Flash CS4 – A Minor Update? Nope.

AppleInsider just released some details about CS4. They’re saying that insiders call it a “minor update.” Over on Keith Peter’s blog, he argues the point by praising these new features, “bones, 3D, PixelBender, sound synthesis, new text engine, new drawing API.” In response, Steven Sacks comments “Wait a sec, Keith. You’re talking about features of the player/actionscript. Let’s not confuse the language or the runtime with the IDE. You can access the features you listed without using Flash CS4.”

I agree that most of the features I’m really excited about are in FlashPlayer 10 and not necessarily in Flash CS4. But take my company for example. We create Flash games. We heavily rely on inheritance, code reuse, and modularization. We have a great system setup where you can open any smaller module that you want to reuse in a future Flash game, copy a single folder from the Flash Library to your new game, import and initialize the object in the new game, and you’re off and running. This makes creating the ground floor of a future flash game extremely quick and efficient. After 3 years of refining this process, we have arrived at what we believe to be a fantastic work flow from design to engineering.

I am extremely excited and intend on using immediately many of the new features of FP10. The only reason we haven’t already is because, currently, this requires Flex. It would take us countless hours and tons of money to get everything converted to Flex. This simply is not an option for us. So if a new Flash IDE called CS4 came out and was exactly the same as Flash CS3 except that I could leverage all of the new FP10 features *directly from the Flash IDE*, I would be sold without hesitation. As Keith claims, for many, FlashPlayer 10 = Flash CS4. If you use Flex instead of Flash CS3, then feel free to review the latest version of FlexBuilder. But as for a person who leads a team of people who use Flash CS3 40+ hours / week, we are all very excited about the new version.