Getting Started > What's new in Flash 5

What's new in Flash 5

The new features in Flash 5 provide enhanced capabilities for creating artwork, streamlining your workflow, and creating interactivity. Flash 5 also includes greatly expanded capabilities for creating actions with ActionScript. See "What's New in ActionScript" in ActionScript Help.


 
Creating artwork

Enhanced color controls, including the Mixer panel, Fill and Stroke panels, Swatches panel, and Fill and Stroke toolbox controls, provide expanded capabilities for painting artwork. See Working with color overview.

New selection highlights make it easy to identify selected lines, fills, and groups as well as the color of selected objects. See Selecting objects.

Draggable guides aid you in arranging objects on the Stage. See Using the grid, guides, and rulers.

The Pen tool lets you create precise paths; it works like the Pen tool in Macromedia FreeHand or Macromedia Fireworks. See Using the Pen tool.


 
Workflow

New panels for working with color, type, actions, frames, instances, and entire movies make it easy to access options for modifying elements in Flash movies. See Flash basics overview.

Shared libraries let you link to library items as external assets. You can create font symbols to include in shared libraries, as well as buttons, graphics, movie clips, and sounds. See Using shared libraries.

The Macromedia Dashboard provides a way for you to easily keep up with the latest information on using Flash. See Macromedia Dashboard for Flash.

Custom shortcut keys allow you to create your own shortcuts for Flash commands and functions to customize your workflow. See Customizing keyboard shortcuts.

Support for importing MP3 sound files lets you import sounds into Flash that are already compressed. This reduces the time required for publishing and exporting a movie with sound, since you don't have to compress the sounds during export. Using compressed sounds reduces the file size of completed movies and reduces memory requirements during authoring. See Adding sound overview.


 
Interactivity

Expanded ActionScript provides greatly enhanced capabilities for creating interactivity in Flash using ActionScript. See ActionScript Help.

The Movie Explorer lets you easily view the complete contents of the current movie and view the Properties panel for a selected item to modify it. See Using the Movie Explorer.

The Print action lets you assign actions for printing Flash movie frames from the Flash Player as vector or bitmap graphics. See ActionScript Help.