Several features of Macromedia's latest Flash authoring tool were revealed in Japan's Flash conference. The new Flash authoring tool is currently codenamed 8Ball.

Macromedia's last two installment of the Flash authoring tool, Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004 Professional, both featured a massive evolution in the Flash authoring tool for the introduction of the Action Script 2.0 and the evolution of flash's programming language into a more coherent OOP language, the upcoming installment seems to be going in the direct other direction this time for, until now, it seems to concentrate on the design aspects of Flash by providing rich designing environment and adding various customisable tools and effects. This article will feature some of the revealed new effects and tools available in the upcoming Flash authoring tool 8Ball.

Most of the new ready made effects will be intensively integrated between the flash authoring tool and the actual flash player making it possible to generate these effects dynamically via ActionScript as well as manually within the authoring tool environment. The properties inspector is now enhanced by a new "Filters" tag similar to that in Macromedia Fireworks MX, and in fact features extremely similar list to that of the Macromedia Fireworks MX as it includes in its list Drop Shadow, Blur, Glow and Bevel among other effects and options available. Images presented here show the new awesome brisk soft-edged Drop Shadow effect. The new effect can be added manually via the authoring tool or via ActionScript and can be used on still-images as well as animations. The same applies to all the other new effects on this list, the inclusion of this new feature is going to save Flash designers a great amount of time that used to be spent on image conversion and the usage of various other independent tools to mimic such effect that are now to be generated in real time on the Flash player.

Another new feature that will be easily recognised by Fireworks uses is the Blend menu. The list is not identical to that of Fireworks (or at least to the last version of Fireworks), it seems to include the following blend modes: Normal; Layer; Darken; Multiply; Lighten; Screen; Overlay; Hard Light; Add; Subtract; Difference; Invert; Alpha; and Erase. Again, these modes can be modified either via the authoring tool or via ActionScript and could be applied to all forms of images and objects.

Being a known powerful tool for vector drawing, the new Flash Authoring tool is going to include new means of controlling strokes and fills, this time probably inspired from Macromedia's own specialised vector tool, Freehand.

Previous versions of the Flash authoring tool featured very limited control over strokes in comparison to what now is featured in 8Ball. 'Image 1' shows a sample of how a stroke would normally look in the previous versions of the Flash authoring tool. The new authoring tool allow the designer to control the actual edges of a stroke, by a very simple menu added to the property inspected it is possible to modify the way a stroke is joint to another. Videos of the conference showed three available options; Miter, Round, and Bevel.

Another enhancement to strokes is the possibility to give it a gradient colour. Previously, all Flash authoring tools and even Fireworks were only limited to apply only solid colours to strokes.

Another major edition to the flash authoring environment is the introduction of the Object Drawing Model or Object Based Drawing. Previous Flash users would recall the condensed drawing environment were the addition of an object in front of another on the same layer would modify the lower object, either by trimming it, or completely deleting it if covered completely by the upper object. 8Ball gives the option to users to switch between the old environment and a new one in which all drawn shapes are independent object that maintain their shapes as if stacked on separate layers.

Another brand new feature is the advanced gradient control tool. Users will be able to have total control over the direction and shape of a gradient fill, not only in its static form, but it is also makes it possible for designers to motion tween the transformation of a gradient fill.

These were some of the new tricks that will be in the upcoming Macromedia Flash ( codenamed 8ball ). Click Here to download a video showing these effects, and additions in motion, and to have a better idea on how these changes will speed the production and the quality of your work.