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CHAPTER 1
What’s New in Flash 8
ActionScript
Macromedia Flash Basic 8 and Macromedia Flash Professional 8 provide several
enhancements that make it easy for you to write robust scripts using the ActionScript (AS)
language. The new features, which are discussed in this chapter, include new language
elements (see “Additions to the ActionScript language” on page 22), improved editing tools
(see “ActionScript editing changes” on page 27), changes to the security model, and other
ActionScript-related improvements to the authoring tool.
For more information, see the following topics:
New in ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Changes to security model for locally installed SWF files. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
New in ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8
The ActionScript language has grown and developed since its introduction several years ago.
With each new release of Flash, additional keywords, objects, methods, and other language
elements were added to ActionScript. There are also ActionScript-related improvements to
the Flash 8 authoring environments. Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8 introduce several
new language elements for expressive features, such as filters and blending modes, and
application development, such as JavaScript integration (ExternalInterface) and file input and
output (FileReference and FileReferenceList).
This section provides an overview of the ActionScript language elements and classes that are
new or changed in Flash 8 and ActionScript-related improvements to the authoring tool. For
a list of specific additions to ActionScript 2.0, see “Additions to the ActionScript language”
on page 22. To use any of the new language elements in your scripts, you must target Flash
Player 8 (the default) when you publish your documents.
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