The new custom easing function is quite a cool idea that I wanted for a long time, but I’m afraid that it has a couple of flaws that make it not so useful in day-to-day function. The first is the fact that you can only specify a tweening curve between 0 and 100% of the delta of whatever property you’re tweening. That means that if you want to have a ‘back and forth effect’, like ‘Elastic’ or ‘Back’ effects in Robert Penner’s easing equations, you have to create an extra frame for the maximum position, and then fiddle with the graph to get it to transition correctly; it seems like a no-brainer to allow to ‘overshoot’ in these graphs. The JSFL setCustomEase does not allow values over 1 or under 0 either.

Secondly, the custom easing interface does not include presets, which would have made the interface a lot more useful. The ability to put all the curves on on top of the other to fiddle with them would have been helpful. Fortunately MM did allow us to set easing parameters using JSFL; my feeling is that someone (maybe even me, who knows) will make a more useful panel with preset saving and loading and side-by-side or one-on-top-of-the-other curves in the following weeks which could be invoked using a command. This custom panel might also have the ability to create multi-frame easing curves, who knows? If anyone’s interested in participating in such a project I’ll gladly help.

Scale-9 is a good idea, but I feel that it is (1) badly documented and (2) poorly implemented. Scale-9 in theory allows you to tell that when a movieclip is scaled, it is scaled ‘with corners intact’ and sides stretching only in one direction, similar to how you can create a rounded border around a stretchable table in HTML. You enable it from the library item by clicking scale-9. For one thing, the scale-9 guides only appear when you are in symbol-editing mode, not in the edit in place mode, meaning you have to right-click the object and select edit symbol instead of double clicking to edit these guides. Unlike components there is no live preview of scale 9 so you have to Ctrl+Enter to see how it looks. Scale-9 does not cut bitmaps across the 9 squares, meaning you’ll still have to use Fireworks to cut up the bitmap before importing into Flash… For some reason Scale-9 only cuts up curves at compile time so weird results are expected when used at runtime with Actionscript. Overall it’s not completely worthless, but I won’t throw away the good ol’ resizer components from the bit component set.

While these new features lack refinement, MM did do an excellent job patching the old annoyances that drove me mad. One tiny thing is the fact that for Windows, you can drag and drop bitmaps from the desktop to the stage instead of getting the ‘Cannot embed OLE objects’ error from the old versions. Tighter Fireworks integration is beautiful. The Export Window progress bar on Ctrl+Enter does not go back and forth like it used to to lure you into thinking that compiling will only take 3 seconds when it takes 30. Compiling is faster. My ultimate wish for a better library has been fulfilled. Filters may seem gimmicky but bitmap handling brings so much possibilities to the table; DisplacementMapFilter in particular can be used to create OsX-like transitions (it doesn’t look nearly as good and takes a lot of fiddling but it definitely has tons of potential). BitmapData.draw and blend modes means you can take one cool particle animation and duplicate it several times on stage to create the illusion of huge field of particles while maintaining respectable performance. I could go on but with everything that’s already been said… Very respectable and worthwhile upgrade from MM, but don’t expect a perfect IDE until Flash 11 ;)