Colin Moock, patron saint of Actionscript programmers, has given Flash 8 an A+ rating…wow! By comparison, he felt MX 2004 merited 2004 a mere B+. Anyway, he’s written up his impressions on what’s changed and why it’s good. Some highlights that struck me:

• 9-slice bitmap scaling…great for implementing skinnable windows without all that tedious cutting and pasting. Kick ass!

• the ability to define custom acceleration curves for tweening…sweet! This will be a welcome addition to animators who want to impart a more subtle signature to their motion work.

• Of course, the new bitmap filters, for cool real-time compositing effects, with video streams even.

• And bitmap caching features that should speed up performance in certain applications. One big framerate sucker is animating big fields of text, because they redraw slowly. Caching that could mean FAST animated chunks of text.

• ExternalInterface, a new class that enables ActionScript to call JavaScript and vice versa. Right now, this is hard to support across multiple browsers without resorting to underhanded techniques like the Gateway Movie Trick and the getURL() Javascript Trick.

• A native Flash File Upload interface! COOL!

• Lower memory consumption and improved garbage collection! That info I got from this post.