I just spotted an interesting item on Richard Galvan’s blog. Galvan is the product manager for Adobe Flash, and he brings our attention to a software update for CS4. Some of the issues they addressed with this update include things that have effected my workflow, and I suspect yours too. The Adobe site states that this fix…

….addresses stability and performance issues related to large animation files, such as timeline scrubbing and looping and nested movie clips, as well as text handling.

I first learned about this issue over at Chris Georgenes’s blog, and I suspect it’s one of the main reasons this fix got underway in the first place. +10 points for Chris.

Download the update here

The latest version of Flash is officially shipping. Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, which was announced a few weeks back, is now on sale for $699 USD ($199 upgrade) as a stand-alone product, or as part of a product bundle like the Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Design Premium for $1,799 USD. Of course you can also will eventually be able to try before you buy – the 30-day trial version is slated for release mid-November 2008.

For more on what’s inside, check out our exclusive tutorials featuring the new IK functionality.

Adobe rolled out their Creative Suite 4 product family today, which includes a fresh new version of Flash – Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. It ships with a few new tools that many of us have been dreaming of for a few years now.

For starters, there’s IK – or Inverse Kinematics. For more on what that is, check out this 3-minute tutorial I put together that illustrates how the Bone Tool can connect graphic symbols together. You may recognize the artwork – it’s an elephant I borrowed from Ed Emberley:

And here’s another way to use the bone tool – on vector shapes.

Adobe has also introduced object-based animation, which for some may replace the stand key-frame tweening method. For hard-core Flash-animators, this may not be visually robust enough, as when you’re handling a dozen assets and even more layers, those visual keyframes become a sort of braille-like language. This object-based functionality will likely appeal most to beginners who will enjoy quickly creating motion in a manner that’s perhaps a bit more intuitive.

There’s also a 3D transform tool, which could have some interesting applications for those who don’t want to take their camera-work into After Effects. Speaking of After Effects, we’re also seeing a new Motion Editor toolset, which offers bezier curve refinement functionality that will look familiar to those who work in AE.

A few months back, I wrote about Cut&Paste’s See What’s Possible Challenge, sponsored by Adobe, which featured several shorts animated in Flash. I somehow missed this one, titled Living Colorforms, which was designed and animated by Claude William Trebutien (Burning Safari). It should come as no surprise that Trebutien is a Gobelins graduate, and the art direction was provided by Baeyens Michael, who attended ESRA in Paris.

Head over to to the TroisCube website to see how they created the short, a process that also involved After Effects.

Adobe’s plans to create a Flash player for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch have been announced. In Ben Charny’s article at the Wall Street Journal, he confirmed that Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen has approved his company’s effort to create a version of Flash Lite for the iPhone using the iPhone SDK. This doesn’t mean that the Safari browser for the iPhone will allow Flash content, but who knows what the future holds.

Thanks to Larry Rains for the story tip.

**** UPDATE ****

Seems like Adobe has their work cut out for them.