Mann freu ich mich auf die neue Flash Version. Für alle die es noch nicht gesehen haben, bitte hier kucken:

Macromedia Studio 8

Macromedia released the Flash Player in Version 8 as Beta! Now it’s getting hot, although Macromedia didn’t state a final release date yet. But you can download the new beta player at Macromedia’s website. There is also a uninstaller available, so no panic if the beta doesn’t work as you expect. Found Bugs should be submitted through the Feedback Form.

Links:
Flash Player 8 Beta
Flash Player 8 Bug report

Additional graphic formats are supported by Flash, including GIF, PNG, and progressive JPEG.

That would be really great! Have you ever made an image gallery in flash, and had to save all the normal JPEG images into non-progressive ones? Really stupid work …

Better font readability [...] Maelstrom solves this issue by including a great new font-rendering engine that enables arbitrary fonts to display crisply even at small sizes.

This will make ALL flash developers happy I think. It’s a point macromedia should have fixed long time ago …

Improved performance [...] Performance of Flash Player has been increased in graphics rendering, text scrolling, component rendering, ActionScript execution, and memory management.

Performance is always welcome and definitely needed for such tasks like game development!

So I think Maelstrom will be a major step in the Flash history.

Lately I talked about content management systems in Flash with a friend of mine. He gave me a link to flashblog.org.

This is the first open source CMS in Flash I saw. It looks really promising and is available for free on this site. Sadly the site is only in spanish (I think that it is spanish?!).

But when the audience get bigger, maybe there comes an english version. Hope so …