Summary

• Using the geometric shapes available from the Tools panel is a quick, accurate way of creating basic elements that you can customize with various fill and stroke styles.

• New Settings dialog boxes for the Oval tool and the Rectangle tool finally make it possible for you to set the width and height of these shapes before they are drawn.

• The Pencil, Brush, and Pen tools enable you to draw freeform or Bezier lines that you can edit using the Selection tool arrow options and the Subselection tool.

• The new Object Drawing option can be turned on while creating graphics with any of the drawing or shape tools. Drawing Objects are hybrid graphics that share selective characteristics with shapes, grouped shapes, and Graphic symbols.

• Enhanced Smoothing controls, a Tilt toggle, and a Pressure toggle give artists who use tablets lots of options to customize the Flash drawing environment.

• The new Scale control in the Property inspector gives you more precise control over strokes that will be scaled in the authoring environment (as symbol instances) or in the Flash Player (as final published content).

• Optimizing artwork manually by editing points with the Subselection tool, or automatically by using the Optimize Curves option, can greatly reduce file size by simplifying lines and curves.

• By adjusting and applying the various snapping modifiers, you can control how "auto" alignment behavior affects elements as you work. The new Edit Snapping dialog box enables you to set or modify Snapping behaviors quickly.

• Flash 8 gives you the option of using Flash MX 2004-style Undo (Document-level) or going back to the legacy style Undo (Object-level). There are advantages to using Document-level Undo (which is the default in Flash 8), but Macromedia added the legacy option in response to users who wanted to go back to the Undo style that they were familiar with from older versions of Flash.