1.2 Features Introduced by Flash Player 7

In addition to the ActionScript 2.0 language enhancements, Flash Player 7 introduces some important new classes and capabilities. These are available only to Flash Player 7-format movies playing in Flash Player 7 or later. (For information on export formats, see "Setting a Movie's ActionScript Version and Player Version," later in this chapter.) Although these features are not the direct topic of study in this book, we'll cover a few of them during our exploration of ActionScript 2.0.

The key new features of Flash Player 7 include:

• New array-sorting capabilities

• The ContextMenu and ContextMenuItem classes for customizing the Flash Player context menu that appears when the user right-clicks (Windows) or Ctrl-clicks (Macintosh) on a Flash movie

• Cross-domain policy files for permitting data and content to be loaded from an external domain

• ID3 v2 tag support for loaded MP3 files

• Mouse wheel support in text fields ( Windows only)

• Improved MovieClip depth management methods

• The MovieClipLoader class for loading movie clips and images

• The PrintJob class for printing with greater control than was previously possible

• Support for images in text fields, including flowing text around images

• Improved text metrics (the ability to obtain more accurate measurements of the text in a text field than was possible in Flash Player 6)

• Cascading stylesheet (CSS) support for text fields, allowing the text in a movie to be formatted with a standard CSS stylesheet

• Improved ActionScript runtime performance

• Strict case sensitivity

The topic of this book is the core ActionScript 2.0 language. As such, the preceding Flash Player features are not all covered in a detailed manner. For more information on the new features in Flash Player 7, see Flash's online help under Help ActionScript Reference Guide What's New in Flash MX 2004 ActionScript.