in a browser window. 

For detailed instructions on how to use Adobe Stock, refer to the Adobe Stock help page at https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/help/using-adobe-stock.html.   Note: Adobe Stock is available only in following countries right now: US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Cyprus.   For more details, see https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/faq.html

Paint Brush tool

The new Paint Brush tool brings the capability of using Art Brushes, as commonly known in Adobe Illustrator, within Flash Pro. Paint Brush tool is based on strokes and is different from the existing Brush tool, the behavior of which remains unchanged.

Paintbrush tool lets you draw stylized brush strokes by applying the selected art brush’s pattern along the drawn path. You can apply brush strokes to existing paths, or use the Paintbrush tool to draw a path and apply a brush stroke simultaneously.

Using the Paint Brush tool

A set of Art Brush Presets are available by default for using them directly within your Flash Pro project. These presets are accessible in the Stroke Style selector dropdown in the Properties panel, when the Paint Brush tool is selected in the Tools panel.

These Art brushes are also available while working with tools such as Pen, Line, Rectangle, or Oval, except the Pencil tool, which lists the primitive stroke styles only.

Applying Art Brush styles to already drawn graphics on stage

You can apply the new art brush styles to already drawn shapes or in your existing Flash documents.

Select a shape on stage and modify its stroke style by choosing an Art brush stroke style on the Properties Panel . 

Importing new Art Brushes from CC Libraries

You can import new Art Brushes to your Flash Pro document using the CC Libraries in addition to the Art brush presets available by default.

To add a new Art Brush, open the CC libraries panel and just click on any of the supported brushes. (Flash Pro currently supports only Illustrator brushes from CC Libraries.)

For adding new brushes to your CC Library, you can use the Brush App for Android and iOS.

Applying colors of the brush strokes

You can draw Monochrome art brushes with any color and it will pick the color applied as the current stroke color, just like any other strokes.

Multicoloured art brushes, however, ignore the stroke color and draw using its own color set as specified in the brush definition.

Other workflows

Editing the Art Brush stroke paths

Brush Strokes drawn using the Paint Brush tool can be edited or reshaped just like any other strokes in Flash using the selection and Sub selection tools.

Converting Art Brush Strokes to Fills

Art brushes drawn in Flash Pro behave as strokes and can be changed to fills by using the ‘Convert Lines to Fills option.

To convert, first select the brush strokes drawn on stage and click Modify > Shape > Convert Lines to Fills.

Once converted to fills, it will behave as normal fills and lose its path editing capability.

Object Drawing Vs Merged Drawing mode

When using Art Brushes it is recommended to enable the Drawing Object mode so that each brush stroke is drawn independently and do not merge with the existing strokes causing undesirable stroke intersections. You can see better performance when you use it in Object drawing mode compared to Merged drawing mode because brush strokes typically contain heavy vector data and merging of shapes may cause Flash Pro to perform slower.

To convert an already drawn shape to a Drawing Object, select the graphic on stage and click Modify > Combine Objects > Union.

Rotate your stage

The new Rotation tool in Flash Pro rotates the Stage view temporarily, to help you draw and paint at a particular angle, without permanently rotating the actual objects on stage, as the Free Transform tool does. You can quickly rotate the Stage, regardless of which tool you have currently selected, by holding down the Shift and Space keys together, and then dragging your mouse to rotate the view.

To rotate the stage using the Rotation Tool

Only the stage view is rotated when you use the Rotation Tool. The published content is unaffected by the rotation.

While working with Flash on touch devices such as Wacom Cintiq and Surface Pro, you can rotate the stage at any time using two fingers without selecting the Rotation tool.

Import SVG files

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation. You can now import SVG files in to Flash. Some of the import options work the same as the import options for Adobe Illustrator files.

You can use one of the following options to import SVG files in to Flash Pro:

• Using the File Import option: File > Import > Import to Stage, or Import to Library.
• Drag and drop an SVG file directly into Flash Pro
• Using SVG assets stored in your CC library: Drag and drop the asset from CC library directly on to Stage or your document’s library.
• Using the existing file import JSFL API: document.importFile()

You can choose to covert the layers in your SVG files as follows:

• Import all paths to the same layer and frame: Choose this option to import all the layers in your SVG to a single Flash layer.
• Import each path to different layer: Choose this option to import each layer in your SVG to a separate Flash layer. 
• Import each path to different keyframe: When converting SVG layers to keyframes, the SVG file is imported as a movie clip; converting the SVG layers to Flash layers, or as a single Flash layer, imports the SVG file as a graphic symbol. The resulting movie clip or graphic symbol contains all of the content of the SVG file imported to its timeline, as if the content were imported to the Stage. 

Enhanced drawing object bounding box

The drawing objects in Flash Pro used to show rectangular bounding box when they are selected. This pre-release drop introduces an enhanced bounding box that shows the selection indicator drawn as an outline exactly fitting the shape. With this change, you can easily edit the shape edges without getting inside the drawing objects. 

This change helps you when you use the new Art brushes in Drawing Object mode. The selection indicator now shows the actual path of the art brush strokes. You can easily edit the stroke path as required.

The new bounding box model also helps you distinguish between a Drawing Object and a Group more prominently, as groups will continue to appear with rectangular bounding boxes.

What's New in Falak Prerelease Drop - 1

Video export to multiple resolutions

You can now export normal and HD quality videos from your FLA document to multiple resolutions by configuring a render size in the Video Export dialog box. While setting the video resolution, Flash maintains the aspect ratio as per the Stage dimensions.

To export a video from your FLA, click File > Export > Export Video and specify the export settings.

To learn more about exporting videos, see https://helpx.adobe.com/flash/using/exporting.html

Audio looping

With the "loop" option turned on in the timeline, you can now loop streaming audio within a range of frames along with other animations.

Contents scale proportionately to stage size

The Scale Content option in advanced settings is now directly accessible from PI. When stage is resized with this option selected, content resizes in the same proportion as the stage.

Custom Platform SDK optimizations

The command generation function IFrameCommandGenerator::GenerateFrameCommands() has been optimized in this release to enable you to publish custom document types much faster.

Color variation in Onion Skinning Outline Mode

Onion skinning is a feature that allows you to modify the present state of the animation based on a small window of preview into the past as well as the future frames of that animation.

Starting this prerelease drop, instead of using layer colors for the outlines, Blue is used for past, Red is used for current, and Green is used for future frames. 

For more details about using onion skinning, see https://helpx.adobe.com/flash/using/frame-by-frame-animation.html#use_onion_skinning

Bug fixes

While working with Wacom tablets in a dual-monitor setup, lines drawn using Brush Tool and Pencil Tool straighten up when the stylus makes contact with the monitor.