Text has always been a bit of a pain in the ass in Flash (luckily, Flash CS5 will include the new Text Layout Framework) – apart from the fact that rich text and custom typography isn’t a problem, it’s really one of those areas where plain old HTML takes the win. Still, I just discovered something that makes life a little easier if you’re going to design a text heavy website in Flash – the ability to wrap text around images (and MovieClips) in a fairly easy way – without multiple text fields, split up strings and whatnot.
The debug version of the Flash Player 10.1 beta is available now, which is a relief.
As for the upcoming CS5 release, Lee Brimelow’s put up another preview video. In addition to the iPhone compiler previously uncovered, this is our first peek at some of the other features we’re looking forward to, such as the new text engine, improved font embedding, the XLF format, improved code panel with custom class completion and various other improvements and tweaks. Looks pretty good, although I get the feeling that CS5 is a far smaller update than CS3 and 4; this feels more like CS4.5 than a fullbred new version. As for CS4, it was just upgraded to 10.0.2, and it seems far more stable and responsive now. Read More »