I probably shouldn’t be showing you this but I can’t help myself. I’ve got my hands on a copy of Flash CS4 so hop in, we’re going for a spin.

Just as we hypothesized, the Bone Tool is amazing. You don’t have to cut up the image before applying bones to any vector. The Bone Tool will use it’s magic to transform the image in the appropriate way allowing you to animate the joints and the skeleton while it applies inverse kinematics keeping your parts attached. You can apply the tool to symbols too! Althought it’s simple to apply bone structures inverse kinematics (IK) comes with a price. The Adobe team has put a great deal of work into the foundation and the principles of IK that will take even a seasoned designer time to master.

The Deco Tool is just like the Force, it can be used for good, but also has tremendous power to corrupt the undisciplined and be used for evil. It also may cause choppy-clunky-itus. It has 3 effects: Vine Fill, Grid Fill and Symmetry Brush. The Vine Fill is shown here filling a circle with leaves and flowers connected on, you guessed it, a vine. You can use your own symbols for the leaves and flowers making this tool the most impressive of the bunch.

Gone are Distributed Duplicate and Grid fill but you won’t miss them. With the Deco Tool Grid Fill you have added options to skew and rotate the grid and can see your effects in real-time without having to create a preview. The Symmetry Brush (shown above) and the Grid Fill take a symbol for input. You can see the Test Collisions check box that will hit-test your effect and remove duplicates making it easy to produce clean effects. You can get your own ride sometime late this month (from what I’ve heard).

On a world is ending in financial ruin but it doesn’t have to get you down side-note, Dave McClure is dealing up realism for startups and entrepreneurs, get your fix.