In the continuing gush of information from Macromedia including lots of articles on Devnet for all related technologies. Let’s take a look at Flash 8 and mobile at their new Flash 8 mobile information site just for that purpose.

I’m looking at it right now, so I will just keep updating as I read (Its like Christmas in August)

Bill Perry Did an excellent Breezo on Flash Lite Development in Flash 8. This really covers the major updates for Flash Lite developers.

• Script assist to help with that pesky Flash 4 syntax
• THE EMULATOR!!! The emulator looks fabulous (more on that in a moment).
• Device configuration to let you really target your phone settings and content type

So the emulator. Every time Macromedia has given a preview of the emulator, I drool. I spend so much time bluetoothing swfs from PC to phone. Anything that can shave some time off is a very welcome feature. It won’t replace testing on the phone, but it really does look like it will but out 75% of transfers. Now I can just move files for periodic sanity checks.

Some of my favorite features are:

• Skins: in the device settings you Can choose phones and you can use your swf in the context of the phone. All of the buttons on the phone are interactive too!
• Rotation: If you produce Flash Lite for landscape display, it can be a literal pain in the neck to look at you content in portrait mode. The emulator fixes that with the rotate feature!
• Skin Switching: while you are testing your content, you can actually change your phone settings on the fly. It looks like they’ve done a really good job of making this tool extremely usable.

I am really amazed. This is really an unprecedented release of information for an upcoming release. Of course if probably means they hired a mystery writer for their PR team. Obviously some master of suspense organized so much info a month before the ship date.